In Public Books

Reading Lives, Writing Lives (Excerpt)

It certainly does seem that Lessing was a more radical, braver woman than most of our contemporaries—if not ultimately freer, as Feigel shows in her exploration of the relative trade-offs involved for Lessing in motherhood, love, and political commitment (freedom, it turns out, is an elusive beast). Lessing was, however, a remarkable spirit and intellect, not easily reducible to her moment in time. Feigel’s broader concern that “there was a world that Lessing’s generation and my feminist friends in their sixties and seventies had fought to bring into being that my generation seemed willing to let fall away” is trickier to state definitively. Such sweeping claims are easily met with an army of yes, buts—chief among them the oft-asked, “But isn’t this just nostalgia?”1 Feigel, no doubt wary of the yes, buts, does not linger on this generational comparison. Instead she mostly lets it lie as an underlying impression and repeatedly qualifies her own experiences in terms of age, education, and class background. I admit, though—albeit as an almost exact contemporary of Feigel’s, in all of those qualifying terms—that the comparison between Lessing’s generation and ours rings true to me.

By “our” generation I mean the tail end of Generation X: those born in the late 1970s or early ’80s, now in their mid-to-late 30s, who graduated from university when large sign-on bonuses were being handed out like confetti by banks and consultancy firms and, a decade later, transferred the desire for achievement into the realm of motherhood, allowing, for example, natural childbirth to become a measure of success or failure. Lessing and her characters questioned whether marriage and monogamy were tenable or desirable institutions at all; we ask whether weekends away can help spice up a marriage.

Read the full essay here.