A Life of Doing It Her Way : Books: Doris Lessing’s stubborn resistance to misfortune has taken her on a remarkable journey, which she reveals in her new autobiography.

In her newly published autobiography, “Under My Skin” (HarperCollins), Doris Lessing recalls an important scene from her childhood in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in Africa.

Coming home from playing in the bush, she stops short at the sight of her British immigrant parents sitting in front of the farmhouse they had built themselves. They are smoking, faces tense with money worries, gray and old before their time.

To the young Doris Lessing, they seem “intolerable.” From this moment she rejects what they represent--victimhood, illness, despair, a confining marriage--and she repeats to herself a phrase that will become a lifelong mantra: “I will not.”

This stubborn resistance to misfortune, and a tremendous will to live life on her own terms, has taken Lessing on a remarkable, often controversial journey far from the African bush.

Decades later, now living in London, she is a world-famous writer--some say one of the greatest--with more than 30 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry to her name, all still in print, translated into 23 languages. Her most famous novel, “The Golden Notebook,” first published in 1962, is still a world bestseller, with more than a million copies sold. An unsentimental portrait of clever women compromised to the point of madness by what men expect of them, the book was taken up by the fledgling women’s movement as a kind of manifesto, and earned Lessing the title “archeologist of human relations” from critic Irving Howe.

Yet to others, Lessing has proved infuriatingly elusive as she sheds philosophies and interests like skins--communism, the politics of colonial Africa, Freud, the anti-psychiatry movement and, finally, Sufism, in which she still believes.

She’s a realist who baffled readers by switching to “space fiction” in her “Canopus in Argos: Archives” series, and a prankster who wrote two “realistic” novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers to show that critics praise only the familiar. (The books had modest success, but nothing like novels under her own name.)

Even her expansive, unadorned prose eludes definition. Admirers say she’s technically a “bad” writer, yet her very ponderousness casts a spell. As Joan Didion put it, Lessing “can close her eyes and ‘give’ a situation by the sheer force of her emotional energy.”

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The small, sturdy 75-year-old woman who opens the door to her room at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena seems at first glance less intimidating than her works suggest. Dressed simply in muted colors and a patterned Indian shirt, gray hair drawn back in her trademark bun, Doris Lessing has an air of contained stillness that might mean shyness or self-assurance, perhaps both.

She’s in town as part of a world tour to promote volume one of her autobiography, “Under My Skin,” which describes her childhood in Persia and Southern Rhodesia.

Filled with evocative descriptions of the African landscape, the book also explores Lessing’s complicated relationship with her parents. Her mother was a career nurse who gave up an interesting life in London to follow her husband to Africa, which she always hated. Her father was a heartbreakingly handsome bank clerk-turned-farmer who lost a leg in World War I, disguised his subsequent depression with laconic wit, and died an embittered diabetic.

Lessing also tells of her decision to leave school at 14 to educate herself; her two marriages and three children, and her active membership in the Communist Party. She closes with her departure for England in 1949, at the age of 30, with Peter, her son from her second marriage to Gottfried Lessing, a German-Jewish refugee.

In her suitcase she has the manuscript of her first novel, “The Grass Is Singing,” which proves an instant success and establishes Lessing’s reputation as a serious writer--although it is followed by a bitter blow. Because of her writings about Africa and her call for justice for the black majority, she is labeled a “prohibited immigrant” by the white Southern Rhodesian government.

Twenty-five years later, newly independent, black African-run Zimbabwe allowed her to return--she wept upon arrival--on a series of visits described in her last, highly praised book, “African Laughter.”

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“Under My Skin” has had a mixed reception. Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times called it “the slurry after the gold is panned,” preferring her fiction, which covered much of the same ground. The New York Times’ critic, Michiko Kakutani, praised Lessing’s absorbing portrait of British colonials but chided her for “rationalizations and evasions” and her “reluctance to assume responsibility for personal choices.”

In England, Lessing says, “Most of the reviews have been good, but there have been some really tetchy ones. They sound as if they’d trodden on a corn or something.”

She decided to write her autobiography, she says, because she discovered five American biographers working on her life. “So I thought, right, I’ll get the facts down, and then they can make what they like of it. At least that will be accurate.”

