You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Doris Lessing.

It's the occasion of the publication by Harper Collins of Volume 1 of her autobiography

under my skin.

I feel foolish telling my audience her other books, but beginning with the grass is singing. She's written

many novels, including the Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, the Children of Violence,

Quintet, the Canopus and Argus series, and the most recent novel is The Fifth Child. I was very stirred by your recollecting a childhood intransigence,

saying in the face of the stuck position of your mother and father that I will not.

I will not be like that.

I will not become that.

I wondered if there were I will not as a writer as well.

I don't think so.

I don't remember ever saying it or feeling it. You see, that business of I will not when I was a child, I think I must have had pretty heavy pressure on me very young to think in ways I didn't want to think or to see things in ways I didn't want, because otherwise I can't account for it.

The earliest age I can remember saying this to myself was when my brother was born.

Now remember, this is what happened. Don't let them talk you out of it.

I have no doubt that this is what I was thinking, and it must have been about really two and a half.

So I had to be, because my brother was born.

So, and it was not the first time I'd done that.

...