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Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays
A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, selected London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude have been described as "virtuoso performances," and "small masterpieces."
From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated and mordantly funny.
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude have been described as "virtuoso performances," and "small masterpieces."
From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated and mordantly funny.
448 pages, Paperback
First published July 23, 2020
239 people are currently reading
4968 people want to read
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 77 reviews
January 15, 2022
How fabulous was this book? Not that we should be surprised, of course, Diski is a brilliant and hilarious writer, but this had the rare additional pleasure of a collected essay collection that is MORE than the sum of its parts, coming together to reveal a thru-line of tight perspective thinking that I was moved by. From the early essays from the 90s on Roald Dahl and Jeffrey Dahmer, to the close when she movingly discusses her cancer diagnosis and questions of aging, we fall in love with Diski.
The audiobook version of it is really good, by the way, and the essays are bite-sized enough to be pleasurable companions on a subway ride, a walk, a drive.
The audiobook version of it is really good, by the way, and the essays are bite-sized enough to be pleasurable companions on a subway ride, a walk, a drive.
May 25, 2021
Jumping right in ....to the good stuff....THESE ESSAYS WERE EXCELLENT....
The book’s Introduction:
“When you think of the 1950s and who was available in London and Paris to sleep with, you can only wonder that she made time to do any work”.
“Most of us were easy to take when we were young, especially if we were beautiful”.
“No One ever mentioned the possibility of a career as a
mariner: hadn’t Moses ordered the Red Sea to part rather than have the Children of Israel get their feet wet?”
“Death has a cachet which leads weight to even the featheriest of lives”.
I also enjoyed reading what was shared ‘about’ Jenny Diski….
“She wasn’t vain, or no more so than average, and she didn’t show off any more than other writers do but she enjoyed her own thoughts and her sentences as much as she enjoys her own company, and she doesn’t let that pleasure go to waste”
How can you not love this woman from the get-go?/!
Jenny Diski died of lung cancer in 2016. She had written more than 200 pieces for The London Review of Books… reflections on the world and its stories. This is my first time experiencing her writing, and it’s terrific… I plan to read other work by her.
The collection of essays are wonderful and varied...
Here comes samples.... quotes and excerpts picked from different essays::
“It is a kind of heaven. This is what I was made for. It ‘is’ doing nothing. A fraud is better perpetrated: writing is not work, it’s doing nothing. It’s not a fraud: doing nothing is what I have to do to live. Or doing writing is what I have to do to do nothing; doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone”.
“Jenny and I had a good time. We played cards - a game called Spite and Malice - and fell out: she thought I was a bad loser, I thought she was a bad winner”.
…..Mary-Kay Williams
I PLAYED HOURS OF “Spite and Malice” growing up. GREAT CARD GAME. (just sayin)...Have any of ‘you’ played?
“I suppose the world divides into those who look and those whose look away. Looking is always the easiest, of course, because it requires no justification, implying as it does, decent sensibility. Looking is always together a more difficult activity.
I doubt that it’s ever entirely free of prurience, but the decision to gaze on the abominable - starving children in faraway countries, death and destruction in vicious wars, images and accounts of the Holocaust- might also be a conscious decision to bear witness to the monstrous possibilities of our own humanity”.
“The rich are different from us not just because they can afford to indulge their madness, but because they can pay other people to sustain their nightmares”
“There is something in us that wants good writers to be good people. There’s also something in us that knows pigs can’t fly”.
“Though I’m very good at getting what, the world is better at not letting me have more than a taste of it”.
“There must be people who, during their lifetime, get their minds right enough not to feel bitterness as the end looms and they realize that nothing much else is going to happen to them apart from death”.
In 1984, while I was in deep and long depression, largely, I think about how I wasn’t being a writer, my previously adoptive or foster mother,, Doris Lessing, would say, and her matter of fact, and patient way ‘Well, just write down your life story. It’s interesting enough, and there are editors you can deal with sorting out your sentences and that kind of thing’. She wafted her arm in the air to show me how easy it would be. It made me feel even more silent with despair. I wasn’t interested in just being published. I wasn’t even interested in writing something ‘interesting enough’. I was a writer and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t writing. The answer was, I think, that I hadn’t understood how writing gathers everything into itself to make a satisfactory piece. 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 un-thought of, had to be combined in the right amounts in order to make a book, an essay, fiction, nonfiction, history, comedy, whatever, ‘work’. I was enough as a writer to know that writing the story of my interesting childhood was not enough to be a writer. I was enough as a writer to be dismayed that Doris, having known me by then for nearly two decades, didn’t know that about me. I was also, in spite of my depression, quite insulted that she thought my sentences needed such tending”.
“In my experience, writing doesn’t get easier the more you do it. But there is a growth of confidence, not much, but a nugget like a pearl, like a tumour. you learned that there is a process, and that it doesn’t very much matter ‘what’ you write, but ‘how’ you do it, that is crucial, and that nothing I wrote, or you wrote, it’s ever going to be the same as what she wrote and he wrote, unless, as Truman Capote said, what you’re dealing with isn’t writing, but typing. So I’ve got cancer. I am writing”
….. September 11, 2014
“A Diagnosis”…
“The future flashed before my eyes and all it’s pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness, the sort that comes over you when you are set on a track by something outside your control, and which, although it is not your experience, is so known in all its cultural forms that you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future. Including the surprises”.
I could included, at least five more excerpts....It’s PACKED FILLED with great essays an articles taken from the London Review of Books
Jenny Diski was a terrific writer.
The book’s Introduction:
“When you think of the 1950s and who was available in London and Paris to sleep with, you can only wonder that she made time to do any work”.
“Most of us were easy to take when we were young, especially if we were beautiful”.
“No One ever mentioned the possibility of a career as a
mariner: hadn’t Moses ordered the Red Sea to part rather than have the Children of Israel get their feet wet?”
“Death has a cachet which leads weight to even the featheriest of lives”.
I also enjoyed reading what was shared ‘about’ Jenny Diski….
“She wasn’t vain, or no more so than average, and she didn’t show off any more than other writers do but she enjoyed her own thoughts and her sentences as much as she enjoys her own company, and she doesn’t let that pleasure go to waste”
How can you not love this woman from the get-go?/!
