I came across A Life Of One's Own as a teenager, and she became one of my heroes in courage and self-exploration, a great inspiration. The sequels An Experiment in Leisure and On Not Being Able To Paint are also excellent. On Not Being Able To Paint initially didn't seem as interesting, but I picked up my copy again 20 years later and found that what she'd learnt about art was almost exactly what I'd learnt from 5 years of writing orchestral music! It had gone over my head the first time.
The book had a similar impact on myself & partner after we picked it up randomly from a clearance box in a used book store.
The idea that truly owning one's life, thoughts, behaviour and so on is a project to undertake - and not (as might be commonly assumed for successful healthy indiviuals) an effortlessly given state of affairs - seems remarkable for the time she was writing.
From that point of view, there's something singular about on the one hand her observations being utterly unburdened by psychological theory and on the other the scope of what she's attempting!
Awesome! :-) I often tell people about her, but have come across her mentioned anywhere extremely rarely, hardly ever. I believe she was a trained psychologist before she started those books! She realized all that training had taught her nothing about herself, so set out to find out for herself. There's a fascinating struggle between her 'trained expert' side yielding to the 'naïve observer' side.
