Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing

An intense exploration of the life and works of Doris Lessing.Free Woman begins at a wedding and ends in the African bush. This is a memoir of a Feigel's own journey as a writer, which becomes enmeshed with that of Doris Lessing. Co-opting a dead novelist into an obsessive, ambivalent relationship, Feigel sets about learning from her about how to live. Rereading The Golden Notebook in her mid-thirties, shortly after Doris Lessing's death, Lara Feigel discovered that Lessing perfectly captured her experiences as a woman, writer, and mother in a way that no other novelist had done. At a time when she was dissatisfied with the constraints that she felt she and her generation blindly accepted, Feigel was enticed by Lessing's vision of freedom. Part memoir, part biography, and part literary criticism, Free Woman is an examination of Lessing's life and work, structured as a series of nine investigations of sexual, psychological, intellectual, and political freedom. Feigel combines incisive writing, elegant exploration, and intimate revelations to mesmerizing effect.