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In Gratitude
The future flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness …
I got a joke in.
“So – we'd better get cooking the meth,” I said to the Poet.
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 family, 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.
I got a joke in.
“So – we'd better get cooking the meth,” I said to the Poet.
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 family, 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.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published April 21, 2016
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About the author
Jenny Diski
36 books148 followersJenny Diski was a British writer. Diski was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction articles, reviews and books. She was awarded the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 116 reviews
July 12, 2016
Jenny Diski was a writer who lived a painfully wild life in the 60s, replete with drugs and mental illness. In the teens, she was "rescued" by author Doris Lessing, who, sight unseen, welcomed her into her home. But the "rescue" brought its own complications...
In Gratitude includes the fascinating details of Diski's relationship with Doris Lessing (and author I admire greatly and who, in some ways, shaped my life in the 1970s). This story is alternated with Diski's recounting of her life with cancer (she died shortly after the book's publication this year).
The parts of the book that deal with Diski's illness are well-written but were hard for me to deal with. They were specific and frightening, especially in the depiction of Diski's efforts to imagine the world without her. The difficulties I had with these sections were entirely due to my own fears
This is a must read book if you are interested in Doris Lessing. Otherwise, it is a moving book about living with (or dying of) cancer, creating a writer's life, and surviving family.
Definitely worth reading.
In Gratitude includes the fascinating details of Diski's relationship with Doris Lessing (and author I admire greatly and who, in some ways, shaped my life in the 1970s). This story is alternated with Diski's recounting of her life with cancer (she died shortly after the book's publication this year).
The parts of the book that deal with Diski's illness are well-written but were hard for me to deal with. They were specific and frightening, especially in the depiction of Diski's efforts to imagine the world without her. The difficulties I had with these sections were entirely due to my own fears
This is a must read book if you are interested in Doris Lessing. Otherwise, it is a moving book about living with (or dying of) cancer, creating a writer's life, and surviving family.
Definitely worth reading.
January 29, 2017
I loved the part of the book that told the story of Jenny's time with Doris Lessing, not so much the part that dealt with her cancer and fibrosis. I don't know why that is -- maybe because it was too scary/too close to home? It's not too close to home -- nobody has cancer at our household -- but I've been thinking about death lately and, like Jenny, I refuse to believe in any kind of afterlife. But if this is the case (and I have no doubt that it is), the question of death, of the inevitable nothingness, becomes enormous and oppressive; in fact, too oppressive to bear when one has been given a certain diagnosis, as Jenny Diski had. One cannot help reading the last few pages of the book with a sense of impending death in mind, like a constant reminder that the person who wrote this is no more.
By contrast, the parts of the book where she talks about Doris are more cheery, even if only because a happier ending is implicit in them. No, teenage Jenny did not commit suicide; she did come off drugs, and she did become a writer after all despite Doris's despairing she would ever be one. Jenny's relationship with Doris is told in fits and starts, nothing is linear and nor should it be. Doris figures as a rather unlikeable person, herself immature despite the age difference with YA Jenny, because how else would you describe a person who accuses a vulnerable teenager of emotional blackmail and ordains her never to behave like this again? Diski gives her account of the relationship in the book -- Doris gave hers in Memoir of a Survivor which includes a thinly disguised Jenny as one of the characters. Another thing I find objectionable, using those who are close to you as book material.
That said, the account of Doris that emerges from the book is far from black-and-white. Like the Gratitude/Ingratitude ambiguity of the title that suggests gratitude was both sincerely felt and officially required, the portrait of Doris in the book is nuanced. After all, Jenny kept in contact with Doris all her life even though rage held sway over her long after she'd stopped living with the famous writer.
All in all, I'm glad I read this book. Diski gives you a slice of her mind, which can be quite scary when she knows she's so close to death, but totally genuine as well.
By contrast, the parts of the book where she talks about Doris are more cheery, even if only because a happier ending is implicit in them. No, teenage Jenny did not commit suicide; she did come off drugs, and she did become a writer after all despite Doris's despairing she would ever be one. Jenny's relationship with Doris is told in fits and starts, nothing is linear and nor should it be. Doris figures as a rather unlikeable person, herself immature despite the age difference with YA Jenny, because how else would you describe a person who accuses a vulnerable teenager of emotional blackmail and ordains her never to behave like this again? Diski gives her account of the relationship in the book -- Doris gave hers in Memoir of a Survivor which includes a thinly disguised Jenny as one of the characters. Another thing I find objectionable, using those who are close to you as book material.
That said, the account of Doris that emerges from the book is far from black-and-white. Like the Gratitude/Ingratitude ambiguity of the title that suggests gratitude was both sincerely felt and officially required, the portrait of Doris in the book is nuanced. After all, Jenny kept in contact with Doris all her life even though rage held sway over her long after she'd stopped living with the famous writer.
All in all, I'm glad I read this book. Diski gives you a slice of her mind, which can be quite scary when she knows she's so close to death, but totally genuine as well.
May 28, 2016
In gratitude to Jenny Diski.
"Where am I going? Nobody knows. Can I come with you? Aye, bye and bye. There is a kind of excitement. This, that I've never done, already done, but previously, in a different form, an absolute otherness, nothingness, knowingnessless. That everyone has done, will do, world without end. The ending, and the world going on, going about its daily business. A world without me. To have known but not have any apparatus to know with. The excitement of a newness that is as old as the hills. My turn".
A marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation, a terrifying and knowing read for the unknowing of us who don't believe in "God" or life after "life".
We’ve been dead before, in other words. “When I find myself trembling at the prospect of extinction,” Ms. Diski writes, “I can steady myself by thinking of the abyss that I have already experienced.”
There’s a raw, almost feral quality to Ms. Diski’s writing about cowering in Lessing’s long shadow. It’s a trait she brought to so much of her writing. It’s just like her to leave us a title, “In Gratitude,” that slowly sheds its softness and sends up a mischievous flare.
It towed the line between being unforgiving and astoundingly accepting. It is fierce and terrifying. It is sad only in the sense that it is universal, and for the mind made of knowing, to meet with the unknowingness of total extinction, without the cushioning of some delirium of heaven, is something so real that I met it with a mix of terror and euphoria.
To you, Jenny.
NB: never a fan, but it put me off Doris Lessing for life, not that this was her intention at all.
"Where am I going? Nobody knows. Can I come with you? Aye, bye and bye. There is a kind of excitement. This, that I've never done, already done, but previously, in a different form, an absolute otherness, nothingness, knowingnessless. That everyone has done, will do, world without end. The ending, and the world going on, going about its daily business. A world without me. To have known but not have any apparatus to know with. The excitement of a newness that is as old as the hills. My turn".
A marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation, a terrifying and knowing read for the unknowing of us who don't believe in "God" or life after "life".
We’ve been dead before, in other words. “When I find myself trembling at the prospect of extinction,” Ms. Diski writes, “I can steady myself by thinking of the abyss that I have already experienced.”
There’s a raw, almost feral quality to Ms. Diski’s writing about cowering in Lessing’s long shadow. It’s a trait she brought to so much of her writing. It’s just like her to leave us a title, “In Gratitude,” that slowly sheds its softness and sends up a mischievous flare.
It towed the line between being unforgiving and astoundingly accepting. It is fierce and terrifying. It is sad only in the sense that it is universal, and for the mind made of knowing, to meet with the unknowingness of total extinction, without the cushioning of some delirium of heaven, is something so real that I met it with a mix of terror and euphoria.
To you, Jenny.
NB: never a fan, but it put me off Doris Lessing for life, not that this was her intention at all.
July 3, 2016
In this incredibly intimate memoir the late British author Jenny Diski (1947-2016) diagnosed with lung cancer and complications from pulmonary fibrosis, recalled the dark complexities of end of life stages with a fierce determination to preserve her dignity. In addition, Diski wrote about unstable chaotic upbringing, and her life in connection with mentor British literary icon Doris Lessing (1919-2013).
In the opening of the book Diski wrote disapprovingly of cancer clichés, bucket lists and her disinterest in accomplishments before dying. Cancer narratives were a part of her life whether she liked it or not, in the newspapers, magazine articles, twitter, blogs she wondered if anything new could have possibly been discovered. All she seemed to want was to lie back and enjoy the morphine induced dreams into oblivion away from the extreme tiredness, chemo-brain, and lack of control in body movements. The subject matter was matter of fact and brutal at times, not easy to absorb emotionally, but always written with depth, meaning, and astonishing clarity.
After her unstable chaotic upbringing by "greedy, self-absorbed, terrifying parents" Diski was taken in by Doris Lessing in 1963. (Sylvia Plath had visited Lessing before her death, as did Ted Hughes later). Rather fearful and insecure about her place at Lessing's home, at 15, she turned rebellious, experimented with sex and drugs, stayed out all night-- taking longer to complete her studies in higher education. Lessing expected Diski to be grateful and behave as a mature adult, which wasn't possible at first. As Diski matured, she would understand the internal motives of Lessing for supporting her, how Diski's life story was woven into Lessing's books, how unprepared Lessing may have been to care for a troubled teen who had been in numerous care placements and psychiatric hospitals.
There are many family stories Lessing's role as a provider and mentor throughout Diski's writing career. From an early age Diski knew she wanted to be a writer, Lessing always encouraged her assuring that a good editor would fix whatever problems a manuscript might have. Some of Lessing's books are discussed beginning with "Memoirs of A Survivor" (1974) though this is not a biography of Lessing. "In Gratitude" is a great introduction to Diski's writing, and I am looking forward to reading more. ~ With thanks to the Seattle Public Library.
In the opening of the book Diski wrote disapprovingly of cancer clichés, bucket lists and her disinterest in accomplishments before dying. Cancer narratives were a part of her life whether she liked it or not, in the newspapers, magazine articles, twitter, blogs she wondered if anything new could have possibly been discovered. All she seemed to want was to lie back and enjoy the morphine induced dreams into oblivion away from the extreme tiredness, chemo-brain, and lack of control in body movements. The subject matter was matter of fact and brutal at times, not easy to absorb emotionally, but always written with depth, meaning, and astonishing clarity.
After her unstable chaotic upbringing by "greedy, self-absorbed, terrifying parents" Diski was taken in by Doris Lessing in 1963. (Sylvia Plath had visited Lessing before her death, as did Ted Hughes later). Rather fearful and insecure about her place at Lessing's home, at 15, she turned rebellious, experimented with sex and drugs, stayed out all night-- taking longer to complete her studies in higher education. Lessing expected Diski to be grateful and behave as a mature adult, which wasn't possible at first. As Diski matured, she would understand the internal motives of Lessing for supporting her, how Diski's life story was woven into Lessing's books, how unprepared Lessing may have been to care for a troubled teen who had been in numerous care placements and psychiatric hospitals.
There are many family stories Lessing's role as a provider and mentor throughout Diski's writing career. From an early age Diski knew she wanted to be a writer, Lessing always encouraged her assuring that a good editor would fix whatever problems a manuscript might have. Some of Lessing's books are discussed beginning with "Memoirs of A Survivor" (1974) though this is not a biography of Lessing. "In Gratitude" is a great introduction to Diski's writing, and I am looking forward to reading more. ~ With thanks to the Seattle Public Library.
October 17, 2025
"La gratitudine era solo la metà di ciò che provavo. L’altra metà era rabbia e risentimento, un residuo di tutto il caos precedente, che in un modo o nell’altro i miei genitori non erano stati in grado di risolvere"
"In gratitudine” è un memoir scritto da Jenny Diski durante la malattia terminale (impasto di cancro ai polmoni e fibrosi), intrecciando il racconto della propria fine con la memoria del rapporto con Doris Lessing, scrittrice che l’aveva accolta in casa da adolescente dato che i genitori non erano in grado di badare a lei.
Diski riflette sul significato ambiguo della gratitudine: verso chi l’ha salvata, verso la vita, e perfino verso la morte, che le impone di fare i conti con tutto ciò.
Doris Lessing, nella narrazione, appare come una sorta di “madre letteraria” ma anche come figura complessa, autoritaria, spesso distante e assolutamente poco empatica nei confronti di Jenny ragazzina disturbata e difficile. (Continuo a pensare, a piú forte ragione a valle di questa lettura, che stare alla larga dagli scrittori sia cosa buona e giusta)
Diski si interroga continuamente.
Deve esserle grata per averle offerto una casa, un’educazione, una possibilità di vita migliore?
Oppure quella gratitudine imposta è un debito insopportabile, che cancella la libertà personale e il diritto di raccontare la propria verità?
La gratitudine, in questo senso, è ambivalente: è insieme riconoscenza e schiavitù emotiva.
Quando scopre di essere malata di cancro, Diski affronta la stessa tensione: tutti si aspettano che sia grata alla vita, ai medici, alla possibilità di scrivere e riflettere; ma lei rifiuta la retorica della “lotta” e della “gratitudine obbligata” davanti alla malattia.
Scrivere diventa allora un modo per restituire complessità a quella parola: la gratitudine non è un dovere morale, ma un sentimento che si può mettere in discussione, scomporre, persino negare.