Jenny Diski died of lung cancer in 2016. She had written more than 200 pieces for The London Review of Books… reflections on the world and its stories. This is my first time experiencing her writing, and it’s terrific… I plan to read other work by her.
The collection of essays are wonderful and varied...
Here comes samples.... quotes and excerpts picked from different essays::
“It is a kind of heaven. This is what I was made for. It ‘is’ doing nothing. A fraud is better perpetrated: writing is not work, it’s doing nothing. It’s not a fraud: doing nothing is what I have to do to live. Or doing writing is what I have to do to do nothing; doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone”.
“Jenny and I had a good time. We played cards - a game called Spite and Malice - and fell out: she thought I was a bad loser, I thought she was a bad winner”.
…..Mary-Kay Williams
I PLAYED HOURS OF “Spite and Malice” growing up. GREAT CARD GAME. (just sayin)...Have any of ‘you’ played?
“I suppose the world divides into those who look and those whose look away. Looking is always the easiest, of course, because it requires no justification, implying as it does, decent sensibility. Looking is always together a more difficult activity.
I doubt that it’s ever entirely free of prurience, but the decision to gaze on the abominable - starving children in faraway countries, death and destruction in vicious wars, images and accounts of the Holocaust- might also be a conscious decision to bear witness to the monstrous possibilities of our own humanity”.
“The rich are different from us not just because they can afford to indulge their madness, but because they can pay other people to sustain their nightmares”
“There is something in us that wants good writers to be good people. There’s also something in us that knows pigs can’t fly”.
“Though I’m very good at getting what, the world is better at not letting me have more than a taste of it”.
“There must be people who, during their lifetime, get their minds right enough not to feel bitterness as the end looms and they realize that nothing much else is going to happen to them apart from death”.
In 1984, while I was in deep and long depression, largely, I think about how I wasn’t being a writer, my previously adoptive or foster mother,, Doris Lessing, would say, and her matter of fact, and patient way ‘Well, just write down your life story. It’s interesting enough, and there are editors you can deal with sorting out your sentences and that kind of thing’. She wafted her arm in the air to show me how easy it would be. It made me feel even more silent with despair. I wasn’t interested in just being published. I wasn’t even interested in writing something ‘interesting enough’. I was a writer and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t writing. The answer was, I think, that I hadn’t understood how writing gathers everything into itself to make a satisfactory piece. 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 un-thought of, had to be combined in the right amounts in order to make a book, an essay, fiction, nonfiction, history, comedy, whatever, ‘work’. I was enough as a writer to know that writing the story of my interesting childhood was not enough to be a writer. I was enough as a writer to be dismayed that Doris, having known me by then for nearly two decades, didn’t know that about me. I was also, in spite of my depression, quite insulted that she thought my sentences needed such tending”.
“In my experience, writing doesn’t get easier the more you do it. But there is a growth of confidence, not much, but a nugget like a pearl, like a tumour. you learned that there is a process, and that it doesn’t very much matter ‘what’ you write, but ‘how’ you do it, that is crucial, and that nothing I wrote, or you wrote, it’s ever going to be the same as what she wrote and he wrote, unless, as Truman Capote said, what you’re dealing with isn’t writing, but typing. So I’ve got cancer. I am writing”
….. September 11, 2014
“A Diagnosis”…
“The future flashed before my eyes and all it’s pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness, the sort that comes over you when you are set on a track by something outside your control, and which, although it is not your experience, is so known in all its cultural forms that you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future. Including the surprises”.
I could included, at least five more excerpts....It’s PACKED FILLED with great essays an articles taken from the London Review of Books
Jenny Diski was a terrific writer.
July 10, 2021
I read Jenny Diski’s memoir ‘Skating to Antarctica’ 21 years ago, and found it to be OK/good. I don’t know how much I read of her oeuvre then, but over the years I have read some of her columns in the London Review of Books. I have her memoir from 2002 that I have yet to read, ‘Stranger on a Train’ – I am sure I will get to it. I was not aware that she had died…I was at the library 3 weeks ago and saw this book on the New Arrivals shelf and grabbed it… She died of lung cancer in 2016 at the age of 68.
This is a collection of essays from the London Review of Books from 1992 to 2014. This is not a book to zoom through. She has too many things to say that are packed in her ~10-16-page essays. She is a very good, and very smart, writer. I enjoyed a number of her essays of the 33 presented. However, some of them were not my cup of tea, but that’s not a reflection on her writing. It was a long slog, 432 pages.
Here they are the titles of the essays with my ratings and a comment here and there:
• Moving Day –3.5 stars [an ex-lover movers out of her house after 18 months.] /Good Housekeeping – 3.5 stars [Jeffrey Dahmer, the very sick man who killed people.] / He Could Afford It – 3.5 stars [on Howard Hughes] / Stinker – 4.5 stars [Wow…Roald Dahl was a areal a__hole.] / The Natural Death Center – 3.5 stars [cemeteries and such and dying] / Sweetie Pies – 3 stars [about Denis Thatcher, husband of Margaret Thatcher] / A Feeling for Ice – 3 stars [an excerpt from her memoir, Skating to Antarctica. She was in a psychiatric hospital when she was a teenager. So had been her mother. Her parents sexually abused her. She had not seen her mother in the last 20 years of her mother’s life. The mother could have looked for her but didn’t….and she could have looked for her mother, and didn’t. Sad.] / The Girl in the Attic – 4 stars [Anne Frank] / Mrs. Straus’s Devotion – 3.5 stars [the sinking of the Titanic] / Did Jesus Walk on Water? – 2 stars / Perfectly Human – 1.5 stars / My Little Lollipop – 2 stars / Don’t Think About It – 2 stars [Sonia Orwell, George Orwell’s wife] / Fashion as Art – 2.5 stars / It Wasn’t Him. It Was Her – DNF/ XXXX – 5 stars [very interesting essay on Stanley Milgram’s psychology experiment on blind obedience] / Mirror Images – 2 stars / My Word, Mrs. Perkins – 2.5 stars/ The Housekeeper of a World-Shattering Theory [about being Sigmund Freud’s wife…she was surprisingly a normal housewife] / The Friendly Spider Programme – 4 stars [very good…Diski was scared of spiders, arachnophobia, and entered a program to erase her fears…funny and interesting] / Tunnel Vision – 3 stars [about Princess Diana of Wales] / Enjoying Herself – 2.5 stars/ Staying Awake – 4 stars [essay on sleeping and falling asleep. Pretty funny. Very well written in beginning and had she kept it short, would have been 5 stars]/ The Khugistic Sandal – DNF [Very boring essay on shoes and Jews. Sorry, she kept on going on and on. This is too long a book. Essay fatigue.] / Toxic Lozenges – 3.5 stars [very disturbing but interesting article about arsenic both as a means of murder but also it was in a lot of household products, and so people died that way too (indeliberate poisoning).] / Never Mainline – 3 stars [about Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Scary dude at times, but I guess he was talented. Seems like a terrible father…] / Which One of You is Jesus? – 2 stars / Zeitgeist Man – 2.5 stars [about Dennis Hopper] I Haven’t Been Nearly Mad Enough – 2.5 stars / However I Smell – 3 stars [on old age and supposedly wisdom that comes with it and other musings] / Post-its, Push Pins, Pencils – 3 stars [initial pages were interesting...a walk down memory lane of what used to be in stationery cabinets in offices / A Diagnosis – 3 stars [about her lung cancer diagnosis. This was an essay within her final book, ‘On Gratitude’, which was about her living and dying with cancer and also about living with Doris Lessing, who took her under her wing when she was an adolescent]
Reviews
• (16 reviews here!!!) https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all...
