Dear Readers, I have just finished a collection of essays by Jenny Diski, who died back in 2016 of inoperable lung cancer. What a loss to the world she was! All of the pieces in ‘Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told’ were published in the London Review of Books: this publication is one of the last UK champions of the long-form essay, which gives a writer the chance to really engage with their subject. And what subjects they were! She writes about biographies of Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Branson and Howard Hughes. She gets stuck into a book about Jewish seafarers. She eviscerates Piers Morgan (not literally). She is never predictable, and she makes me laugh even on the darkest of subjects – the last piece in the collection, ‘A Diagnosis’, is about learning about her cancer. When she hears that she has ‘two or three years to live’, she makes a comment about ‘Breaking Bad’. which goes down like a lead balloon. At the time, she thinks that the doctor isn’t familiar with US TV shows, but later realises that probably every one who gets the diagnosis says something similar.

Of all her pieces though, I most admire ‘A Feeling For Ice’. She describes how she has always enjoyed white as a colour, the blankness of an all-white room, and decides to head off to Antarctica. But what is astonishing is the way that she interleaves her journey with an account of her childhood, with her charming conman father, and her mentally-ill, abusive mother. We grow to see how the love of nothingness might have its roots in such a traumatic childhood, but this is not a misery memoir – I was gripped by how Diski tries to piece together her memories, to work things out, to track the way that she got from where she was to where she is now. She had many gifts, but the way that she transitions between different times, places and subjects without ever losing her reader  is a real skill.

I was at an ‘audience’ with Jenny Diski once, at the LRB bookshop. From memory, it was about her book ‘Skating to Antarctica’, which tackles the subject of ‘A Feeling For Ice’ in more depth. She was a small, neat, rather nervous woman, who looked as if she couldn’t wait to go outside for a cigarette, and yet when she started to talk she was absolutely fearless. I left the talk with the feeling that she was absolutely her own woman, and that she would say what seemed true to her without any compunction. She is funny, too. In her book “What I Don’t Know About Animals”, she describes how her cat was forever in her writing room wanting to go out, or outside her writing room wanting to come in (a situation that any of us cat ladies can sympathise with, I’m sure). She decides to get a friend to install a cat flap in her office door, so that the cat will stop pestering her when she’s trying to work.

“I showed her (the cat) how it worked. I pushed her through. I pushed her back the other way. I showed her how independence worked, though down in the kitchen she knew exactly how it worked. Now that she could get on with her life as she wished, would she leave me alone to get on with mine?……

Bunty now sits in front of the cat flap and turns to stare at me on the sofa, waiting for me to open the door. When I open the door to leave the room, she races to get through it in the regular human way. Eventually, if I hold out against her baleful stare, though it might be an hour, she will laboriously go through the flap. In some way, it has worked. But the sight of a cat that comes and goes with no problem through the garden cat flap sitting, determinedly, in front of the one in my study drives me crazy. 

‘Go! Go on!’ I cry. And she looks at me. ” (What I Don’t Know About Animals, Jenny Diski, 2010). 

In short, I would recommend anything written by Jenny Diski. There are lots of her essays available on the LRB site, but honestly, any of her non-fiction work is worth a shot. I’m not familiar with her novels, though they sound satisfyingly strange to me. What a loss she was, with her acute observation, beautiful sentences and unique take on everything and everyone. If you haven’t read her before, do give it a shot. You won’t be disappointed.