Books: a book that changed me

STEPHANIE DOWRICK on Doris Lessing's 'The Golden Notebook'

When did you first read it? I read The Golden Notebook in about 1970. I was then young, intensely curious about life and eager for intellectual adventures. But I already knew that bloodless thinking did not impress me. No matter how brilliant, I was turned off by abstract ideas that bore no relation to people's actual lives and their most urgent questions.

Why did it strike you so much? Reading The Golden Notebook was utterly revelatory. Here were women characters who felt entitled to form opinions about the most serious social and political matters of their post-war world, yet who also consciously remembered that every day wood needs chopping and water must be fetched. It changed my vision of how I could think and what I could dare think about. The sheer scale of Lessing's enterprise dazzled me: her refusal to limit her concerns; her refusal to charm readers with a shorter or less truthful book.

Have you re-read it? If so, how many times? As much as I loved the novel, and continued to recommend it for many years, I have not re-read it for a very long time. My own needs as a reader have changed. Perhaps I am also a little afraid to return to it and find it less splendid than it is in my memory. It has certainly had a most positive effect on my own writing. It began a process which was nurtured by the women's movement, by other courageous women writers, and by my years as a feminist publisher, that has given me crucial encouragement to take on the big questions. I have tackled some extremely daring questions in my own writing: how do we express and receive love? what is a good life? can we learn anything from suffering? what is life for? I am often daunted by the demands of my own subject matter, but also intensely interested in it. I feel privileged to work with the questions that really matter in all our lives, and could never have done so had I not been inspired by Lessing, and others, to believe that I am entitled to think as broadly and as deeply as I can. And also, never, never to forget those daily details: how to chop wood, how to fetch water.

! Stephanie Dowrick's new books published last month by The Women's Press are 'Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love' (pounds 8.99) and a novel, 'Tasting Salt' (pounds 15.99/pounds 8.99).