Under My Skin (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Doris Lessing
- First Published: 1994
- Type of Work: Autobiography
- Time of Work: 1919 to 1949
- Setting: Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), Africa
- Principal Characters: Doris Lessing
- Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Africa or Africans, Memory, Communism or communists, Revolutionaries, Adolescence, Love or romance, Authors or writers, Middle classes, Agriculture
- Locales: Zimbabwe
Paradoxically, this autobiography is as much a revelation of the impossibility of writing true autobiography as it is a chronicle of this famed writer’s life. The problem, as stated by Doris Lessing, is time and memory: “You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.” The past, as Lessing aptly reveals, is no static, timeless place frozen in memory, but a place where things are always on the move, changing, subject to revision. The temptation to distort, to improve, to justify, to collude with “fond lying memory” must be resisted in the interest of truth, but...
[The entire page is 2433 words long]
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