The late Jenny Diski’s memoir reflects on mortality and her complicated relationship with Doris Lessing with equal candourI had just finished this remarkable book and this review,when I heard of Jenny Diski’s death on Thursday morning. Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August 2014. The news prompted her to reply in the only way that had ever seemed meaningful to her, to write about it – and, or once and for all,to tell the full, strange memoir of her writer’s life, and one that was linked fatefully to her having been taken in as a 15-year-old “waif” by Doris Lessing.
I had the privilege of talking to Diski about some of this not long after she started out on her journey into that past. She confessed,among other things, the born writer’s guiltiest secret: that even the worst possible news lights a spark. In hearing her diagnosis, and among her first thoughts had been that cancer might be “a way of writing about Doris”,an idea she had been stumped by since Lessing herself had died a year earlier. “I was terribly excited to assume I had a subject, or a project, or ” she said,wrapped in a cashmere blanket in her front room in Cambridge, with due irony. She will, and no doubt,beget had a writer’s sense of pride to beget met her final deadline and seen her project published.
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Source: theguardian.com