In gratitude

Jenny Diski

Book - 2016

In July 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given "two or three years" to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the cliches and try to write about it. And there was another story to write, one she had not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship. In the pages of the London Review of Books, to which Diski contributed for the last quarter century, she unraveled her history with Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar famil...y, the modeling of a literary life. Swooping from one memory to the next-alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, the drug-taking twenty-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals -- and telling all through the lens of living with terminal cancer, through what she knows will be her final months, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers -- Lessing and herself. From a wholly original thinker comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death.

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

BIOGRAPHY/Diski, Jenny
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor BIOGRAPHY/Diski, Jenny Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Bloomsbury 2016.
Language
English
Main Author
Jenny Diski (author)
Edition
First U.S. edition
Physical Description
250 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781632866868
9781408879917
  • Doris and me
  • Chemo and me
  • Spray it silver.
Review by New York Times Review

JENNY DISKI WAS DYING. It was 10:07 a.m. on April 25; I Googled to make sure, before I filed this review, that she was still alive. She was. Her "onc doc" gave her a year in April 2015, which meant, if she survived another seven days, she would technically beat the projections. She did not. She died on the morning of April 28, 2016. Diski, as she makes vitally clear in her new memoir, "In Gratitude," spent her every moment on earth beating the projections of authority figures. She overcame abusive and neglectful parents, foster homes, suicide attempts, repeated hospitalizations and the persistently gloomy conviction of relatives, caregivers, teachers, doctors and occasionally herself that she would fail at whatever she attempted. Diski did not fail. Over the past 30 years, Diski published 17 books of fiction and nonfiction and became a writer who commanded descriptions from reviewers like "individual" and "wildly various"; her books - such as her 1997 "so-called travel book," "Skating to Antarctica" (which she described as being about "Icebergs, mothers. That sort of thing") - all proof, as Giles Harvey wrote in a 2015 New York Times Magazine profile, of her "spectacular originality." In September 2014, two months after the diagnosis, Diski began publishing essays in The London Review of Books about her illness and impending death. She was more than wary of the maudlin pitfalls (even she expressed disbelief at her choice to write "another [expletive] cancer diary"); as a result, her monthly testimonies are droll and uncertain and disobey time and, like memory itself, circle obsessively back to moments she finds most difficult to emotionally process, such as the realization that she will never see her small grandchildren "become their own people." Diski also began publishing essays about her quasi-adoption by (and subsequent decades-long relationship with) the Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing. "In Gratitude" collects like metal filings around these two magnetic points - the functional end of Diski's life as a writer, and the functional beginning of it, due to Lessing's "rush into kindness" and mentorship. While her sections about cancer offer unruly testimonies to sickness and dying (and, frankly, living), it's in the sections about Lessing where Diski's idiosyncratic mind - and her bravery as a human confronting both imminent obliteration as well as certain vexing questions that, years later, she's still rolling around in her head - is most potently on display. BECAUSE OF COURSE the "in gratitude" of the book's title contains, with one tap of the delete key, its negation. Diski riskily interrogates the ingratitude lurking beneath her feelings toward Lessing - the aristocratic savior (of the Communist-Su-fi-literary variety) to her Dickensian waif. Diski was a classmate of Lessing's son Peter, who urged his mother to invite Diski, 15 at the time and in a mental institution, to live with them. Diski accepted Lessing's invitation and was tossed into a stimulating melee of writers and activists (among those at the Lessing dinner table were Ted Hughes and R. D. Laing). Yet she struggled with "a substantial amount of anger at having to be grateful, the gratitude ever increasing, the bill never settled, and made more enraging by Doris's insistence that I wasn't to feel it." Lessing, to her credit, practiced what she preached - just stop being emotional, she was known to advise. Also known about Lessing: She had left two young children in Southern Rhodesia when she moved to London with Peter to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. "In Gratitude" stalks a particular early moment in Diski's relationship with Lessing. Diski, who had been shunted between various institutions since birth, who knew too well "the fearful feeling of privation when your time as part of a system runs out," was terrified of being kicked out of this new system as well. She bumblingly confronted Lessing one night: "I wanted to know if she liked me, and what on earth could be done if she didn't." Lessing reacted badly. The next morning, Diski found a letter from Lessing, accusing her of emotional blackmail. Diski is not condemning Lessing for her behavior. She is seeking, in these final moments of her own life, the fullest possible understanding of a woman who represented, despite her prickliness and remove, the closest thing she had to a family. Diski courageously and persistently speaks what many might deem unspeakable. She tries to comprehend Lessing's ability to leave two children on a continent so far away she was guaranteed never to know or even much to see them. "I get the need to flee, but no matter how I try to put myself in her place, I am perplexed by her emotional ability actually to do it." But Diski always lets Lessing respond from the grave. To the contention that she, Diski, could never imagine leaving her own daughter in order to "fulfill her promise" - "Doris would say, I think, that I was lucky I didn't have to." Diski proves again and again her spectacular originality in her ability to empathize with as well as profess a total failure to comprehend the mind of another human being. These pages are evidence of her undiminished aptitude, even while her body was on the wane, to vigorously inhabit and investigate emotional spaces that shift and change shape as her sentences accrue. While I couldn't read "In Gratitude" without a persistent lump in my throat, and without the persistent awareness that its author was in a bed, somewhere, experiencing the very last days or hours or minutes of her life, Diski's final book proves transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction. HEIDI JULAVITS is the author, most recently, of "The Folded Clock."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* This hardheaded memoir could also be called the cancer diaries, admits English writer Diski, whose work is always personal. I start with me, and often enough end with me. These particular essays begin with a grim diagnosis. In 2014, she was told she had inoperable lung cancer. Given her precarious health status, gallows humor seemed the best coping mechanism. In between descriptions of her exhausting treatment, she offers flashbacks of a difficult youth and young adulthood in various psychiatric institutions, battling depression and drug addiction and surviving suicide attempts. Diski is the ultimate nonconformist; it never occurred to her to do as she was told, but she doesn't make a big deal of it. Much of this episodic memoir is devoted to her complicated friendship with the Nobel Prize-winning writer, Doris Lessing, who became her mentor and took her in at the age of 15 when she had nowhere else to go. Sadly, Diski died in April 2016 at age 68, before this book was published. In Gratitude is an unsentimental portrait of living with illness and facing death, from one of the fiercest and most uncompromising writers of her generation.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This revealingly raw memoir by British author Diski (What I Don't Know About Animals) about living with terminal cancer is even more poignant in light of her death on April 28, 2016, shortly before the book's U.S. publication. She spends time indulging in (entirely justifiable) self-pity, but in a manner that is witty and enlightening. From the beginning, Diski draws readers in, describing her emotions upon receiving a cancer diagnosis as "embarrassment" tinged with exhaustion. She then interweaves her experiences dealing with cancer and the subsequent chemotherapy with her memories, highlighting her teenage years living with writer Doris Lessing and the tenuous bond they forged over the next 50 years. Diski dredges up her difficult childhood with bizarre parents-an abusive, perfectionist mother and unscrupulous father-which led to time spent as the youngest patient in a psychiatric unit. Painting a vivid picture of the extreme exhaustion caused by chemo, she relates finding refuge in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which "have always offered me the common sense of my situation." She concludes the book with a series of floating ruminations on life and death. Both heavy and light, Diski's beautifully written memoir is worth any reader's time. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Review by Kirkus Book Review

