Lessing wrote a deeply profound book here, and I'm rather ashamed that I only ever got around to reading her only after the news of her passing. 
 I've heard The Golden Notebook described as a feminist novel, which is not entirely wrong, but gives only a part of the whole picture. Instead, it could be interpreted as a comprehensive and overwhelming portrait of the minds and self-expressions of women, but also with brutal honesty about emotion and sex being caught within the currents of history. There are sections about "free women", but that might be a false name, or at least a dream, trying to uncover a sense of honesty. 
 Well, no, that might not be the whole story. It could be a 'splintering apart'. There is the part of the book which the post-modernist tinkerers love and that is the 'splitting' apart of narratives, with our protagonist writing their life story in four colored notebooks, separating the parts of their life story in an attempt to find something original to write again after their own failed novel. Or it could be the splintering apart of their own lives and attempts to find a meaning or their experiments with men, which all turn into billowing slow-motion train wrecks. 
 It could be very many things. All of which are true, owing to the immense complexity of the thing. I have a sense that I'm not ready to grapple with everything here, but that this is a book to remember and take up again.