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.
I can take more than my fair share of crap TV cop drama. Formulaic is good: I haven’t seen True Detective yet, but I fear from what I’ve read that it might be less rigidly structured than I’d like. Two of the Law and Order police procedurals, plain old Law and Order and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, provide the perfect sort of thing. Intro: a kid’s dog comes...
One of the problems of ageing is knowing when to start complaining about being old. I received an email not long ago from a woman who had read something of mine in which I described myself, at 66, as old. She said she worked with elderly people and her 85-year-olds call people my age young. What’s more, they never refer to themselves as old. The point of my piece was to report that I supposed I must accept that I was old because my hairdresser says, ‘Ah, bless,’ in response to whatever I say in answer to her questions.
The new rules that govern what prisoners can be sent in the post by families and friends have caused small tremors in the social media, calling them and their perpetrator, Chris Grayling, the minister in charge, mean, vicious, offensive and disgraceful. The aspect of the changes that has upset people most is that books are no longer allowed to be sent to prisoners. Other 'small items', such as underwear and handmade cards from children, are also prohibited. One odd thing is that these new rules were put in place in November. I remember there being some pieces in the newspapers and comments decrying the changes on Twitter and Facebook. But it didn't take fire as it has now. I don't know why an article about it by Frances Crook has gripped those who care about books and prisoner rehabilitation now, rather than in November when it actually happened.
Nembutal, an old friend of mine from other days, turns out to be pentobarbital, US executioners' drug of choice for lethal injections. Now a problem has arisen. The licensed manufacturer refuses to allow it to be sold for that use, and so it comes about that the state of Missouri, which has an inmate, Michael Taylor, on death row waiting to be dispatched this month, has no stocks to hand and can't get the wherewithal. Unable to source the real thing, they looked around for someone to cook it up for them. Homemade pentobarbital can apparently give you a very nasty death – on top of the already nasty death you get from judicial execution. In a recently recorded use of it, the victim's heart continued to beat for ten minutes after he had stopped breathing; last month another recipient of such an injection said after 20 seconds: 'I feel my whole body burning.'
‘Madness is a childish thing,’ Barbara Taylor writes in The Last Asylum, a memoir of her two decades as a mental patient. The book records her breakdown, her 21-year-long analysis, her periods as an inmate at Friern Mental Hospital in North London, and in addition provides a condensed history of the treatment of mental illness and the institutions associated with it. Taylor was in the bin during the final days of the old Victorian asylums, before they were shut down in the 1990s, and their patients scattered to the cold liberty of the underfunded, overlooked region of rented accommodation.
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...
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