Mind you, I don't think I'd have been up to meeting her anyway. She was too much of a lion to my mouse, too much a literary and cultural giant to my provincial attempts at thinking and teaching. But just because she's dead doesn't mean she's gone. She will always be a part of me because she helped form me. For better or worse, I am who I am because I read The Grass Is Singing, the four Martha Quest novels and dozens of her short stories while I was in my impressionable twenties.
Her words taught me that I could say "no" to the sacred institutions of marriage and motherhood. And as I grew through my thirties, and tackled The Golden Notebook, The Four-Gated City, some of her science fiction, and more short stories, I learned about politics. I learned about politics on a micro level--relationships between men and women, friends, family and community members--and I learned about macro politics on national, global and universal scales.
But the most important thing I learned from Lessing was to be oneself. My self. And if people don't like me as I am, I hope she has taught me to accept that gracefully, and carry on.
Lessing was a brave woman. Maybe she wasn't the most gracious, nor the most likeable. Maybe she was a bad mother, a failure as a wife--I don't know. And maybe, as I've read more than once, her novels tended to be long, rambling, confessional and self-important. But because of her I feel I know a little about Africa, a little about marriage, mental illness, love, jealousy, rage, friendship and loneliness.
I've also learned a little about what it takes for a woman to march to the beat of her own drum.
And the fact that some people might be pissed off? So what?
Thank you, Doris Lessing.
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