SOURCE: "Storytelling by Reluctant Extraction," in Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1994, p. E8.

An American critic, Eder has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In the following review, he laments that "Lessing proclaims but does not convey the wretchedness" of her early life in Under My Skin.

In the first volume of her autobiography [Under My Skin], Doris Lessing writes that in 1947 and 1948 she went through the worst time in her life. Living in Salisbury in what then was Southern Rhodesia, she had left her first husband and two small children and moved into a leftist bohemian circle, where she met and married a German Communist refugee named Gottfried Lessing.

It was an "unhappy though kindly marriage" and it would not last; meanwhile she supported herself by working for a lawyer, sold short stories to South African magazines, and struggled with a...