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/bo...
This is a collection of essays from the London Review of Books from 1992 to 2014. This is not a book to zoom through. She has too many things to say that are packed in her ~10-16-page essays. She is a very good, and very smart, writer. I enjoyed a number of her essays of the 33 presented. However, some of them were not my cup of tea, but that’s not a reflection on her writing. It was a long slog, 432 pages.
Here they are the titles of the essays with my ratings and a comment here and there:
• Moving Day –3.5 stars [an ex-lover movers out of her house after 18 months.] /Good Housekeeping – 3.5 stars [Jeffrey Dahmer, the very sick man who killed people.] / He Could Afford It – 3.5 stars [on Howard Hughes] / Stinker – 4.5 stars [Wow…Roald Dahl was a areal a__hole.] / The Natural Death Center – 3.5 stars [cemeteries and such and dying] / Sweetie Pies – 3 stars [about Denis Thatcher, husband of Margaret Thatcher] / A Feeling for Ice – 3 stars [an excerpt from her memoir, Skating to Antarctica. She was in a psychiatric hospital when she was a teenager. So had been her mother. Her parents sexually abused her. She had not seen her mother in the last 20 years of her mother’s life. The mother could have looked for her but didn’t….and she could have looked for her mother, and didn’t. Sad.] / The Girl in the Attic – 4 stars [Anne Frank] / Mrs. Straus’s Devotion – 3.5 stars [the sinking of the Titanic] / Did Jesus Walk on Water? – 2 stars / Perfectly Human – 1.5 stars / My Little Lollipop – 2 stars / Don’t Think About It – 2 stars [Sonia Orwell, George Orwell’s wife] / Fashion as Art – 2.5 stars / It Wasn’t Him. It Was Her – DNF/ XXXX – 5 stars [very interesting essay on Stanley Milgram’s psychology experiment on blind obedience] / Mirror Images – 2 stars / My Word, Mrs. Perkins – 2.5 stars/ The Housekeeper of a World-Shattering Theory [about being Sigmund Freud’s wife…she was surprisingly a normal housewife] / The Friendly Spider Programme – 4 stars [very good…Diski was scared of spiders, arachnophobia, and entered a program to erase her fears…funny and interesting] / Tunnel Vision – 3 stars [about Princess Diana of Wales] / Enjoying Herself – 2.5 stars/ Staying Awake – 4 stars [essay on sleeping and falling asleep. Pretty funny. Very well written in beginning and had she kept it short, would have been 5 stars]/ The Khugistic Sandal – DNF [Very boring essay on shoes and Jews. Sorry, she kept on going on and on. This is too long a book. Essay fatigue.] / Toxic Lozenges – 3.5 stars [very disturbing but interesting article about arsenic both as a means of murder but also it was in a lot of household products, and so people died that way too (indeliberate poisoning).] / Never Mainline – 3 stars [about Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Scary dude at times, but I guess he was talented. Seems like a terrible father…] / Which One of You is Jesus? – 2 stars / Zeitgeist Man – 2.5 stars [about Dennis Hopper] I Haven’t Been Nearly Mad Enough – 2.5 stars / However I Smell – 3 stars [on old age and supposedly wisdom that comes with it and other musings] / Post-its, Push Pins, Pencils – 3 stars [initial pages were interesting...a walk down memory lane of what used to be in stationery cabinets in offices / A Diagnosis – 3 stars [about her lung cancer diagnosis. This was an essay within her final book, ‘On Gratitude’, which was about her living and dying with cancer and also about living with Doris Lessing, who took her under her wing when she was an adolescent]
Reviews
• (16 reviews here!!!) https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all...
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/bo...
April 24, 2021
Looking for a new essay collection to add to your TBR pile? Then check out my review for Jenny Diski’s WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST DO WHAT YOU WERE TOLD? over at www.thenerddaily.com.
See below for a snippet. Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for gifting me a review copy. You can pick up a copy of Diski’s collection today from your favorite bookseller!
“ ... There is a little something for everyone here in Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Diski’s essays range from topics like life and death, love and children, to the peace of solitude and the hardship of her struggles with mental health. A great number of the included essays are book reviews and critical explorations into the lives of well-known public figures ranging from writers and musicians to serial killers and wealthy entrepreneurs. The common thread throughout these pieces, however, is the connection between her subject, her own lived experience, and the larger human condition. Diski is simply brilliant at drawing out the commonalities, as well as the particular oddities, of our lives.
... Diski’s work is phenomenal, a master class in not just writing essays with substance and style, but in the human matters of vulnerability and self-exploration. Perceptive and humorous, often darkly so, Diski’s writing begs to be read, thoughtfully chewed upon, and revisited as we each work our way through the beautiful and bewildering chaos we call life.”