La malattia diventa il luogo in cui Diski misura la verità della propria libertà.
Da un lato, c’è la gratitudine “sociale” (verso chi cura, verso la vita stessa).
Dall’altro, c’è il bisogno di autenticità: poter dire che si ha paura, che si è arrabbiati, che non si vuole essere eroici né riconoscenti a comando.
Così, la gratitudine che Jenny “avrebbe dovuto” provare diventa il nucleo critico del libro: un modo per interrogare i rapporti umani, la dipendenza, la libertà, e il significato della morte.
In "In gratitudine" quindi, la malattia offre a Diski l’occasione di smontare il mito della gratitudine come virtù assoluta.
La sua relazione con Doris Lessing e la sua esperienza di malata rivelano che la vera gratitudine, se esiste, può nascere solo da un atto di verità e libertà, non da un debito o da un obbligo morale.
3 stelle e mezzo.
"In gratitudine” è un memoir scritto da Jenny Diski durante la malattia terminale (impasto di cancro ai polmoni e fibrosi), intrecciando il racconto della propria fine con la memoria del rapporto con Doris Lessing, scrittrice che l’aveva accolta in casa da adolescente dato che i genitori non erano in grado di badare a lei.
Diski riflette sul significato ambiguo della gratitudine: verso chi l’ha salvata, verso la vita, e perfino verso la morte, che le impone di fare i conti con tutto ciò.
Doris Lessing, nella narrazione, appare come una sorta di “madre letteraria” ma anche come figura complessa, autoritaria, spesso distante e assolutamente poco empatica nei confronti di Jenny ragazzina disturbata e difficile. (Continuo a pensare, a piú forte ragione a valle di questa lettura, che stare alla larga dagli scrittori sia cosa buona e giusta)
Diski si interroga continuamente.
Deve esserle grata per averle offerto una casa, un’educazione, una possibilità di vita migliore?
Oppure quella gratitudine imposta è un debito insopportabile, che cancella la libertà personale e il diritto di raccontare la propria verità?
La gratitudine, in questo senso, è ambivalente: è insieme riconoscenza e schiavitù emotiva.
Quando scopre di essere malata di cancro, Diski affronta la stessa tensione: tutti si aspettano che sia grata alla vita, ai medici, alla possibilità di scrivere e riflettere; ma lei rifiuta la retorica della “lotta” e della “gratitudine obbligata” davanti alla malattia.
Scrivere diventa allora un modo per restituire complessità a quella parola: la gratitudine non è un dovere morale, ma un sentimento che si può mettere in discussione, scomporre, persino negare.
La malattia diventa il luogo in cui Diski misura la verità della propria libertà.
Da un lato, c’è la gratitudine “sociale” (verso chi cura, verso la vita stessa).
Dall’altro, c’è il bisogno di autenticità: poter dire che si ha paura, che si è arrabbiati, che non si vuole essere eroici né riconoscenti a comando.
Così, la gratitudine che Jenny “avrebbe dovuto” provare diventa il nucleo critico del libro: un modo per interrogare i rapporti umani, la dipendenza, la libertà, e il significato della morte.
In "In gratitudine" quindi, la malattia offre a Diski l’occasione di smontare il mito della gratitudine come virtù assoluta.
La sua relazione con Doris Lessing e la sua esperienza di malata rivelano che la vera gratitudine, se esiste, può nascere solo da un atto di verità e libertà, non da un debito o da un obbligo morale.
3 stelle e mezzo.
August 20, 2016
I rarely consider a book five-star-worthy, but Jenny Diski's latest (and last) book deserves all five. It took me over a hundred pages to get hooked, but once I did, I couldn't stop. Diski writes honestly about hard subjects--depression, mental illness, childhood abandonment, her fraught relationship with Doris Lessing, and her own imminent demise--but with a sharp wit and in an almost conversational style. Her contemplation of death I found especially moving; she poses the unanswerable questions with which we will all have to struggle at some point. My biggest takeaway was a reminder of the formative power of childhood and of how the events of our early years follow us to the end of our days.
January 11, 2019
La scrittura e il tono sempre ironici, puliti, dritti al punto, svuotati di qualsivoglia 'trucco da scrittore' per ottenere compassione, immedesimazione o, peggio, pietà mi hanno immediatamente conquistata e già ciò vale il libro.
Il tema è delicatissimo: una diagnosi che non lascia speranze, una malattia a cui se ne somma una seconda, effetti collaterali dei medicinali devastanti, la presa di coscienza che il tempo a propria disposizione è estremamente breve e una tra le più ostiche metabolizzazioni del lutto che si sia costretti a subire, quella per la propria morte.
Questo è il destino dell'autrice che con altissima dignità, obiettività, astensione dal giudizio e coraggio racconta questa tragica fatalità taccatale in sorte e nel farlo ripercorre la sua vita fin dalla più tenera età dedicando grande spazio e parole al periodo in cui visse con la scrittrice Premio Nobel Doris Lessing e all'eredità che quest'ultima le ha lasciato.
Da segnalare le molte citazioni tra le quali, mie preferite, quelle di fiabe famose come "Il mago di Oz", "Peter Pan" e la mia amata "Alice nel paese delle meraviglie" che ritorna in più punti e, incredibilmente, aiuta l'autrice a tenere i piedi per terra e a non sprofondare nel mondo delle domande senza risposta.
"La morte è la fine di te. Di me. Essere morti non esiste. La salma, la bara, le lacrime, tutta roba per i vivi. Priva della nozione di un paradiso-villaggio vacanze, che pare io non abbia mai avuto, mi ritrovai con un tipo nuovo e speciale di assenza di confini, come l'infinito, ma senza di te. Ossia di me. Tu e non più tu. Io e non più... una frase impossibile da concludere. La prospettiva di estinguersi finisce per essere accompagnata dall'ammissione dell'orrore di non essere in grado di immaginarlo o di farne parte, perché travalica il tu che ha la capacità di pensarci. Ho imparato cosa vuol dire non avere parole; mi sono scontrata con l'orizzonte del linguaggio."
In gratitudine
Jenny Diski
Traduzione: Fabio Cremonesi
Editore: NNe
Pag: 270
Voto: 5/5
Il tema è delicatissimo: una diagnosi che non lascia speranze, una malattia a cui se ne somma una seconda, effetti collaterali dei medicinali devastanti, la presa di coscienza che il tempo a propria disposizione è estremamente breve e una tra le più ostiche metabolizzazioni del lutto che si sia costretti a subire, quella per la propria morte.
