An Endless Story with Fragmented Memories

Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily (2008) as a biographical fiction can be considered important due to the change in her attitude towards her parents. Considering the conflicts between Lessing and her mother as demonstrated in her writings, it is interesting to see her softened approach towards her mother. In addition, she uses a style of a novella in which she reinvents her mother and father's lives in the scenario that there had been no World War One, because their lives were shattered by the War in reality. She confesses that she wanted to give her parents a new and happy life that they did not enjoy during their real lives. Strangely, Lessing's parents are not married to each other in the imagined world and she erases herself from her parents' imagined story. In Alfred and Emily, Lessing uses some pictures which were used in her autobiography Under My Skin. These pictures are related to her fragmented memories about her family, in particular, her mother. Through repeatedly telling readers about her mother, Lessing demonstrates sympathy towards her mother, and in her old age she attempts to reconcile her feelings towards her mother. Lessing is seen to have suffered trauma from the aftermath of the War just like her unhappy parents, and is ready to understand her mother using the trauma narrative. However, she is still struggling to embrace her mother in that she shows her mother's death in a different way; in the imagined world, she gives her mother a less peaceful death. In other words, Lessing intends to show how difficult it is to accept the past and how dangerous it is to pretend to understand her mother's suffering through writing. Accordingly, her attempt to recover from the loss still continues unresolved.