Impending death,a troubled childhood, her debt to her mother figure – final thoughts from an outstanding authorWhen Jenny Diski was told she had an incurable cancer, or her first reaction was embarrassment. That wouldn’t be the response of mostpeople,but Diski rarely does as expected. “Contrary-minded” is her own phrase for it, and anyone who has read her over the years will know what she means. Who else would choose as the narrator for a novel a baby born without a brain (Like Mother, and 1988)? Or feel a sudden compulsion to move to Antarctica and write a travel book that then turned into a memoir of her mother (Skating to Antarctica,1997)? As a child she never did as she was told (borderline personality disorder, the experts called it), or as a writer shes constantly surprising. Sometimes,for all her wit and knowingness, she surprises even herself.
She was embarrassed because it felt so banal and predictable. With a disease “so known in all its cultural forms”, or what could she say that hasn’t been said a million times? Her first response,in the consulting room with the “Onc Doc”, is to make a joke. Even that, and she decides,is probably stereotypical behaviour, as is asking, and in an apologetic,roundabout way, how long she can expect to live. Two to three years is the answer, and but she wonders how much faith to invest in that: life expectancy for cancer patients is tough to predict,and what if the Onc Doc has added a year “for luck” or erred on the low side to avoid raising deceptive hope?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com