Questo è il destino dell'autrice che con altissima dignità, obiettività, astensione dal giudizio e coraggio racconta questa tragica fatalità taccatale in sorte e nel farlo ripercorre la sua vita fin dalla più tenera età dedicando grande spazio e parole al periodo in cui visse con la scrittrice Premio Nobel Doris Lessing e all'eredità che quest'ultima le ha lasciato.
Da segnalare le molte citazioni tra le quali, mie preferite, quelle di fiabe famose come "Il mago di Oz", "Peter Pan" e la mia amata "Alice nel paese delle meraviglie" che ritorna in più punti e, incredibilmente, aiuta l'autrice a tenere i piedi per terra e a non sprofondare nel mondo delle domande senza risposta.
"La morte è la fine di te. Di me. Essere morti non esiste. La salma, la bara, le lacrime, tutta roba per i vivi. Priva della nozione di un paradiso-villaggio vacanze, che pare io non abbia mai avuto, mi ritrovai con un tipo nuovo e speciale di assenza di confini, come l'infinito, ma senza di te. Ossia di me. Tu e non più tu. Io e non più... una frase impossibile da concludere. La prospettiva di estinguersi finisce per essere accompagnata dall'ammissione dell'orrore di non essere in grado di immaginarlo o di farne parte, perché travalica il tu che ha la capacità di pensarci. Ho imparato cosa vuol dire non avere parole; mi sono scontrata con l'orizzonte del linguaggio."
In gratitudine
Jenny Diski
Traduzione: Fabio Cremonesi
Editore: NNe
Pag: 270
Voto: 5/5
July 27, 2016
Bravo Jenny Diski. As far as deathbed memoirs go, this will be one to top. I don't think she would have minded me saying so. Her writing is exquisite and always fresh and indeed writing is one of the main themes of this extraordinary memoir. As a former Doris Lessing obsessive, the portrait of her here was so compelling and vivid I could almost smell the house the two of them knocked about in, sometimes joined by Doris' son Peter, the most tragic figure of them all. But the person I enjoyed reading about most was Diski herself, what a sharp, droll and contrary person she was. Vale Jenny Diski.
September 8, 2018
Het boek had beter "Look back in anger" geheten! Het is echt een afrekening met haar verleden, met haar jeugdjaren eigenlijk, een afrekening met haar ouders maar vooral met Doris Lessing die haar op haar 15e, en op vraag van haar zoon Peter, in huis nam.
Er zijn twee dingen die ik probeer in overweging te nemen: ten eerste is dit een memoir en geen (auto)biografie, het verschil is dat het eerste zich baseert op herinnering en op eigen gevoelens en het tweede voortgaat vanuit het feitelijke (in het boek zegt Diski zelf ook eens dat een kennis uit die tijd haar had aangesproken om te zeggen dat haar herinnering fout was); het tweede is dat Lessing zeker en vast slecht voorbereid was en eigengereid haar eigen weg is gegaan bij de opvang van een psychisch wankele en boze puber. In die tijd (we spreken over de jaren '60) begon ook "de vrije opvoeding" in zwang te geraken waarbij er geen grenzen worden gesteld en men denkt dat het kind zichzelf wel opvoedt, maar hier was duidelijk wel nood aan grenzen.
Maar om dan zo publiekelijk met moeder (en op het einde ook zoon) Lessing af te rekenen, mensen die al dood zijn, ja, daar heb ik het moeilijk mee. De kwaadheid spat uit heel dit boek, dankbaarheid om gekregen kansen is volledig afwezig, die kansen werden niet benut ten andere. Op het einde van het derde deel geeft ze dat ook zelf toe: "In all honesty I'm not genuinely grateful at all", al ging het hier over haar gevoel bij alle lieve mails en brieven die ze van haar lezers krijgt.
De tweede ster is er omdat het deel over haar kanker milder is, haar onzekerheid laat zien, beschrijft wat ze allemaal doorstaat, en omdat ze op het einde toch berustender wordt.
Net zoals velen vraag ook ik me af hoe het is te sterven, hoe het zal zijn zonder mij, hoe dan alles gewoon hetzelfde zal blijven alleen zonder mij, en hoe je je klaarmaakt voor die laatste reis. Dit wordt mooi behandeld en ik vergeet niet de passage waarin Diski vraagt aan een verpleegster waarom een vrouw die ligt te sterven zoveel lawaai maakt. "She's not ready" is het antwoord "ze heeft haar tijd niet gebruikt om zich klaar te maken, om in het reine te komen met haar sterven." Ik denk dat de schrijfster die raad ter harte heeft genomen want aan het einde van het boek voel je dat ze klaar is en er vrede heeft met haar niet-meer-bestaan en er zelfs nieuwsgierig naar is.
Er zijn twee dingen die ik probeer in overweging te nemen: ten eerste is dit een memoir en geen (auto)biografie, het verschil is dat het eerste zich baseert op herinnering en op eigen gevoelens en het tweede voortgaat vanuit het feitelijke (in het boek zegt Diski zelf ook eens dat een kennis uit die tijd haar had aangesproken om te zeggen dat haar herinnering fout was); het tweede is dat Lessing zeker en vast slecht voorbereid was en eigengereid haar eigen weg is gegaan bij de opvang van een psychisch wankele en boze puber. In die tijd (we spreken over de jaren '60) begon ook "de vrije opvoeding" in zwang te geraken waarbij er geen grenzen worden gesteld en men denkt dat het kind zichzelf wel opvoedt, maar hier was duidelijk wel nood aan grenzen.
Maar om dan zo publiekelijk met moeder (en op het einde ook zoon) Lessing af te rekenen, mensen die al dood zijn, ja, daar heb ik het moeilijk mee. De kwaadheid spat uit heel dit boek, dankbaarheid om gekregen kansen is volledig afwezig, die kansen werden niet benut ten andere. Op het einde van het derde deel geeft ze dat ook zelf toe: "In all honesty I'm not genuinely grateful at all", al ging het hier over haar gevoel bij alle lieve mails en brieven die ze van haar lezers krijgt.
De tweede ster is er omdat het deel over haar kanker milder is, haar onzekerheid laat zien, beschrijft wat ze allemaal doorstaat, en omdat ze op het einde toch berustender wordt.
Net zoals velen vraag ook ik me af hoe het is te sterven, hoe het zal zijn zonder mij, hoe dan alles gewoon hetzelfde zal blijven alleen zonder mij, en hoe je je klaarmaakt voor die laatste reis. Dit wordt mooi behandeld en ik vergeet niet de passage waarin Diski vraagt aan een verpleegster waarom een vrouw die ligt te sterven zoveel lawaai maakt. "She's not ready" is het antwoord "ze heeft haar tijd niet gebruikt om zich klaar te maken, om in het reine te komen met haar sterven." Ik denk dat de schrijfster die raad ter harte heeft genomen want aan het einde van het boek voel je dat ze klaar is en er vrede heeft met haar niet-meer-bestaan en er zelfs nieuwsgierig naar is.
