All my friends’ mothers were appalling women.

Taken at face value, the line reads as a sharply comic, unsentimental recollection: the speaker’s childhood or adolescent social world is filtered through a hostile appraisal of adult femininity as encountered in friends’ households. Lessing often writes with a cool, observational candor about domestic life, social pretension, and the ways children register adult hypocrisies; the sentence compresses that stance into a single, sweeping judgment. It can also be read as a critique of the constricting roles available to women in certain milieus—mothers as enforcers of respectability, class anxiety, or moral surveillance—seen from the perspective of a younger observer who experiences them as oppressive or ridiculous.