See below for a snippet. Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for gifting me a review copy. You can pick up a copy of Diski’s collection today from your favorite bookseller!
“ ... There is a little something for everyone here in Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Diski’s essays range from topics like life and death, love and children, to the peace of solitude and the hardship of her struggles with mental health. A great number of the included essays are book reviews and critical explorations into the lives of well-known public figures ranging from writers and musicians to serial killers and wealthy entrepreneurs. The common thread throughout these pieces, however, is the connection between her subject, her own lived experience, and the larger human condition. Diski is simply brilliant at drawing out the commonalities, as well as the particular oddities, of our lives.
... Diski’s work is phenomenal, a master class in not just writing essays with substance and style, but in the human matters of vulnerability and self-exploration. Perceptive and humorous, often darkly so, Diski’s writing begs to be read, thoughtfully chewed upon, and revisited as we each work our way through the beautiful and bewildering chaos we call life.”
January 25, 2021
“I write fiction and non-fiction, but it’s almost always personal. I start with me, and often enough end with me. I’ve never been apologetic about that nor had a sense that my writing is ‘confessional.' What else am I going to write about but how I know and don’t know the world? I may not make things up in fiction, or tell the truth in non-fiction, but documentary or invented, it’s always been me at the centre of the will to put descriptions out into the world. I lie, like all writers, but I use my truths as I know them in order to do so.” — "A Diagnosis"
July 28, 2021
Diski is a great dinner companion. Witty, incisive and with the ability to take you in wonderful diversions. Many of these pieces are ostensibly book reviews, but Diski takes the opportunity to turn her eye to the cultural phenomena that spark these books. The centerpiece is a long, braided essay that intertwines a trip to Antarctica with memories of her troubled childhood.
December 12, 2020
Reading this book felt very poignant, knowing there would be no more from Jenny Diiski. Her writing draws the reader into even those topics of no apparent interest: there is always a nugget of new knowledge to be marvelled over and preserved. Her book reviews are masterly; unstinting admiration where it is due, bedecked with new intellectual insights tempting a reader to seek out the book; and entertainingly acid critiques when she has subjected herself to the pain of reading and thus protected us from wasting hours. I especially liked her luxurious description of the stationery cupboard in "Post-Its, Push Pins, Pencils". Highly recommended as fine examples from a skilled essayist, a literary form which can often disappoint in less able hands.
March 1, 2022
Jenny Diski was Doris Lessing's protégé. This fact alone piqued my interest as Doris Lessing has been a favorite of mine for years.
Diski's essays on various themes, such as the unfathomable depths of sleep, the arsenic craze in the UK (which inspired some of Agatha Christie's books and many other crime novels), death and dying, Anne Frank's diary, Stanley Milgram's experiments and the interpretation of their results or the implications of overcoming arachnophobia (to mention just a few) are really original, amusingly clever and deeply personal.
Diski's essays on various themes, such as the unfathomable depths of sleep, the arsenic craze in the UK (which inspired some of Agatha Christie's books and many other crime novels), death and dying, Anne Frank's diary, Stanley Milgram's experiments and the interpretation of their results or the implications of overcoming arachnophobia (to mention just a few) are really original, amusingly clever and deeply personal.
May 23, 2021
Very smart book reviews and essays. I enjoyed them all, even the ones about topics that were too British for me to understand.
February 6, 2021
This was my introduction to Diski and her warm and captivating voice. These essays unfurl with ease, moving in unexpected directions as in the opening essay, which follows the end of a love affair intertwined with the purpose of art, the mortality of pets, the solitude necessary for writing. Diski is truly a master of the literary essay and reading her is like listening to your most brilliant friend hold court at a dinner party. Diski’s endless curiosity is the driving force behind these essays; she doesn’t stay in one place for too long, moving from the writing life to the daily routine of orangutans at the zoo, and teasing out their similarities. Other essays tackle ethical and aesthetic questions, the benefits of looking at horrors such as those inflicted by Jeffery Dahmer versus looking away; biographies of figures such as Howard Hughes, Anne Frank and Roald Dahl. “A Feeling for Ice” may be the standout piece; this essay moves from the comforting whiteness of oblivion and Diski’s desire to visit Antarctica to the death of her father and disappearance of her mother following a childhood wracked with abuse. It’s mesmerizing how Diski moves from anecdotal stories and conversations to the larger cultural milieu. This is a collection to be treasured and its author will be sorely missed.
August 30, 2020
I was tempted by this not only by the good reviews, but also because I greatly enjoyed an earlier book of her essays, 'What I Don't Know About Animals.'
Diski's favoured form is the long essay, the 33 here first appearing in the London Review of Books. All are worthwhile, whilst some of them are excellent. She is honest, learned, acerbic and often very funny.
The essay 'A Feeling for Ice', bringing together a trip to Antarctica and her very troubled upbringing (including being 'adopted' by Doris Lessing for four years) is both heart rending and amusing. Her book reviews ooze straightforward sense and her essay on Martha Freud (Sigmund's wife) puts the 'great man' firmly in his place.
She admits that all of her writing is in some way about herself and this is what makes it so engaging and human. If you enjoy understated irony and an idiosyncratic view of the world and are not content with platitudes, you should enjoy this book.
She died in 2016 of inoperable lung cancer. A great loss.
Diski's favoured form is the long essay, the 33 here first appearing in the London Review of Books. All are worthwhile, whilst some of them are excellent. She is honest, learned, acerbic and often very funny.
The essay 'A Feeling for Ice', bringing together a trip to Antarctica and her very troubled upbringing (including being 'adopted' by Doris Lessing for four years) is both heart rending and amusing. Her book reviews ooze straightforward sense and her essay on Martha Freud (Sigmund's wife) puts the 'great man' firmly in his place.
She admits that all of her writing is in some way about herself and this is what makes it so engaging and human. If you enjoy understated irony and an idiosyncratic view of the world and are not content with platitudes, you should enjoy this book.
She died in 2016 of inoperable lung cancer. A great loss.