October 1, 2018
Non avevo mai letto nulla di Jenny Diski, parto quindi da quella che è così intrinsecamente la sua ultima opera. Ad accompagnare la lettura non è tanto - o non solo - la sensazione di acquisire e insieme perdere qualcosa man mano che il numero di pagine rimanenti si abbassa; c'è molto di più. C'è la consapevolezza di accompagnare, da lettore, gli ultimi momenti di vita di una persona che trova il coraggio e la forza di guardarsi morire con oggettività e distaccata ironia, tornando al tempo stesso indietro negli anni al periodo più importante e formativo della propria vita, quello dell'adozione sui generis da parte di una figura così forte da aver determinato lo stesso destino di scrittrice di Diski, oltre a generare ferite relazionali che sopravviveranno per sempre in queste pagine.
May 11, 2016
An important book in my life, but withholding comments for now because I want to write about it and other things.
November 17, 2017
Ha lo stesso effetto di una musica struggente: ho trovato quella bellezza delicata che si nasconde dietro un dramma.
September 19, 2016
I appreciated (liked isn't quite the right word) the previous Diski books I'd read, so decided to try this one, her final work. First third, a memoir of her childhood didn't interest me much. Second part, set in present day focusing on her medical issues, and her feelings about that, were the Diski I was reading it for. Final section was a mix of that and memoir, so a mixed bag. Overall, my feelings mirrored those of Eat, Pray, Love (boring, interesting, a bit of both).
In terms of her childhood and younger days, Diski was taken in as a sort of (unofficial) foster child by writer Doris Lessing. In that respect, the first part is largely a "Doris and Me" tale, with the third part containing some of that, though in a more detached sense as it references events after she was no longer living with Doris.
Unless you're a serious Lessing fan, I wouldn't start here with Diski. I did well reading Stranger on a Train first, wanting to learn more about this rather eccentric woman.
In terms of her childhood and younger days, Diski was taken in as a sort of (unofficial) foster child by writer Doris Lessing. In that respect, the first part is largely a "Doris and Me" tale, with the third part containing some of that, though in a more detached sense as it references events after she was no longer living with Doris.
Unless you're a serious Lessing fan, I wouldn't start here with Diski. I did well reading Stranger on a Train first, wanting to learn more about this rather eccentric woman.
August 9, 2016
I just recently discovered Diski. She's a fabulous, honest writer. This book describes her time living with Doris Lessing and also goes into detail about Diski's deteriorating health. She addresses headon the various indignities and awful ordinariness of her life as a cancer patient. What its like to receive radiation, etc. She's honest, tough, unsentimental. Want to read everything this woman has written.
May 9, 2016
I think I'm in love with Jenny Diski. This book is fascinating, disjointed, admirable.... It's a sad book to read in the wake of her death last week, but I have so much respect for how she processes and writes about her experiences with cancer and Doris Lessing.
December 6, 2019
Mycket ambivalent kring denna. Delar av den gillar jag, andra delar verkligen INTE. Tar med mig att Doris Lessing var en vidrig människa och lägger betyget på en tvåa men med vissa kapitel som gnistrar till och egentligen förtjänar bättre.
June 26, 2016
Honestly never heard of Diski before reading her essays from The Guardian in a NYT Book Review section in 2014 about her cancer diagnosis. Along with Oliver Sachs and a few others who published essays about their eventual demise from cancer in NYT, I found her essays frank, fresh and reflective without being solipsistic or obtuse. I wondered why I had never heard of Diski before this or why more of her work had not crossed the Atlantic from the UK. Picking up the NYT Book Review last Sunday was a review of her final work, a memoir, published posthumously, In Gratitude, and I immediately ordered it on Kindle. I would have read it in one sitting last Sunday if I didn't have 15 other things to do. Diski's focus as per the title is a past/present rumination on her cancer treatment and the knowledge of her own mortality and her problematic relationship with the novelist, Doris Lessing, who, for a time in Diski's adolescence, became her "foster parent" although Diski describes how that moniker is not really definitive. This is a brief memoir but I feel as if I have read through the author's lifetime as she can connect disparate and seemingly distant events with the present in such a way that reveals both question and insight into the place and time. The title appropriates the author's exploration of whether Lessing's "help" at a vulnerable time in her life was really worth the gratitude she has been made to feel she owed up until Lessing's death in 2010. In the final pages, Diski finally gets to the heart of the result of her own exploration and I, for one, heartily agree with her summation.
June 29, 2020
"• writing and being a writer was the only way I could think of to be, the only way to balance the down side of the seesaw.
• It’s absurd to complain about the uncertainty of life expectancy – we’re all just a breath away from the end of our lives
• I could put on a performance that seemed good enough to convince most people. The problem was that I had no idea what this ‘normal’ was that I was supposed to achieve.
• we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in.
• Real writers (as opposed to crowd-pleasers) are often uncomfortable if they aren’t writing on the edge and even crossing it, rather than policing their prose to keep away the censors – particularly that inner one.
• writing of any kind is always a private, autobiographical affair even if it isn’t only that.
• I was convinced that those who wrote had had lives that could be written about, interesting lives. And I hadn’t had an interesting life. Yet, at the same time, the only answer to the miserableness of most of my childhood was that I ought to be a writer.
• The most important thing was to try to make the unknown known or at least to create enough of something to observe and engage with.
• But I have been not here before, remember that. By which I mean that I have been here; I have already been at the destination towards which I’m now heading. I have already been absent, non-existent.
• My two-year-old grandson, when asked a question he can’t or doesn’t want to answer, says after a moment: ‘Ella’. Which, I think, serves for the ‘Fuck off’ that I’ve been forbidden by his mother to say in front of him.
• When I find myself trembling at the prospect of extinction, I can steady myself by thinking of the abyss that I have already experienced.
• Novels, you can do pretty much what you like with them. That’s what they’re for.
• There is supposed to be a psychological state at which we all have to arrive and where we rest or make a final effort before we can receive our certificate for having done right.
• I have always thought of writing straight autobiography as incredibly tedious. I couldn’t put hand to keyboard without there being something else, some other component in the narrative than just my personal history.
• What no one can help me with is time. When am I going to die? How long have I got?
• It wasn’t her battling the cancer, fibrosis, or death, but finding the best way to engage with her situation and to understand it.
