"Sometimes women say, It is not true you forget labor pains. But I think you remember you did have bad pain, but not the pain itself: you forget the intensity of the pains in between each pain. Real remembering is---if for even a flash, even a moment---being back in the experience itself. You remember pain with pain, love with love, one's real best self with one's best self."
It's true that the body has no physical memory of pain or hot or cold. I always wish I could save some of my shivers from a 6 degree day for an 86 degree one. If every time you thought wistfully of having another baby your body cramped up like it did while having childbirth there would be more "only children".
I am constantly surprised at how aimless Lessing was when she was young and how aimless the memoir is...it just meanders along, occasionally an idea bobs to the surface soon to be submerged again 1-2 pages later. It's interesting that she never tries to revise her youthful self to make the story more political and all about race relations in Rhodesia...the servants are called boys and piccanins are always popping in and out of the house. There is a glossary of about 20 words in the front with the word piccanin listed as a "small black boy" but it feels like the publisher wanted to make it seem like a curious word in a foreign language not a part of a larger issue. Lessing just sort of floats about above it all in her own aimless cloud of hormones and passivity.
One of her annoying habits that's has a slight air of "Buy the Book!" is her tendency to start a promising incident and then trail off with..."well, it's covered in Martha Quest." or "so and so is described in my short story The Antheap." Not being the Lessing Scholar that she seems to imagine reading her memoir, I don't remember every story in African Stories as she expects. In fact I will now enumerate the only Doris Lessing books I have ever read:
- In Pursuit of the English
- African Stories
- Memoirs of a Survivor
- The Fifth Child
- A Man and Two Women
- The Summer Before the Dark
Although I have the Golden Notebook I confess I have probably never gotten beyond page 50. It bored me. I read most all of them all in my twenties and at the time her voice echoed something in me that felt foreign in the USA. What she felt going to England from Africa mirrored something in how I felt coming to the USA from Mexico. I was American but it was not my home. Lessing was British but her home was Africa.
The most adorable video is on You Tube of Doris Lessing being told she has won the Nobel. She is getting out of a cab and the photographers have to hoist her out and with her is this rather pudgy bemused man with what appear to be artichokes strapped to him. When they tell her she's won she goes "Oh Christ!". She pays the cabbie while the artichoke man stands there muttering something or other.
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