Bill moyers interviews doris lessing biography

BILL MOYERS: We end as we began this week, with a metaphor; in this case, the phoenix—that great bird of ancient Greek mythology—reborn and rising from its own ashes, a bright and colorful symbol of renewal.

That’s how the Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing described the storyteller she believed is deep inside each one of us.

Bill moyers interviews doris lessing biography

“It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker that is our phoenix,” she said, “that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.” Doris Lessing died last Sunday, age “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth,” she wrote, and so she proved in her master work, “The Golden Notebook,” and the many other novels written throughout a literary career that spanned six decades.

She was an iconoclast. She didn’t suffer fools; she said what she meant and meant what she said, with no holds barred and no subject off limits. I spoke with her ten years ago as she described growing up in Africa and her one great love, the written word.