save me, doris

There’s been a copy of The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing sitting on my bookshelf for probably half a decade at least. I’ve picked it up four separate times. Once it made it all the way to my bedside table, a real commitment to reading it, but I stopped. When we moved to London, I gave it away.

This fall, my friend Nora read The Golden Notebook, and she couldn’t stop talking about it. Nora and I are pretty much constantly reporting live to each other from our reading journeys, but I could tell right away that the way she was talking about this book was different.

What happened next is sort of magical — so magical, in fact, that I hesitate to relate it because it’s going to sound like some kind of twee fantasy. But I don’t care! I don’t care. Last Friday night Christian asked what I wanted to do, and I said, with sudden conviction, that we should go to Word on the Water.

I swore to myself when we moved to London that I would not romanticize living here for myself or for an online audience, since I resist the flattening quality of the attention economy or whatever, and also because a certain strain of romanticization collapses urban realities that actually matter a lot to me personally and politically (I can feel myself starting in on the sort of wine-rant that would make a listener feel trapped in the corner at a party with me, okay, will stop there).

And yet some parts of living here quite simply stop my heart. They are quite simply, overwhelmingly romantic. Word on the Water is such an extreme example that I literally try not to make eye contact with it when I pass by in my daily life.

It’s a boat — the kind of low, long narrowboat that are moored all along the canal here — whose interior and exterior have been turned into a bookshop. The owner is always playing music that echoes lightly over the surface of the water. At night the whole thing is lit up with fairy lights, and you step down into the boat from the footpath, so that you’re practically eye level with the water outside, and suddenly you’re in a warm, wooden log of books, full of worn upholstered perches where you can sit and read, and every nook of the walls crammed with paperbacks. Outside the windows, the ice on the surface of the canal crackles, and the moorhens call to each other. It’s absolutely sickening!! If it was in a movie, you’d roll your eyes!! But it is real!!

Inside the disgustingly magic womb of this boat, I see The Golden Notebook. Lo and fucking behold. For the millionth time, I read the description on the back, and for the very first time, it smacks me in the face. It is a book about a woman who is writing a novel while living in London!! She’s blocked from finishing her book by something she cannot name!! She doesn’t know how to bring the strands of her life together — her writing life as a novelist, her political life as a Marxist, her romantic life and relationships, her psychoanalysis, etc. — and so she begins to explore them in separate notebooks.

I gasped. I live in London! I am a novelist! I spend all my time thinking about leftist futures and how they fit in with my art! I quite literally started a notebook this week where I’m trying to scribble my way towards that exact understanding! Maybe I should finally read this book after all.

Reader, I bought the book. I took it back to our apartment where I began to read it with the intensity of a woman on fire. I’m a hundred pages in and already so enthralled that I’m writing a whole newsletter about the thing even though I haven’t finished it yet.

Something that is absolutely captivating and refreshing about The Golden Notebook is how unabashedly and specifically she takes on politics, specifically Marxism, and what it means to be a person who wants to pursue, as Lessing puts it in the preface, “a world ethic.” It’s really not cool anymore to tackle that head-on in fiction, and I’ve really been wondering why.

A couple days before I started The Golden Notebook, Christian showed me The Kitchen, Daniel Kaluuya’s new movie. It’s set in London, some time in the future, when social housing has been totally gutted, and its characters live in what is essentially a massive encampment inside a building that’s constantly being raided by police. Apparently this movie has gotten mixed reviews, which I can’t understand, because I think it’s one of the best depictions of the questions and details at the heart of the political and emotional experiences that matter so much to me. It celebrates the communities that spring up out of survival without romanticizing the horror that makes them necessary. It lets its characters change slowly, often with minimal dialogue, in a way that feels very real. When I read the negative reviews I think about the knee-jerk reaction we often have to “political” art — an assumption that it’s shouting something, telling you what to feel or think. (Not to mention the common misreading that a story unfolding under the pressure-cooker of poverty and oppression is “political” while one unfolding in the wide space of privilege isn’t.)

I think bad political art does tell you what to think — but that’s because it’s bad, not because it’s political. The question of what it means to be human is a political question. (A sentence I can only write because I’ve been reading Sylvia Wynter, thank you Sylvia). The ways we make families, have romances, and fight each other are all shaped by the politics of our time.

Which is why it all feels so urgent to me, to figure out how to bring the strands together. Novel writing, art, politics, emotions, relationships, my messy psyche! They belong together, but they resist each other! Will Doris Lessing tell me how to combine them? Stay tuned to find out!