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 have a tendency when reading biographies and autobiographies about elderly or dead people of great accomplishment to want to skip through the early part, especially the childhood. The residue of psychoanalytic theory and Just-So psychology is spread thick on most retrospective accounts of individual origins. Received assumptions and teleology come too easily. Both writers and readers are...
We should all use language carefully. That is an obligation on the literate. But carefully doesn’t mean fearfully. There is a danger that concern about insensitive use of language can be cynically used to muddy reasonable debate about political issues, and close down criticism. The Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, David Ward, has been under pressure and finally apologised for saying at a Holocaust Day ceremony: I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza. Ward failed to specify that the Jews he was talking about are those who agree with destroying the livelihoods of Palestinians, building Israeli settlements on much-reduced Palestinian land, and with Israel retaliating incommensurately against Palestinian provocations, rather than considering and dealing with the reasons for them. Ward’s statement doesn't seem to me to refer to me or anyone else who is Jewish and does not support Israeli policies in Palestine. He was wrong; he shouldn’t have conflated ‘the Jews’ with ‘Israel and its supporters’ – or, to put it another way, me with Netanyahu. But that doesn't mean he didn't have a legitimate (if naive) point, that the memory of what the Jews went through ought to give Israeli politicians pause for thought before subjecting other groups to persecution. As a Jew I've thought so with great sadness myself, while understanding that the argument about Israel must be a political one.
I'm knitting a vibrant stripy blanket. It's a blanket because I'm a rubbish knitter, and it's stripy because being a rubbish knitter I can only make it interesting in the most simple way possible. It's vibrant, because the knitting pattern says it is, although I've long since gone feral on the order of colours the pattern sets out. So far it's about ten inches long. It has three little holes where there shouldn't be holes, and a couple of places where stiches have been retrieved the wrong way round so the pattern (a most basic garter stich) goes off in the middle of a row or two. This doesn't matter, I decided, because if I wanted the soon to be born grandson to have a perfect baby blanket, I could have bought one for half the price of the wool and needles, and spent a fraction of the time achieving it. At least in part, this is me taking up my proper place in the proper way, as a sign of my consent to my new role.
I’m not good at forgiving. It’s always been one of the worst aspects of my character, and now that I am old, there’s no chance it’s going to get better. I won’t have a warm retrospective feeling about Margaret Thatcher. I don’t see Reagan or Nixon in a new perspective with the passage of time. And I still loathe my wicked stepmother. This last is what needs...
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World.
Orwell published his famous essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’ in Tribune in February 1946, six months after the end of...
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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