• So be it. I’m a writer. I’ve got cancer. Am I going to write about it? How am I not? I pretended for a moment that I might not, but knew I had to, because writing is what I do and now cancer is what I do, too.
• So having given up on the vomit-making pill, there is one other: ‘There’s nothing else we can do for you.’ Doc language for ‘You’ve failed us and you’ll just have to die, which is not our speciality, so goodbye.’
• The stories never run out, especially the ‘real ones’, the ones that actually happened and press forward impatiently awaiting their turn, like elephants’ teeth.
• I lie like all writers but I use my truths as I know them in order to do so.
• On the other hand, it’s also increasingly clear to me that there may be little to find out and that no one, Onc Doc, Onc Nurse, really knows very much, except in an academic way.
• Can I learn to live with certain uncertainty, or uncertain certainty?
• Everybody leaves home, almost everybody. How you do it depends on the times and one’s own experience.
• If that pneumonia gets me unexpectedly, I’m sure someone will let you know. No hymns, please. Except, maybe Janis Joplin’s ‘Ball and Chain’.
• borderline personality disorder (and I never have found out whether it was the personality that was disordered or a crack in the wall of personality that threatened to flood my self into nowhere if I didn’t keep a hold on it. I think that BPD was really a diagnosis meaning a young woman who didn’t do as she was told and they didn’t know how to deal with it).
• In the final weeks of her life, she needed the physical presence of others and, to my surprise, she told me that her main regret was not making more good friends and spending time with people having interesting conversations.
• But finding what is good about life makes their loss all the more miserable, even if you know there will be no you to miss anything.
• Doris knew that writers, some more than others, never keep things to themselves: they take a morsel of her, make his eye colour different, turn a her into a him.
• But for fuck’s sake, get it back, kids. Fight for what was our right. Get angry.
• My particular difficulty is that I don’t like writing narrative, the getting on with what happened next of a story that has a middle, an end and a beginning.
• The Onc Doc and Onc Nurses talk about ‘fatigue’, not ‘tiredness’, as if to distinguish it in kind from feeling sleepy or lazy, just as major depression is distinct from ‘a bit mis’, or dehydrated is many steps along from thirsty or always carrying around a non-prescription bottle of water and taking a few sips from time to time.
• The very moment my foot made landfall, the anger began as if the pavement and the soles of my shoes had closed a vital circuit.
• It was also where I met my friend Mr Amnesiac, a middle-aged man who had lost all his life except the present, but they found out his name, and that he’d left his house somewhere up north with a large chunk of cash to pay the rent and was found wandering in King’s Cross Station, where he ended up in the unknown strays department with no money. His wife and daughter came to visit him. He didn’t remember them at first but said they seemed very nice.
• The cancer’s in charge and leading them all a merry dance. Perhaps that’s why I’ve so little taste for investigation.
• There’s an awful lot of uncertainty for patients and doctors in this cancer business. And uncertainty is what I am least good at.
• I’m writing a memoir, a form that in my mind plays hide-and-seek with the truth. It contains what I imagine and what I remember being told. Absolute veracity is not what I’m after.
• My story, someone else’s story, a place, an idea, a dream, human anatomy, the mind acting on the world, vice versa, some or all and more yet unthought of, had to be combined in the right amounts in order to make a book, an essay, fiction, non-fiction, history, comedy, whatever, work."
• It’s absurd to complain about the uncertainty of life expectancy – we’re all just a breath away from the end of our lives
• I could put on a performance that seemed good enough to convince most people. The problem was that I had no idea what this ‘normal’ was that I was supposed to achieve.
• we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in.
• Real writers (as opposed to crowd-pleasers) are often uncomfortable if they aren’t writing on the edge and even crossing it, rather than policing their prose to keep away the censors – particularly that inner one.
• writing of any kind is always a private, autobiographical affair even if it isn’t only that.
• I was convinced that those who wrote had had lives that could be written about, interesting lives. And I hadn’t had an interesting life. Yet, at the same time, the only answer to the miserableness of most of my childhood was that I ought to be a writer.
• The most important thing was to try to make the unknown known or at least to create enough of something to observe and engage with.
• But I have been not here before, remember that. By which I mean that I have been here; I have already been at the destination towards which I’m now heading. I have already been absent, non-existent.
• My two-year-old grandson, when asked a question he can’t or doesn’t want to answer, says after a moment: ‘Ella’. Which, I think, serves for the ‘Fuck off’ that I’ve been forbidden by his mother to say in front of him.
• When I find myself trembling at the prospect of extinction, I can steady myself by thinking of the abyss that I have already experienced.
• Novels, you can do pretty much what you like with them. That’s what they’re for.
• There is supposed to be a psychological state at which we all have to arrive and where we rest or make a final effort before we can receive our certificate for having done right.
• I have always thought of writing straight autobiography as incredibly tedious. I couldn’t put hand to keyboard without there being something else, some other component in the narrative than just my personal history.
• What no one can help me with is time. When am I going to die? How long have I got?
• It wasn’t her battling the cancer, fibrosis, or death, but finding the best way to engage with her situation and to understand it.
• So be it. I’m a writer. I’ve got cancer. Am I going to write about it? How am I not? I pretended for a moment that I might not, but knew I had to, because writing is what I do and now cancer is what I do, too.
• So having given up on the vomit-making pill, there is one other: ‘There’s nothing else we can do for you.’ Doc language for ‘You’ve failed us and you’ll just have to die, which is not our speciality, so goodbye.’
• The stories never run out, especially the ‘real ones’, the ones that actually happened and press forward impatiently awaiting their turn, like elephants’ teeth.
• I lie like all writers but I use my truths as I know them in order to do so.
• On the other hand, it’s also increasingly clear to me that there may be little to find out and that no one, Onc Doc, Onc Nurse, really knows very much, except in an academic way.
• Can I learn to live with certain uncertainty, or uncertain certainty?
• Everybody leaves home, almost everybody. How you do it depends on the times and one’s own experience.
• If that pneumonia gets me unexpectedly, I’m sure someone will let you know. No hymns, please. Except, maybe Janis Joplin’s ‘Ball and Chain’.
• borderline personality disorder (and I never have found out whether it was the personality that was disordered or a crack in the wall of personality that threatened to flood my self into nowhere if I didn’t keep a hold on it. I think that BPD was really a diagnosis meaning a young woman who didn’t do as she was told and they didn’t know how to deal with it).
• In the final weeks of her life, she needed the physical presence of others and, to my surprise, she told me that her main regret was not making more good friends and spending time with people having interesting conversations.
