Jenny Diski FRSL (née Simmonds; 8 July 1947 – 28 April 2016) was an English novelist, non-fiction writer and memoirist. She was a regular contributor to the London Review of Books; articles and essays she wrote for the publication are in the collections Don't and Why Didn't You Do What You Were Told? Her memoirs include In Gratitude, The Sixties, Skating to Antarctica, and Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions, for which she won the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

Early life

Diski was a troubled teenager with a difficult family background. Her parents were working-class Jewish immigrants to London. She was taken in and mentored by the novelist Doris Lessing; she lived in Lessing's house for four years. Diski was educated at University College London, and worked as a teacher during the 1970s and early 1980s. Compared at times with her mentor Lessing as both were concerned with the thinking woman, Diski has been called a post-postmodernist for her abiding distrust of logical systems of thought, whether postmodern or not.

Diane Gagneret states that Diski's writings about depression and "madness" mirror those of Doris Lessing.

Fiction

Diski wrote eleven novels. Her first novel Nothing Natural was about a sadomasochistic affair.

Non-fiction

In The Sixties, Diski described her experience as a young woman starting out in life: "I lived in London during that period, regretting the Beats, buying clothes, going to movies, dropping out, reading, taking drugs, spending time in mental hospitals, demonstrating, having sex, teaching". In her obituary of Diski, Kate Kellaway calls Skating to Antarctica "the most remarkable of her books. It stars her daughter, Chloe, who steers Diski into finding out what became of her mother, with whom relations had been severed for decades. The narrative alternates startlingly between a trip to the frozen south and this search—Diski's reluctant advance towards catharsis."

Diski's final, valedictory, book, In Gratitude, was published shortly before her death in 2016. In it, she "elegant[ly]" takes a tour of her life, knowing she is soon to die of an aggressive and inoperable cancer. She expressly rejects the "cancer clichés", instead going back to her time with Lessing, and meeting famous literary figures, including Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe, Lindsay Anderson, and R. D. Laing. The Kirkus reviewer sums up the book as "Sometimes rueful, often oblique, but provocative and highly readable."

Personal life

She married Roger Marks in 1976, and they jointly chose the name Diski. Their daughter Chloe was born in 1977. The couple separated in 1981 is a poet and translator, and was director of studies in English at Queens' College, Cambridge.

Death

In June 2014, Diski was told that she had at best another three years to live. She died on 28 April 2016.

Prizes

  • 2003 J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions
  • 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions

Works

Fiction

  • Nothing Natural (1986)
  • Rainforest (1987)
  • Like Mother (1988)
  • Then Again (1990)
  • Happily Ever After (1991)
  • Monkey's Uncle (1994)
  • The Vanishing Princess (1995) (short stories)
  • The Dream Mistress (1996)
  • After These Things (2004)
  • Only Human: A Comedy (2000)
  • Apology for the Woman Writing (2008)

Non-fiction

  • Skating to Antarctica (1997) (memoir; Chapter 1)
  • Don't (1998) (essays)
  • Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions (2002) (travelogue)
  • A View from the Bed (2003) (essays)
  • On Trying to Keep Still (2006)
  • The Sixties (2009) (memoir)
  • What I Don’t Know About Animals (2010) (nature)
  • In Gratitude (2016) (memoir)
  • Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? (2020) (essays)

References

  • Jenny Diski's blog
  • Diski's writings at the LRB