In her final book, Alfred and Emily (2008), Doris Lessing returned to a character who had been represented repeatedly and in different ways over her long writing life: the mother. The second part of Alfred and Emily – a memoir following a fictional reimagining of her parents’ lives – opens with the claim: ‘I have written about my father in various ways; in pieces long and short, and in novels. He comes out clearly, unambiguously, all himself’ (152). Of her mother, in contrast, she writes:

That the self, especially the female self, is not one but several, is one of Lessing's most pervasive themes. But the syntax of the first sentence here specifies one particular way in which multiple selves are conceptualised. It begins by negating three ways of learning about her mother (telling, deducing, witnessing), before listing a series of stages in her life, ‘girlhood’, ‘nursing years’, ‘Persia’, each given two attributes, the first and last echoing through the repetition of ‘so … so …’, with the knowable father whose act of ‘witness’ is not enough at the centre. The nascent paratactic sequence is then terminated by the repetition of ‘nothing’, returning us to the beginning of the sentence, while the dispersing ‘anywhere’ implies that this repetitive series could nevertheless continue, possibility infinitely.

This structuring of her mother's unknowability in the form of a sequence which fails to cohere is accentuated by the inclusion within Alfred and Emily of a number of photographs, mostly of her parents, some of which had already been published in the autobiographies Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997).