A winding but elegant valediction from Diski (What I Don't Know About Animals, 2011, etc.), known as a literary journalist and chronicler in England, now resigned to a short tenure on Earth as a "canceree."What is the proper response when the doctor delivers the grim news of an inoperable tumor, an aggressive and untreatable blood condition? The author ponders all the "cancer clichs" that are available to her, deciding on the one hand that she has no major ambitions "except perhaps just lie back and enjoy the morphine" but also concluding that any choice is really not an exercise in free will as much as it is "picking one's way through an already drawn flow-chart." A central figure in her bookmore broadly a memoir of intellectual life in a turbulent era than the cancer diary that she first conceived of writingis the writer Doris Lessing, who took Diski in during a more-than-conflicted adolescence and mined her experiences for her own fiction ("I suppose the fact that she got on with it made the story hers in some way"). Some of the best parts of the book recount table talk with the likes of Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe, Lindsay Anderson, and R.D. Laing. Diski delivers bittersweetness and resentment in spades, as when she recalls shepherding Lessing's "irritating adoratas from California or thereabout[who] spoke of Doris as if she were a source of wisdom, and her every move significant." Hopping and skipping across years and topics"I don't like writing narrative," she protests, "the getting on with what happened next of a story that has a middle, an end, and a beginning"Diski describes the daily indignities of the cancer patient against a swirling backdrop of mescaline, Dylan, Lennon, and other tropes of her youth, a time of which she deliciously wrote in her book The Sixties (2009). Sometimes rueful, often oblique, but provocative and highly readable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.