Kate Bolick Quote
Every year I try to reread Doris Lessing’s slim 1987 polemic (originally a lecture series), Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. In the book, this epicist of the female experience, as the Swedish Academy put it when awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, reminds us how difficult it is to detach ourselves from the mass emotions and social conditions of the age we’re born into; all of us, male and female, are part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself.
Kate Bolick
Every year I try to reread Doris Lessing’s slim 1987 polemic (originally a lecture series), Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. In the book, this epicist of the female experience, as the Swedish Academy put it when awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, reminds us how difficult it is to detach ourselves from the mass emotions and social conditions of the age we’re born into; all of us, male and female, are part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself.