"I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by . . . robust and efficient hands."
This, the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, in her suitcase.
The book is distinctive, as challenging and as wholly original as anything Doris Lessing has ever written. It recalls her own mind as a child, and the life of a child, with almost ove...