Doris Lessing, the prolific British author, is still cranking out novels at 80, but at this time of her life she's down to writing one book a year -- and less than pleased at her output.

Born in 1919 to British parents in Persia (now Iran), Lessing spent most of her childhood in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She moved to England in 1949, where she still lives. Lessing has described her childhood in Africa as a mix of some pleasure but much more pain. Her father failed in his dream to become a wealthy farmer; her mother insisted on giving her son and daughter a proper British upbringing in a land where such Edwardian rigidity made life all the more difficult.

Lessing ended her schooling at 13, but by then she'd found a way to lose herself in literature. She is author of more than 30 works -- novels, short stories, reportage, poems, and plays. Her best known books include The Golden Notebook, the Children of Violence series, the Canopus in Argos series of science fiction stories, the Good Terrorist and Love, Again, about a woman who falls in love late in life. Twice married and divorced, she is the mother of three children and a grandmother.

In an interview excerpted here, Lessing discusses, work, family, politics, aging, and how she came to fall in love again at age 65. "Everybody falls in love," she says. "I talk to older people, and when they're being truthful, they'll confess that they fall in love at the most inappropriate ages, often with people much younger than themselves." Following is part of an interview with Doris Lessing from the book On Women Turning 70: Honoring the Voices of Wisdom by Cathleen Rountree.

"I don't mind being invisible"

This idea of the invisibility of older women... I have to say, I don't mind being invisible. The young people don't see you at all. You are an old person. It's this Western culture's fear of old age that we're afflicted with. It's not as bad as in America, where you're obsessed with it. In China, they're actually interested in old people. When I went there for two weeks, I discovered this. It's quite interesting, completely different. They think we might have something to say about things.

I do find in talking to people of my age, you know, the thing that we will often say is that we see young people making the same mistakes we made, and yet they're not interested in what we have to say. Now, having been that young person, I understand exactly why; young people define themselves against the older generation. But it's a very funny way to define yourself, when you come to think of it. They could define themselves in all kinds of other ways, not, "I am against everything the older lot have done." That must be quite new, I should think. I don't know enough about history to know when that became the norm, but it's recent, I suspect. There's an automatic contempt of the older generation.

I had a fascinating experience recently with a man on the street selling a magazine produced by homeless people. I always buy it, but one day there was a man with one copy left, and I said, "Aren't you selling that?" and he said, "I wouldn't expect you to buy it." I said, "Why not?" He said, "We don't think it's right for old people to buy it." I said, "How do you know if I can afford it?" He said, "I'd feel bad." I said, "You're depriving me of self-respect." He never saw it that way. We had a conversation about it. I think how deeply it goes, this thing.

The invisibility thing began to happen to me along about my fifties, when I suddenly became aware that men were no longer noticing me. Then, when we get really old, we can be invisible to anyone -- apart from people who know us, of course. I'm not necessarily saying this is a bad thing. It's quite interesting not to be noticed, because you can listen very attentively. It's a public invisibility that is extraordinary. You walk down the street, and there's a flock of children, and you know that they literally haven't seen you. Their eyes are not adjusted to seeing. It's not a tragedy. What is a tragedy is that, as I say, in the past and in other countries, old people were found useful because of what they knew. But now they're not.

"People decide to get old"

Something you don't know yet, at your age, is that one has very much less energy in one's seventies. I have lost energy badly in the last decade. I find myself saying, "No, you can't do that. You've only got so much time left. Don't waste time on that." Of course, I never used to think like that. A lot of choosing goes on about what I need to do; I simply don't have time. My message to you is, "Do it now because you won't have as much energy later." I was recently reading my 1982 diary. In one year, I wrote Shikasta, The Marriages, and half of The Sirian Experiments. I could never do that now. Then, I just took it for granted. Now my writing comes out to about one book a year. It may seem prolific, but this is what I do. I don't do much else. I've never had a taste for luxury, I'm glad to say. I've never enjoyed it. I have friends, you see, who really enjoy living high. What I really enjoy and what is my great extravagance is very good theater and opera tickets.

About this issue of aging, I want to make a terribly important point. People decide to get old. I've seen them do it. It's as if they've said, "Right, that's it. Now I'm going to get old." Then they become old. Why they do this, I don't know. Maybe they like to be dependent. But I do think it's terribly important that people not make that inner decision. Because then they sit around and they're old. It's easy not to do it, in fact. It's not about staying young but about not getting old. Now, I'm not talking about illness or health but attitudes. People who decide to get old, do. That's quite different from the cultural prejudice we were discussing earlier. For example, when I was in Pakistan looking at the Afghan refugee problem, I met a lot of the Afghan refugees. Women fifty or younger were old, old women -- much older than I was, and I was years older than they. That's because they'd had fifteen children, and half of them had died, and they haven't had enough to eat, and there are problems with malnutrition. But there's an attitude at work here; they're expected to be old women, so they're old women.

Staying young is not something that interests me. It's a bit of a lost cause, isn't it? Even for people who have cosmetic surgery, there's a point at which they are not young. So you've just had seven facelifts. Everyone knows you have. I suppose it's a way of passing the time, but surely there are more interesting things to do. It's hard work. I know, because I have a couple of friends who do it. It's a full-time job. That's what they do. That's what they spend their time at. There's not a question to me of having facelifts or spending a lot of time on being young, because it's boring. You can decide to have your hair dyed, for example, but then you think, "I just can't be bothered with it." I thought, "You're going to go once a week and have your roots done. Do you really want to do this?"

I think most older people are continually surprised when they look in the mirror, because nothing has changed inside; you accept that you're the same as you always were. Yet the outside changes all the time. It's what one has to accept.

-- Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley &Sons, Inc. from On Women Turning 70: Honoring the Voices of Wisdom. Copyright 1999 by Cathleen Rountree. This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers and from the Wiley Web site at http://www.wiley.com or 800/CALL-WILEY.

First published July 30, 2001
Copyright © 2000 Consumer Health Interactive

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