October 18, 2020
Read this after enjoying Stranger on a Train so much. Some of the essays in this collection are among the best I've ever read. A Feeling For Ice might be the best. Beautiful, yet hits really hard.
Its commonplace to praise authors who can draw from the reader interest in a subject where there might have been little - Diski does this with ease. However, she does this while lacing in ample personal detail and history - we come out knowing her just as well as the book/biscuit/trip to the zoo being reviewed.
Its commonplace to praise authors who can draw from the reader interest in a subject where there might have been little - Diski does this with ease. However, she does this while lacing in ample personal detail and history - we come out knowing her just as well as the book/biscuit/trip to the zoo being reviewed.
Read
September 2, 2021dnf
This is a collection of previously published essays. Lacking the context or knowledge of current events and trends in Britain when these were written, the essays I read were difficult to grasp or understand. I kept feeling like I was missing the joke or key point, so I set it down.
This is a collection of previously published essays. Lacking the context or knowledge of current events and trends in Britain when these were written, the essays I read were difficult to grasp or understand. I kept feeling like I was missing the joke or key point, so I set it down.
dnf
April 26, 2022DNF ~30%
I’ve always wanted to try the KonMarie decluttering method. Marie Kondo claims by expanding the question, “Does this spark joy?” to your mindset and actions, you'll discover what your ideal life looks like. I rarely have things to declutter because I move so often. Or maybe I declutter on autopilot. My book collection became unmanageable last year so I finally decided to buy a Kindle to help curb the growing stacks. I make an exception for NYRB classics (those covers spark tremendous joy) and Persephone Books (my most exciting discovery of 2022).
I overlooked a crucial point in Marie Kondo’s practice; ACTIONS. It’s not just about things! The action of picking this book up every night does not spark joy! I can’t even get the title straight after all this time! I have no idea what she’s talking about in half her essays because it’s way too British for me. I wish I were an intellectual heavyweight but not at the expense of my enJOYment! Sweet relief!
I’ve always wanted to try the KonMarie decluttering method. Marie Kondo claims by expanding the question, “Does this spark joy?” to your mindset and actions, you'll discover what your ideal life looks like. I rarely have things to declutter because I move so often. Or maybe I declutter on autopilot. My book collection became unmanageable last year so I finally decided to buy a Kindle to help curb the growing stacks. I make an exception for NYRB classics (those covers spark tremendous joy) and Persephone Books (my most exciting discovery of 2022).
I overlooked a crucial point in Marie Kondo’s practice; ACTIONS. It’s not just about things! The action of picking this book up every night does not spark joy! I can’t even get the title straight after all this time! I have no idea what she’s talking about in half her essays because it’s way too British for me. I wish I were an intellectual heavyweight but not at the expense of my enJOYment! Sweet relief!
July 9, 2021
Woof, this one took me almost a month to get through!
Usually I rate short stories/collections of essays based off their high points, but this one was just too tough to justify that. There are some essays that are 4-stars, but the middle of the book just drags. Most of that is likely me not being familiar with niche British cultural figures, but this book just didn’t consistently do it for me.
Usually I rate short stories/collections of essays based off their high points, but this one was just too tough to justify that. There are some essays that are 4-stars, but the middle of the book just drags. Most of that is likely me not being familiar with niche British cultural figures, but this book just didn’t consistently do it for me.
Read
November 14, 2022I love how Jenny Diski writes. This was such an exploration of a very specific period of time, and it was such a joy to read (mostly). I like how these are such short bites to read at a time, perfect for commuting!
April 6, 2021
Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a wonderful collection of Jenny Diski's short form writing. They are essays in the form of book reviews, or book reviews in the form of essays. However one wants to categorize them, they are both delightful to read on a surface level while also providing much food for thought at the many underlying levels. These run from the personal (constant throughout) to the cultural, societal, and political. Yet rarely in a way that is beating the reader over the head (unless, of course, we deserve it).
I am mostly familiar with Diski's writing from her books and the periodic clippings friends used to send me of her pieces they thought I would appreciate. I came to realize that her writing did not have to be "about" a topic I was already interested in, she seemed to always find, if not a universality, a common path into any topic. From there we were free to let her offer some guidance on further musings. This collection offers very few, if any, essays that didn't cause me to consider ideas and situations far removed (so I thought) from the main theme of the piece.
While I highly recommend this to readers who enjoy personal essays/book reviews, I would also make a suggestion for those who don't usually read such books. These essays are ideal for those moments when we have a short time to read but want something with both substance and entertainment value. Perhaps an essay before bed, or if you want something besides news feeds to read at lunch or a work break. While the reading time is short for each they will help keep your mind engaged and active in processing what she says.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
I am mostly familiar with Diski's writing from her books and the periodic clippings friends used to send me of her pieces they thought I would appreciate. I came to realize that her writing did not have to be "about" a topic I was already interested in, she seemed to always find, if not a universality, a common path into any topic. From there we were free to let her offer some guidance on further musings. This collection offers very few, if any, essays that didn't cause me to consider ideas and situations far removed (so I thought) from the main theme of the piece.
While I highly recommend this to readers who enjoy personal essays/book reviews, I would also make a suggestion for those who don't usually read such books. These essays are ideal for those moments when we have a short time to read but want something with both substance and entertainment value. Perhaps an essay before bed, or if you want something besides news feeds to read at lunch or a work break. While the reading time is short for each they will help keep your mind engaged and active in processing what she says.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
July 17, 2023
Jenny Diski’nin, London Review of Books için yazdığı bazı makalelerini barındıran derlemesini bitirdim. İnternetten bir “blind buy” idi aslında. Daha önce Diski’nin hiçbir çalışmasını da okumamıştım; çoğu hoş ve kimisi düşündüren yazılarıyla tanışmış oldum.
Dahmer-Nielsen karşılaştırmasından, Roald Dahl’ın şahsi hayatına; kendi geçmişi ve bir Antarktika ziyaretine ait kesitleri bir arada anlattığı harikulade denemesinden, Anne Frank’in günlüğünün önemine dair çok çok ikna edici bir değerlendirmesine; Yahudilerin denizle olan ilişkisi hakkında karşılaştırmalı verdiği tarihi notlardan Milgram deneyine ve Nietzsche’nin kızkardeşine; Dennis Hopper’dan arseniğin zaman içinde kullanım şekillerine dair biiiir sürü konudan dem vuruyor.
