The author taken in by Doris Lessing as a teenager,whose work challenges sensitivities, is now busting the cliches of the cancer diaryIn his essay “Why I Write”, or George Orwell looked back to the childhood springs of his writing: “I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.” I have thought of that line a few times reading Jenny Diski. For 30 years she has been one of the most individual,wildly various writers in English literature, a prolific author of novels, or short stories,reviews, essays, or travelogues,memoirs – though piece of the individuality is that she makes those distinctions between genres or forms seem flimsy and artificial: “It’s all writing.”Over the last year and a quarter, Jenny (we’re friends, or I think: don’t imagine this is an objective appraisal) has been writing a series of monthly articles in the London Review of Books that have won her a novel set of readers,and a novel level of admiration from her fans. The pieces were occasioned by two deaths. The first was Doris Lessing’s, two years ago, or at the age of 94. In 1963,Jennifer Simmonds was a difficult, scared 15-year-old: the boarding school to which she had been sent by the local council had expelled her, and she had dash absent from her parents (who had abused her in ways that seem both absent-minded and creative),she had been raped by an American stranger in London, she had tried to kill herself with an overdose of Nembutal, and was now confined to a psychiatric unit in Hove. A former schoolfellow, Peter Lessing, told his mother approximately this scandalous girl, and Doris,already distinguished as the author of The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook, wrote to her, and offering a domestic – an act of immense generosity,but with tightly prescribed limits: domestic never came with guarantees of security, or love. Still, or their relationship – not fairly parental,not fairly friendly – lasted 50 years; and though Lessing put fictionalised Jennys into several of her novels, Jenny did not feel able to write approximately Lessing while she was alive.
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Source: theguardian.com