• But finding what is good about life makes their loss all the more miserable, even if you know there will be no you to miss anything.
• Doris knew that writers, some more than others, never keep things to themselves: they take a morsel of her, make his eye colour different, turn a her into a him.
• But for fuck’s sake, get it back, kids. Fight for what was our right. Get angry.
• My particular difficulty is that I don’t like writing narrative, the getting on with what happened next of a story that has a middle, an end and a beginning.
• The Onc Doc and Onc Nurses talk about ‘fatigue’, not ‘tiredness’, as if to distinguish it in kind from feeling sleepy or lazy, just as major depression is distinct from ‘a bit mis’, or dehydrated is many steps along from thirsty or always carrying around a non-prescription bottle of water and taking a few sips from time to time.
• The very moment my foot made landfall, the anger began as if the pavement and the soles of my shoes had closed a vital circuit.
• It was also where I met my friend Mr Amnesiac, a middle-aged man who had lost all his life except the present, but they found out his name, and that he’d left his house somewhere up north with a large chunk of cash to pay the rent and was found wandering in King’s Cross Station, where he ended up in the unknown strays department with no money. His wife and daughter came to visit him. He didn’t remember them at first but said they seemed very nice.
• The cancer’s in charge and leading them all a merry dance. Perhaps that’s why I’ve so little taste for investigation.
• There’s an awful lot of uncertainty for patients and doctors in this cancer business. And uncertainty is what I am least good at.
• I’m writing a memoir, a form that in my mind plays hide-and-seek with the truth. It contains what I imagine and what I remember being told. Absolute veracity is not what I’m after.
• My story, someone else’s story, a place, an idea, a dream, human anatomy, the mind acting on the world, vice versa, some or all and more yet unthought of, had to be combined in the right amounts in order to make a book, an essay, fiction, non-fiction, history, comedy, whatever, work."
September 23, 2016
This book is cleverly named In Gratitude, but it's theme is really ingratitude. Read other Goodread reviews which were glowing, but I found the memoir to be depressing and annoying, even though I liked her feisty spirit. First section is about her unfortunate relationship with Doris Lessing although she seemed to have learned a lot from Doris in terms of Lessing's dispassionate and analytical writing style. Second portion is about dealing with cancer which I ultimately skipped over after reading about half of it. Last part of the book was a rehash of Lessing again and her illness again. I felt it needed a ton of editing as she redundantly keeps going in circles asking the same questions, and covering the same territory. Jenny is very angry in general and with Lessing in particular, even though Lessing took her in to her home as a stranger and financially supported her for a very long time. It's like a final purging of everything that had disappointed her in her life, especially painting Lessing as cruel and narcissistic despite the support she received from her. I understand why Diski was ungrateful and I feel compassion for her, but it was basically a painful and unpleasant read.
November 18, 2017
Non è una recensione.
Non ne sarei in grado.
È un libro talmente bello, intenso e di straordinaria qualità che qualunque commento o tentativo di descrizione mi parrebbe inopportuno.
Credo sia uno dei libri migliori non solo di questo 2017 ma anche degli ultimi anni.
Non è la Didion, non è la Ernaux, è entrambe e nessuna delle due ma con una marcia in più: un scrittura che a mio dire trascende entrambe.
Una cura stilistica (non voluta né ricercata) che nella sua urgenza e assoluta sincerità ne fa un capolavoro.
Un libro che ho sentito incredibilmente vicino al mio gusto, al mio mood, al mio pensiero.
Così schietto e drammatico, senza essere mai tragico.
Lucido e affilato come la lama di un rasoio.
L'ho amato incredibilmente. Mi ci sono immersa fino al collo.
NN questa volta ha fatto un colpaccio! E ne vado fiera.
Da lettrice, forse una delle prime fan di questa casa editrice, posso dire che questo della Diski sia uno dei romanzi più validi che hanno pubblicato.
Leggetelo perché, a mio dire, è già un classico.
P.s. notoriamente ho un debole per Fabio DerStunk Cremonesi, (ma non diteglielo)beh qui si è superato!
Non ne sarei in grado.
È un libro talmente bello, intenso e di straordinaria qualità che qualunque commento o tentativo di descrizione mi parrebbe inopportuno.
Credo sia uno dei libri migliori non solo di questo 2017 ma anche degli ultimi anni.
Non è la Didion, non è la Ernaux, è entrambe e nessuna delle due ma con una marcia in più: un scrittura che a mio dire trascende entrambe.
Una cura stilistica (non voluta né ricercata) che nella sua urgenza e assoluta sincerità ne fa un capolavoro.
Un libro che ho sentito incredibilmente vicino al mio gusto, al mio mood, al mio pensiero.
Così schietto e drammatico, senza essere mai tragico.
Lucido e affilato come la lama di un rasoio.
L'ho amato incredibilmente. Mi ci sono immersa fino al collo.
NN questa volta ha fatto un colpaccio! E ne vado fiera.
Da lettrice, forse una delle prime fan di questa casa editrice, posso dire che questo della Diski sia uno dei romanzi più validi che hanno pubblicato.
Leggetelo perché, a mio dire, è già un classico.
P.s. notoriamente ho un debole per Fabio DerStunk Cremonesi, (ma non diteglielo)beh qui si è superato!
July 24, 2016
Diski grapples with her cancer and with her formative years living with Doris Lessing, her "benefactor." Three of Lessing's books have characters inspired by Diski, most notably Memoirs of a Survivor (which is one of my least favorite by Lessing), but also the excellent Briefing for a Descent into Hell, and The Sweetest Dream. People, including Lessing, often perceived Diski to be ungrateful for the chance to live with the famed writer, hence the title.
In addition to learning about Lessing in her mid-life (she did not want to write part three of her auto-biography to spare hurt feelings), Diski's thoughts on her own impending non-existence are striking. "I've got no apparatus to throw over myself as I make the swan dive. I'm just out there, alone without even anyone to lie the truth to me. Carried on the wind, swinging on a breeze, but entirely alone."
In addition to learning about Lessing in her mid-life (she did not want to write part three of her auto-biography to spare hurt feelings), Diski's thoughts on her own impending non-existence are striking. "I've got no apparatus to throw over myself as I make the swan dive. I'm just out there, alone without even anyone to lie the truth to me. Carried on the wind, swinging on a breeze, but entirely alone."
August 10, 2016
Een madam naar mijn hart, moet ik zeggen. Ik had nog nooit van haar gehoord maar kreeg dit boek kado en ik ben er zeer blij om. Dit is een potloodboek! Jenny D. Is een schrijfster, een welbekende schrijfster die te horen krijgt dat ze longkanker heeft. Haar reactie is super. Het hele boek is als het ware wie zij is, met terugblikken op haar leven, haar jeugd, haar moeder, Doris Lessing (bij wie ze mocht intrekken) haar manier van denken, haar manier van zijn en dit alles met rake zinnen, gedachtenkronkels, vragen, .... .