But in the writing, she discovered that accuracy, truth and memory are slippery creatures and, being Doris Lessing, she allowed “Under My Skin” to evolve not simply as a factual record but also as a vehicle to question autobiographical methods. Mixed in with the reportage, she keeps up a running commentary, full of unanswered questions, as if to emphasize the fluid nature of her inquiry.

“It’s a very untidy book, which I think autobiography should be,” she says. Yet she has an overarching theme.

“The book from beginning to end is about patterns inside us, patterns of indoctrination, which govern our behavior, which we often don’t notice--the message being, we’re not as free as we think we are,” she says. Among the most important patterns are those formed by war and family.

The daughter of a shellshocked veteran, Lessing felt “the Great Unmentionable” hanging over her childhood like a gray cloud. Long a doomsayer about the world’s potential for self-destruction, she’s more optimistic now--or, rather, buoyed by “small things,” such as the abolition of apartheid in South Africa and the success of the U.S. peacekeeping mission in Haiti.

As for family, her childhood was “stressful,” largely because of her mother, who complained to visitors how difficult her daughter was, clearly preferred Lessing’s younger brother, Harry; yet her mother tried to dictate how Lessing looked and thought.

“I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of 14 I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented,” she writes. Now she wishes she had been more kind.

“She had a terrible life you know, and I am very sorry indeed about fighting her.” But, “It was absolutely essential to fight her, because she was a very possessive woman.” Her mother died when Lessing was in her 40s. Their antipathy was unresolved.

“I sometimes think if she were alive now. . . .” Lessing drinks some water, her voice shaky. Then she takes the long view.

“This is bad luck, it happens in families. No one’s to be blamed for it. . . . Why does one dislike someone so much? Very often, you know, for breathing.”

She’s impatient with criticisms that she left her children and her failing first marriage to Frank Wisdom too easily--to join the Communist Party and change the world, she said at the time, and she believed it.

“It seems to me that one doesn’t really need to spell out that a woman leaving two children is likely to be unhappy about it. I know people would be very pleased if I wrote two chapters saying how terribly unhappy I was, and then they would have said that it served me right.”

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Part of her reluctance to write about family members who are still living is a strong sense of privacy.

Of her daughter, Jean, she’ll only say that she lives in South Africa and that they are in touch. She has two granddaughters, Anna, a budding architect, and Susie, a soon-to-be lawyer. Her son John, a farmer in Zimbabwe, died two years ago of a heart attack during a terrible drought that ruined his farm--just a week before the rains came, Lessing says sadly. Of Peter, she’ll say only that he lives in London.

She never married again--she calls herself unmarriageable--although she has had at least one famous relationship, with American writer Clancy Sigal, the model for Saul Green in “The Golden Notebook.” Sigal retaliated with two Lessing-like fictional characters, in 1976 in “Zone of the Interior” and in 1992 in “The Secret Defector.”

“I didn’t read his (books) on purpose, because I knew I’d fly into a rage and say, how can you tell all these wicked untruths?” Lessing says, matter-of-factly. “He’s perfectly entitled to put me in a novel. But I’m not going to read it, that’s all.”

Overall, she says, she has reached a level of happiness through her 30-year study of Sufism, a mystic philosophy that aims for harmony with a spirit of “absolute being,” and encourages its students to be “in the world, not of it.”

It’s “not a guru system. It’s not a cult. It is not a religion,” she says. As the writer Lesley Hazelton puts it: “Sufism seems tailor-made for Doris Lessing. It eludes definition.”

Lessing plans to start on volume two of her autobiography this month--it will cover the 1950s. She also has a novel about to come out, and two short stories “mapped out” in her head.

She seems most relaxed talking about domestic things. After years of renting apartments and giving away money to good causes, she now owns a house in West Hampstead in north London, “an extremely lively, mixed neighborhood, with a lot of people who read books.”

But she really comes alive talking about her cat, “a very handsome black-and-white cat,” called General Pink-Nose the Third, usually addressed as Butchkin, who’s featured in her nonfiction book, “Particularly Cats . . . and Rufus.” Butchkin had cancer of the shoulder and had to have a leg amputated, “so now he’s a handsome three-legged cat. But there’s no doubt his dignity has been badly wounded.”

Aside from Butchkin, does she live alone?

“More or less,” she says with a smile. “And that’s all I’m going to say.”