Doris Lessing is a British novelist, perhaps best known for The Golden Notebook, and winner of many awards including the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature, whose panel described her as an "epicist of the female experience." She was ranked fifth on a list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Adore is a 2013 novella about two women and their sons. The girls, both fair and blue-eyed, met the first day at the big school and became best friends, inseparable as sisters. They grew into teenagers, Roz acting theatrical and Lil becoming an acclaimed sportswoman, and eventually married husbands, who could not compete with their friendship, leaving the women to raise their boys. The women lived across the street from each other in the seaside town, where Roz's son Tom, and Lil's son Ian grew up surfing and swimming - the four of them becoming an extended family. Now seventeen, Tom and Ian are as close as brothers, at an age boys are viewed with a poetic aura, their gestures like young gods on an archaic vase. The women are proud of the men they are becoming.
The four share the two houses openly, and when Ian is upset one night, Roz consoles him and they share a bed. When Tom realizes a shift has occured, he feels free to sleep at Lil's house. They are open and aware this situation is different, cautious they can continue and behave normally, everything as usual. When they are young men in their late twenties it seems to others they should have girlfriends, or better yet, wives. The two women have been unmarried for so long, they should be with men as well. That's the way people want it.
This is rich, masterful writing, to encompass a whole history with deep relationships, the lives of two women from girls to grandmothers in just 70 pages. Doris Lessing has said it was based on a true story that took place in a small town in Australia. The subject seems shocking, akin to incest, but objectively, there is nothing more than the bonds of love, tenderness, and even family. Nothing is described, and it is only the offhand conjecture of others that makes them feel the relationships must change.
Adore was originally published as The Grandmothers, now republished under the new title after the 2013 film of the novella starring Naomi Watts and Robin Wright. An Australian-French production, it moved the location to New South Wales, and premiered under the title Two Women. Outside the North America it was called Adoration.
The work of Doris Lessing is recommended, and this enjoyable taste of her fine writing is a good start.
2013 / Tradeback / 70 pages
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