Een boek om traag te lezen, in het Engels, en om in mee te gaan.
Aanrader
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Een boek om traag te lezen, in het Engels, en om in mee te gaan.
Aanrader
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
January 4, 2023
3.5/5
Have really loved Diski’s writing in the few things of hers I’ve read, The Vanishing Princess is one of my favorite short story collections. And so much of this really worked for me. Whether she’s choosing to take you in circles or be really abrupt, it lands every time. My biggest complaint is that parts of this feel incomplete, stories only told in halves, but I feel like in some spots that was definitely intentional.
I checked this out from the library kind of on a whim, but I have Strangers on A Train and Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? at home and am really looking forward to reading them.
Have really loved Diski’s writing in the few things of hers I’ve read, The Vanishing Princess is one of my favorite short story collections. And so much of this really worked for me. Whether she’s choosing to take you in circles or be really abrupt, it lands every time. My biggest complaint is that parts of this feel incomplete, stories only told in halves, but I feel like in some spots that was definitely intentional.
I checked this out from the library kind of on a whim, but I have Strangers on A Train and Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? at home and am really looking forward to reading them.
August 6, 2025
Like the title, ambiguous.
Her story is told in a weaving, non linear way.
Information revealed in snippets - and you finish with so many unanswered questions (what would Doris say?, did they love each other? Is she grateful or not? - hence title).
Very beautifully written & ‘one of those books that is a little world’ is a good description.
Her story is told in a weaving, non linear way.
Information revealed in snippets - and you finish with so many unanswered questions (what would Doris say?, did they love each other? Is she grateful or not? - hence title).
Very beautifully written & ‘one of those books that is a little world’ is a good description.
February 26, 2022
Came for the Doris, got an astonishing & beautiful read about much more than that
May 19, 2021
This has me eager to read more of Diski's books. She was a clear-eyed, honest writer and reviewer who examined the extreme life cards that she was dealt as she looked back over her life without the slightest bit of evasion or sentimentality. This is an excellent, and often surprisingly funny, memoir that begins with her dire lung cancer diagnosis and then casts back over her early life, which was complicated from the start: repellent parents, struggles with mental health, and a period when she was taken in by the writer Doris Lessing, of all people. All of this was before she was eighteen years old! Lessing later used a thinly veiled Diski as a difficult character in some of her novels. What a story.
April 20, 2021
I happened to have just started this book as I received devastating and unexpected news about my beloved dog, then read from it every night in the bathtub in the following four days until we had him euthanized. This book was with me during that horrible week, and I am grateful.
September 4, 2017
Läs min recension på bloggen: http://www.fiktiviteter.se/2017/09/04...
April 19, 2019
Klar som kristall och vass som ett rakblad. Jenny Diski skriver en bok om sin början och sitt slut, och hon skonar varken sig själv eller någon annan. En mycket stark bok, som blir bättre om man har någorlunda koll på Doris Lessing men som funkar oavsett.
January 28, 2019
This was my first ‘cancer memoir’ as Jenny Diski liked to call them when she was alive.
In Gratitude, is in equal parts unsettling and engaging. I couldn’t stop reading, though I have to admit at times I wanted to. Mostly that’s due to my stuff as they say, by which I mean my mother’s death from lung cancer 3 years ago. I remember as a small precocious child reading about cancer in one of my mother’s women’s magazines, and instantly being stricken with terror. Cancer could happen to my mother. One in four, was the statistic, and I took to numbering people in fours. ”Not you, not you, not you, YOU, but not my mother”, I would think, relieved, as we were standing in queues at the butcher and the bake shop. I was an anxious child.
I felt some of that anxiety as I was reading this book. There were moments where I noticed I was squirming in my chair and I had to distract myself with something less provocative. Like Diski, I fear the annihilation of death. The nothingness, the not being able to see grandchildren grow up, the possibility of not having extracted every last bit of life from life. In short, I’m afraid of my mother’s fate.
The uncomfortableness was mitigated by the revelations about Diski’s unusual relationship with Doris Lessing. I had no idea what a complicated, strong willed woman with strong narcissistic overtones Lessing was. Still, the two maintained an uneasy friendship until Lessing’s death, just prior to Diski’s own. Perhaps the biggest revelation for me was how late in life Diski chose to analyze this complicated relationship. She admits some anger towards Lessing, but the enormity of her rage towards her self-described ‘benefactor’ lifts off the page in everything that isn’t said. It’s hard not to think that that kind of rage must have permeated most aspects of her life.
I’m glad I read the book. I’d like to know more about both Lessing and Diski. In Gratitude asks a lot of questions, and in that way it’s not just an interesting book, but also a spring board for self-reflection. I think Diski would have been pleased with that.
In Gratitude, is in equal parts unsettling and engaging. I couldn’t stop reading, though I have to admit at times I wanted to. Mostly that’s due to my stuff as they say, by which I mean my mother’s death from lung cancer 3 years ago. I remember as a small precocious child reading about cancer in one of my mother’s women’s magazines, and instantly being stricken with terror. Cancer could happen to my mother. One in four, was the statistic, and I took to numbering people in fours. ”Not you, not you, not you, YOU, but not my mother”, I would think, relieved, as we were standing in queues at the butcher and the bake shop. I was an anxious child.
I felt some of that anxiety as I was reading this book. There were moments where I noticed I was squirming in my chair and I had to distract myself with something less provocative. Like Diski, I fear the annihilation of death. The nothingness, the not being able to see grandchildren grow up, the possibility of not having extracted every last bit of life from life. In short, I’m afraid of my mother’s fate.
The uncomfortableness was mitigated by the revelations about Diski’s unusual relationship with Doris Lessing. I had no idea what a complicated, strong willed woman with strong narcissistic overtones Lessing was. Still, the two maintained an uneasy friendship until Lessing’s death, just prior to Diski’s own. Perhaps the biggest revelation for me was how late in life Diski chose to analyze this complicated relationship. She admits some anger towards Lessing, but the enormity of her rage towards her self-described ‘benefactor’ lifts off the page in everything that isn’t said. It’s hard not to think that that kind of rage must have permeated most aspects of her life.
I’m glad I read the book. I’d like to know more about both Lessing and Diski. In Gratitude asks a lot of questions, and in that way it’s not just an interesting book, but also a spring board for self-reflection. I think Diski would have been pleased with that.
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