Jenny Diski was born in London in 1947 and went into foster care at the age of eleven. As a teenager she spent time in psychiatric wards, before being taken in by Doris Lessing, the mother of a schoolfriend. When the LRB’s first editor, Karl Miller, met her in the early 1990s, Diski had been divorced, published five novels and was writing a column about supermarkets in the Sunday Times called ‘Off Your Trolley’. Her first piece for the LRB was a Diary about her ‘ex-Live-in-Lover’. She went on to write six more novels and more than two hundred pieces for the paper, on subjects as diverse as Roald Dahl, disgust, Jewish seafaring, Mrs Freud and Mr Thatcher, Antarctica and UFOs, but her best subject was always herself.
As Mary-Kay Wilmers wrote after Diski’s death in 2016, she ‘wasn’t self-obsessed’. When she heard that she had inoperable cancer she told the oncologist that ‘under no circumstances is anyone going to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely.’ But she embraced ‘the worst cliché of all’, the cancer diary (‘another fucking cancer diary’); seventeen entries were published in the LRB and collected after her death as In Gratitude. A selection of her essays, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?, came out in 2020.
Peter Lessing died in his flat, of a heart attack, in the early hours of 13 October 2013, aged 66. His mother, Doris Lessing, died four weeks later, on 17 November 2013, aged 94, in the adjoining house. An interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open. This very nearly tells the story of their lives as mother and son, in the sense that we know our planet...
In between the metaphysics, the memoiring and a previously unknown addiction to vanilla ice cream, there’s been some doctoring, testing, diagnosing and everyday hovering and waiting. Plus standing by for the new grandchild, whom I don’t suppose I’ll know for very long, scoops of the vanilla ice cream, and statistics that will no more keep me alive than the eggs, cream and...
I jumped out of my bedroom window so I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone downstairs having breakfast. That’s what happened around the Easter weekend of 1966. It was the last straw. For Doris, for me, for Doris’s friends. A point of departure. My friend X from St Christopher’s and I were still angry – three years after the event – that St Chris had chucked me out without concerning itself about what happened to me. ‘Well, you certainly fell on your feet,’ the headmaster had said in a voice that told the whole world that it showed life was unfair but that Quakers would at least have the moral upper hand, and porridge.
After a few months, my father finally agreed with Doris that I could go back to school. I apologised to her for my grasping, embarrassing father. Doris laughed and said he was easy to handle. I had my doubts about settling back into the life of a schoolgirl but I was ready to go to the local comprehensive after a full year of being out, since it seemed important to Doris. Also, I had to...
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t provoke myself with impossible thoughts. To begin with I wouldn’t have known which were impossible and which not. But, curled up in a favourite dark place (I’ve always longed to be behind those deep red velvet curtains where Jane Eyre sits on the window seat, leafing through Bewick’s History of British Birds), or...
Jenny Diski reads from her novel Apology for the Woman Writing and answers questions at the London Review Bookshop.
Montaigne had his own literary stalker. Eight years after the Essays first appeared in 1580, he received a breathless letter from a young woman called Marie le Jars de Gournay, who declared...
Was God created by a woman, a writer who dreamed up the early stories in the Bible? Differences in vocabulary and style suggest that the Old Testament is a composite of various sources. The...
This is a compendious, layered novel – see ‘historiographic metafiction’ in the narratology handbook – the sort of novel that intercuts time zones and genres of fiction...
Some readers do not much like Margaret Drabble’s later novels because they are so different from her earlier successes. She may have lost one public and not as yet entirely won over...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.