The Golden Notebook of Wholeness

We split ourselves into versions to survive. Anna Wulf, a writer teetering

on the edge of collapse in the 1950s, kept four colored notebooks. One for Africa,

one for politics, one for fiction, one for her private self. Each a separate

identity, sealed off from the others. She thought compartmentalizing would protect her

sanity. Instead, it nearly destroyed her. The pressure of

being a woman, a mother, an intellectual in a hostile world made those walls

crack. The notebooks started bleeding together. Reality, memory,

fiction, all merging into chaos. Then came the fifth notebook,