The Golden Notebook.

"I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: `Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a `young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph." These words exemplify the themes Lessing struggled with in The Golden Notebook. They question the notion of identity. In the above quote, the protagonist cannot reconcile who she needs to be, to remain healthy and whole, with what the ideologies of society require her to be. This obsession with constructing a comprehensive sense of identity leads to an infinite fictionalization of the protagonist's life. Lessing's work is not only a significant feminist polemic; it is a multilayered glance into the political climate of the 1960's.