Sadece çeviri mekanikti, kimi kısımlarda da tutuk. Önsözde ise bir iki büyük çeviri hatası mevcut.
Dahmer-Nielsen karşılaştırmasından, Roald Dahl’ın şahsi hayatına; kendi geçmişi ve bir Antarktika ziyaretine ait kesitleri bir arada anlattığı harikulade denemesinden, Anne Frank’in günlüğünün önemine dair çok çok ikna edici bir değerlendirmesine; Yahudilerin denizle olan ilişkisi hakkında karşılaştırmalı verdiği tarihi notlardan Milgram deneyine ve Nietzsche’nin kızkardeşine; Dennis Hopper’dan arseniğin zaman içinde kullanım şekillerine dair biiiir sürü konudan dem vuruyor.
Sadece çeviri mekanikti, kimi kısımlarda da tutuk. Önsözde ise bir iki büyük çeviri hatası mevcut.
April 18, 2021
* A collection of essays on various topics/books written by the late and rather fantastic Jenny Diski.
* What an absolute joy to read. Jenny’s writing is full of humour, wit and intrigue. I have learnt so much from this book and the diverse range of topics, from the titanic to arachnophobia and her own cancer diagnosis. I did have to google quite a few of the people mentioned but that just added to my knowledge!
* A lovely and refreshing change from my usual fiction. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone!
* What an absolute joy to read. Jenny’s writing is full of humour, wit and intrigue. I have learnt so much from this book and the diverse range of topics, from the titanic to arachnophobia and her own cancer diagnosis. I did have to google quite a few of the people mentioned but that just added to my knowledge!
* A lovely and refreshing change from my usual fiction. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone!
May 29, 2021
The best book of essays I’ve read in years. Beyond brilliant and moving.
May 23, 2021
Diski is a perfect essayist and sentence writer. These essays are writhing, critical, funny, subversive, wild, and such a joy to read.
September 3, 2020
This is the collection I was hoping for. I would buy a second (and third, ...) selection of her pieces for LRB sight unseen.
October 4, 2020
Beautiful writing I love Jenny Diski.
May 3, 2021
I always love her voice
July 18, 2021
I read "In Gratitude" in 2016 shortly after the author died, and thought it was fantastic and moving. I am big Doris Lessing fan and that was the book that explored their relationship. I would recommend Gratitude and Diski's short stories before I recommended this collection of essays, although some are very good. These are mostly book reviews, and while they are thoughtful and "explore life's complications," they are still book reviews, mostly of biographies of British people. I have no desire to read any of the books she wrote about.
The first essay about a break-up was phenomenal, and the last essay was also in "In Gratitude" and was the best one (only one other essay is not a book review, if I recall correctly). As for the book reviews, even when Diski explores well-worn subjects like Jeffrey Dahmer and Anne Frank and Nietzsche, she brings something new and fresh. I almost skipped the essays on the royals - because nothing could be less interesting to me - but they were actually quite solid and explored some meaty themes. However there is a lot in here that drags and that brought my score down.
The first essay about a break-up was phenomenal, and the last essay was also in "In Gratitude" and was the best one (only one other essay is not a book review, if I recall correctly). As for the book reviews, even when Diski explores well-worn subjects like Jeffrey Dahmer and Anne Frank and Nietzsche, she brings something new and fresh. I almost skipped the essays on the royals - because nothing could be less interesting to me - but they were actually quite solid and explored some meaty themes. However there is a lot in here that drags and that brought my score down.
Read
August 10, 2021A collection of short essays, each just a few pages long. Diski riffs off of book reviews, usually biographies or cultural histories, to reflect on life, society, her personal character flaws. You end up picking up a lot of interesting educational tidbits about famous historical/cultural figures, and also a lot of casual derision aimed at British conservative politicians. Her voice is self-deprecating and confident at the same time, flippant, snarky, and occasionally very on the mark when it comes to cultural commentary. Only complaint is that this collection is pretty long and it can feel like a bit of a quest to get through, could be slimmed down some.
October 21, 2024
I had not heard of Diski before and read this on recommendation of a blogger I follow, Bug Woman of London. I very much enjoyed Diski's style, although probably 30% of the essays didn't interest me because I either didn't know much about the person she was discussing or found the topic unpleasant (like the one about Jeffrey Dahmer). I admit I skimmed some of those, but at 400+ pages, the collection still had many essays to savor.
She especially shines when writing about herself in the world. She is funny, unsentimental and clear-eyed, aware of her biases.
The final essay is the opening entry of her Cancer Diary (published in the London Review of Books), when she first received her diagnosis in 2014. She died in 2016. I will probably read the collection of those essays.
She especially shines when writing about herself in the world. She is funny, unsentimental and clear-eyed, aware of her biases.
The final essay is the opening entry of her Cancer Diary (published in the London Review of Books), when she first received her diagnosis in 2014. She died in 2016. I will probably read the collection of those essays.
July 27, 2024
Witty, astute and lucid. This is why Jenny Diski is commissioned to write for the London Review of Books while I write for Goodreads. My favourite of Diski’s essays are when she writes and reflects on celebrities’ biographies, pointing out the obvious that most people miss and what is nonsensical. She also shows a compassion towards people deemed mentally ill by society and exposes the hypocrisy in our categorisations (who is good vs evil, Boomers vs post-Boomer generations, doctor vs the patient). Overall a good collection of essays.
Glad to get my mojo back like Austin Powers, except mine applies to reading and not saving the world from Dr No.
Excerpts:
The world divides into those who look and those who look away. Looking away is easiest, of course, because it requires no justification, implying, as it does, decent sensibility. Looking is altogether a more difficult activity. I doubt that it's ever entirely free of prurience, but the decision to gaze on the abominable — starving children in faraway countries, death and destruction in vicious wars, images and accounts of the Holocaust — might also be a conscious decision to bear witness to the monstrous possibilities of our own humanity. Part of Primo Levi's final depression centred on his belief that fewer and fewer people were listening to what he had witnessed on our behalf. 'Nothing human is alien to me' is more than an affirmation of species togetherness: it's a warning that by denying kinship with the worst of our kind, we may never know ourselves at all.
