The Golden Notebook

I found this book to be rich, emotionally honest, and a timely discussion of handling politics and interpersonal interactions when it feels like things are out of control, inaccessible. I think there is a through-line here, a bit sketchy, from George Elliot to Dorris Lessig to Sallye Rooney, although I would not be surprised if I was the first to try and claim that. Maybe that through-line is just Women of the British Isles. But I think there is something in here about looking at the world and presenting a story that is at once intensely personal and revealing about societal structure, politics told from the first person perspective.

This reading I think remains true months later, but there was a also a bit of kismet in the timing here - following closely after reading the manly The Virginian, the chauvinistic The Bostonians, the staggering gender violence of 2666, and the aptly named political biography Our Man, I was rather primed an oppositional power. Reviews are ostensibly of a single book, but the context of the literary world I was inhabiting at the time of reading will always have an impact, and this time, maybe a lot of impact. Maybe after all those books I would end up thinking basically anything following to be metonymy for Feminine Thought. And then this and the perfectly written The Waves. I can label these Feminine Thought and then justify my struggle to articulate what exactly I found good about them with an appeal to the Feminine Mystique. But: it does remain true, that I thought this book incredibly rich, and that is a different positive quality than what The Waves possessed. I think it is: The Golden Notebook reveals truths about the world through intense introspection (or interrogation of the relation of the self to the world? Do those connections still count as introspection?) while The Waves aims and achieves more universal truths. Or maybe it's all nonsense.

Anyways: I think Lessig is a very good writer.