Under My Skin, volume one of my autobiography to 1949 by Doris Lessing

How anybody can sit down at the age of eighty-something and write in vivid detail about her life at the age of three is astounding to me, of spotty memory. And if you like Doris Lessings' work, you'll like this book just fine. If you don't know her, read some of her fiction first, like The Grass is Singing or The Golden Notebook. As she says, fiction does a better job of telling the truth.

But do read this book for an perceptive account of her family's early days in Persia, and later as pioneer farmers on what was then Rhodesia bushland. And later still, of her own growth as a young woman trying to find her way in what she finds to be a backwater, constrictive and super-racist society.

I suppose she can be forgiven the occasional preachy, old-auntie tone she takes with "young women today", as one might forgive a wise but crotchety grandmother. With her vast amounts of experience she can't be expected to have come through unscathed of opinions about stuff. Plus she's got such a good wit.

Under My Skin has two volumes to it, this one runs the course of her life until 1949, when, as a 28-year-old twice-divorced mother of three, she prepares to leave her backwater home to sail to England for good, raise her baby and begin her career as a writer in earnest. Something tells me the next volume will be even better.

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