Children love [Roald Dahl’s] stories. They speak to the last overt remains of the disreputable, unsocialised, inelegant parts of themselves the grown-ups are trying so hard to push firmly underground. If they are coarsely written, structurally feeble, morally dubious, so much the better. If the adults can't bear to read them, then childhood nirvana is attained. Adults are to be poisoned and shrunk into nothingness, dragged unwillingly on their deathbed to live in a chocolate factory, and outwitted like the murderous farmers who wait outside Mr Fox's lair only to be trounced by his cunning. Quite right. Dahl has a proper relationship with childish desires and best we keep out of it. […] If millions of children all over the world love the subversive, prurient and emotionally capricious stories he told, could that be because he never left his infantile self behind?
The point of desire is desire itself, the essential pleasure in expectation is expectation. The idea that reality is a completion of the wish is fallacious. It is only our dim literal-mindedness that makes us believe that we should try to achieve what we wish for.
The Titanic, he says, represents the loss of 'a way of life which I and others long for'. Like believers in reincarnation who don't doubt that in previous lives they were pharaohs and potentates rather than slaves and serfs, so the dreamers of Titanic days assume their places would have been in the first-class smoking room rather than the boiler room.
I find myself nostalgic for the time, long ago, when one thing the very rich and very famous could be relied on to do was shut up. Paul Getty, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco wrapped their money around themselves in the form of impenetrable walls and/or designer sunglasses and kept silent while the world wondered and chattered. And you would imagine that if money could do anything for you it would be to insulate you from having to care what other people thought. The people don't have to vote for you, they don't have to love you. But even princesses and tycoons have to seem to be democratic and loveable these days. […] There are power lists and personalities of the year, decade and century, and however filthy with wealth you are, you have to worry about 'the people', you have to care what they think of you. We've had our people's princess, desperate to become the queen of people's hearts.
I have gathered over the years that people in very high and very low places are a great deal more stupid than we expect them to be, and that sheer incompetence accounts for much in national and international politics.
Anyone believes there is an inherently moral distinction which can be defined geographically or racially means people just haven’t been paying attention to what the twentieth century – of which the Milgram study was little more than a reiteration and foreshadowing – made hideously clear. Tell people to go to war, and mostly they will. Tell them to piss on prisoners, and mostly they will. Tell them to cover up lies, and mostly they will. Authority is government, the media, the business sector, the priestly men and women in white coats or mitres. We are trained up in the structure of the family, in school, in work. Most people do what they are told.
It looks as if in every generation there is moral panic and a perception (or hallucination of the horror to come) of the next generation as having lost its predisposition to be obedient. Civilisation depends on most of us doing what we are told most of the time. Real civilisation, however, depends on Milgram’s 35 per cent who eventually get round to thinking for themselves.
By polishing that surface and keeping the clocks ticking in unison, Martha [Freud] was as essential to the development of Freudian thought as Dora or the Rat Man. It's just that she didn't have the time to put her feet up on the couch, and Sigmund never cared to wonder what all that polishing and timekeeping was about. Martha was not there in order to be understood; she was there so that he might learn to understand others.
Now for the other princess [Margaret Rose instead of Diana Spencer]: the one who failed to stop all the clocks in Kensington Palace and Mustique, and grew old. In doing so she became sick, fat, grumpy, drunk and unloved. This, you might think, is the fate of many people who leave dying to their later years. We like our princesses young and adorable, and if possible witty and talented. While she was young, Margaret Rose was the apple of her father's eye, enchanting to all who met her, talented, witty, artistic, they said — and then one day she was middle-aged, frumpy, snobbish, self-centred, a raddled old gin tippler and a bore. So much apparent promise, so little follow through.
The Khugistic Sandal had two horizontal straps and a buckle at the ankle. The sandals were called Khugistic after a commune that was said originally to have produced them, but in the 1930s they were renamed Biblical Sandals. The renaming was symbolic, Orna Ben-Meir says, designed to reiterate the ancestral link between contemporary Jews and the land given by God to Abraham: 'Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee? Neither the Lord nor this book has anything very much to say about those who were already on the land. Though it seems inescapable to me, the symbolic Biblical Shoe, on the feet of the ancient Hebrew wanderers and more recently the pioneers and later citizens of the Israeli state, is never described as being symbolically on the necks of the Canaanites or the Palestinians. Actually, there's barely an indication in these essays of there being anyone on the land.
I'm going to hang on to Keith Richards's autobiography, because sometimes I worry that I lead a boring life and wonder if I shouldn't try harder to have fun. When that happens, a quick flick through Keith's memoirs will remind me that I've never really wanted to live the life of anyone else, not even a Rolling Stone.
[Dennis Hopper] got stuck on the problem of having arrived too late, as each generation does, and being left to watch as the last of the great heroes disappeared. I still regret being just too late to sit in Les Deux Magots with Beckett or hang out at Shakespeare and Company with the Beats.
It's decidedly irritating, but also rather tragic, when head-turning young women, not content with being what they presently are, take the time to look at you in triumph, never doubting that they are going to stay young forever - or perhaps they think the old and the young are born that way. The only defence against them is also a kindness: silence and knowledge.
Feminists may or may not have chucked out constricting undergarments and razors when they were young, but none of them dreamed they would dye their hair to eliminate the grey, or cover up their arms to conceal creased and creped skin, or wonder: is this skirt OK for a woman of my age? When Gloria Steinem snapped back at the 'compliment' that she didn't look her age with 'This is what forty looks like, no one thought that in later years it would still be thought flattering to say a woman looked ten years younger than she was.
Opposition between the generations is a perfect shield for a government under fire for cutting welfare while destroying the NHS, privatising education and doing nothing about the depletion of reasonably priced housing. Let the young blame the old not the coalition. In addition, there is the now institutionalised pressure from all around to 'age well'. Government and official bodies issue warnings about eating wrongly and not getting enough exercise. We are told to take our wellbeing and our ageing process into our own hands. The idea of ageing badly looms over us: those who become ill or develop age-related conditions are to blame for failing to keep themselves bright and sparky. They have grown wilfully old and expect the world to take care of them. It all plays into the neoliberal notion that the old are demanding welfare and medical aid for which the young have to pay. Dependency, more or less inevitable with increasing age, becomes something about which the old should apologise.
