The golden notebook book review5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I could hear her sentences in my ears as I sat below a hundred meters of tasteful Liberty print bunting that the bride, her sister and their mother (three intelligent and expensively educated women) had sewn by hand. I came closer to understanding my own truculence when I attended the wedding of a school friend while halfway through reading The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s 1962 exploration of the artistic and sexual life of a “ free woman.” Lessing’s voice is powerful and it had taken hold of me, 50 years later, to the extent that it seemed to muffle the voices around me. At all of them I chastised myself for my own mean-spiritedness and hypocrisy (I too am married, and once devoted a summer to it) but determined that at some point when not at a wedding I would work out why I minded it all so much. ![]() Collectively, they seemed to go on for too long and to involve too much effort, whether it was the effort of the congregation to reach these much-loved remote places or the effort of the bride and groom to coordinate flowers, music, seating plans, personalized vows, homemade confetti and take-home marmalade. White weddings, gold weddings weddings in village churches, on beaches, at woolen mills. There were too many weddings that summer. ![]()
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