On writing and politics:

While some of Ms. Lessing's novels may illuminate the political currents of a certain era, she vehemently insists that she is not a "political writer," as such a term connotes propaganda. "I'm [from] a generation that had Stalin. And the writer is the engineer of the soul, as far as he was concerned, for political reasons, and you'll find many people of our age repudiating that because it has led to so much bad writing . . . political writing anywhere is usually lifeless."

Ms. Lessing was briefly a member of the Communist Party before becoming thoroughly disillusioned. This loss of faith seems to have helped define her belief in the danger of dogmas and group-think. It also shaped "The Golden Notebook."

"The very second remark in 'The Golden Notebook' is, 'as far as I can see, everything's cracking up.' This is what 'The Golden Notebook' is about, the crack-up of the 1950s," Ms. Lessing says. Or more specifically: the "crack up" of the left after Nikita Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech in 1956, in which he admitted that Joseph Stalin had been less than a perfect leader.

As she reminds us, "communist parties everywhere in the world . . . didn't want to believe it. . . . They said, oh well, it's the capitalist press again, inventing it." Nevertheless, the left was "pulverized," and people "went off and became religious, or they became their own opposites and became very energetic businessmen, or they had very bad breakdowns. It was a terrible thing for the left. And that cracking up which affected not just the left, but generally, was what I was describing."

The novel is divided into several notebooks, with each one for a different aspect of one woman's life. She eventually goes insane. "If you look at the structure, it is a cracking up. Everything is in fragments! Everything is in bits and pieces. And it ends in a breakdown, you know a general breakdown, a psychological breakdown."

This was not at all what many thought "The Golden Notebook" to be about. The book's exploration of a woman's inner life, feelings of hostility and resentment, and unhappy experiences with men came off as inflammatory and "man-hating." Critics initially savaged the book. Feminists, however, embraced it, much to Ms. Lessing's annoyance. "I hated the 1960s feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life."

"It's a continuation of the old Communist Party. It is! The same words, the same attitudes . . . 'the Communist Party has made a decision and this is the line.'" At first, she says, political correctness had a good beginning; she remembers saying that the language that we use is sexist, racist and so on. But then, "that became a dogma. Because we love a dogma, you know, we really do. We can never just let things develop easily from an idea, it seems to me there's always a group of fanatics who grasp it and make it a dogma."

"We are writers writing at a time when it's a question about whether the novel is going to survive at all," Ms. Lessing says. "I think it will survive for a minority of people who care very much about literature." Perhaps partly to blame for the novel's downfall are the temptations of the Internet, such as blogging. The Web, she says, "produces some pretty depressing people who don't know anything about anything."

"Well, back in the '70s they sent some official from the committee to say I would never win it, they didn't like me, so I just stopped thinking about it," she explains. "So when they said I won it, I was slightly upset because I know quite a few people who have won it, and they say you will not do anything else for a year but be a Nobel Prize winner. And it's absolutely true."

At one point, our conversation is interrupted by a visit from a black-and-white cat. "I've only got one now," Ms. Lessing says. "She would never tolerate another cat." The cat's name, "yum-yum," comes from a character in the Mikado, a comic opera set in Japan. "In the Mikado, it's a very rich, beautiful, pampered girl who is going to become an empress. So I thought it would be funny to call this rather staid, middle-aged cat 'yum-yum'," Ms. Lessing explains. She adds dryly, "but most people don't see the joke."