SOURCE: "Memoirs of a Survivor," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 7, No. 327, November 4, 1994, pp. 38-9.

Moorehead is an English journalist and nonfiction writer. In the following review, she praises Under My Skin for its vivid and evocative depiction of Rhodesia and for the insights the book offers into the relationship between Lessing's life and fiction.

Neither Bertrand Russell nor John Cheever emerged well from their children's portraits of them; one was Olympian and cruelly exacting, the other alcoholic and homosexual. Maude McVeagh was not successful or well-known, but as Doris Lessing's mother she has come to prominence in the first volume of her daughter's autobiography as a desperate manipulative woman with a limitless urge for control. It is a devastating indictment not just of an unhappy woman but of parenthood. The saddest thing is that she tried so hard to get it right.

Under My Skin occupies that no-man's...