I was handed my script, though all the lines were known already and the moves were paced out. There are no novel responses possible. […] And then the weariness. A fucking cancer diary? Another fucking cancer diary. I think back to cancer diaries I have read, just because they're there. You don't seek cancer diaries out, they come at you as you turn the pages of magazines and newspapers or thumb through Twitter and blogs. Can there possibly be anything new to add? Isn't the cliché of writing a cancer diary going to be compounded by the impossibility of writing in it anything other than what has already been written, over and over? Same story, same ending. Weariness.
Glad to get my mojo back like Austin Powers, except mine applies to reading and not saving the world from Dr No.
Excerpts:
The world divides into those who look and those who look away. Looking away is easiest, of course, because it requires no justification, implying, as it does, decent sensibility. Looking is altogether a more difficult activity. I doubt that it's ever entirely free of prurience, but the decision to gaze on the abominable — starving children in faraway countries, death and destruction in vicious wars, images and accounts of the Holocaust — might also be a conscious decision to bear witness to the monstrous possibilities of our own humanity. Part of Primo Levi's final depression centred on his belief that fewer and fewer people were listening to what he had witnessed on our behalf. 'Nothing human is alien to me' is more than an affirmation of species togetherness: it's a warning that by denying kinship with the worst of our kind, we may never know ourselves at all.
Children love [Roald Dahl’s] stories. They speak to the last overt remains of the disreputable, unsocialised, inelegant parts of themselves the grown-ups are trying so hard to push firmly underground. If they are coarsely written, structurally feeble, morally dubious, so much the better. If the adults can't bear to read them, then childhood nirvana is attained. Adults are to be poisoned and shrunk into nothingness, dragged unwillingly on their deathbed to live in a chocolate factory, and outwitted like the murderous farmers who wait outside Mr Fox's lair only to be trounced by his cunning. Quite right. Dahl has a proper relationship with childish desires and best we keep out of it. […] If millions of children all over the world love the subversive, prurient and emotionally capricious stories he told, could that be because he never left his infantile self behind?
The point of desire is desire itself, the essential pleasure in expectation is expectation. The idea that reality is a completion of the wish is fallacious. It is only our dim literal-mindedness that makes us believe that we should try to achieve what we wish for.
The Titanic, he says, represents the loss of 'a way of life which I and others long for'. Like believers in reincarnation who don't doubt that in previous lives they were pharaohs and potentates rather than slaves and serfs, so the dreamers of Titanic days assume their places would have been in the first-class smoking room rather than the boiler room.
I find myself nostalgic for the time, long ago, when one thing the very rich and very famous could be relied on to do was shut up. Paul Getty, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco wrapped their money around themselves in the form of impenetrable walls and/or designer sunglasses and kept silent while the world wondered and chattered. And you would imagine that if money could do anything for you it would be to insulate you from having to care what other people thought. The people don't have to vote for you, they don't have to love you. But even princesses and tycoons have to seem to be democratic and loveable these days. […] There are power lists and personalities of the year, decade and century, and however filthy with wealth you are, you have to worry about 'the people', you have to care what they think of you. We've had our people's princess, desperate to become the queen of people's hearts.
I have gathered over the years that people in very high and very low places are a great deal more stupid than we expect them to be, and that sheer incompetence accounts for much in national and international politics.
Anyone believes there is an inherently moral distinction which can be defined geographically or racially means people just haven’t been paying attention to what the twentieth century – of which the Milgram study was little more than a reiteration and foreshadowing – made hideously clear. Tell people to go to war, and mostly they will. Tell them to piss on prisoners, and mostly they will. Tell them to cover up lies, and mostly they will. Authority is government, the media, the business sector, the priestly men and women in white coats or mitres. We are trained up in the structure of the family, in school, in work. Most people do what they are told.
It looks as if in every generation there is moral panic and a perception (or hallucination of the horror to come) of the next generation as having lost its predisposition to be obedient. Civilisation depends on most of us doing what we are told most of the time. Real civilisation, however, depends on Milgram’s 35 per cent who eventually get round to thinking for themselves.
By polishing that surface and keeping the clocks ticking in unison, Martha [Freud] was as essential to the development of Freudian thought as Dora or the Rat Man. It's just that she didn't have the time to put her feet up on the couch, and Sigmund never cared to wonder what all that polishing and timekeeping was about. Martha was not there in order to be understood; she was there so that he might learn to understand others.
Now for the other princess [Margaret Rose instead of Diana Spencer]: the one who failed to stop all the clocks in Kensington Palace and Mustique, and grew old. In doing so she became sick, fat, grumpy, drunk and unloved. This, you might think, is the fate of many people who leave dying to their later years. We like our princesses young and adorable, and if possible witty and talented. While she was young, Margaret Rose was the apple of her father's eye, enchanting to all who met her, talented, witty, artistic, they said — and then one day she was middle-aged, frumpy, snobbish, self-centred, a raddled old gin tippler and a bore. So much apparent promise, so little follow through.
The Khugistic Sandal had two horizontal straps and a buckle at the ankle. The sandals were called Khugistic after a commune that was said originally to have produced them, but in the 1930s they were renamed Biblical Sandals. The renaming was symbolic, Orna Ben-Meir says, designed to reiterate the ancestral link between contemporary Jews and the land given by God to Abraham: 'Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee? Neither the Lord nor this book has anything very much to say about those who were already on the land. Though it seems inescapable to me, the symbolic Biblical Shoe, on the feet of the ancient Hebrew wanderers and more recently the pioneers and later citizens of the Israeli state, is never described as being symbolically on the necks of the Canaanites or the Palestinians. Actually, there's barely an indication in these essays of there being anyone on the land.
I'm going to hang on to Keith Richards's autobiography, because sometimes I worry that I lead a boring life and wonder if I shouldn't try harder to have fun. When that happens, a quick flick through Keith's memoirs will remind me that I've never really wanted to live the life of anyone else, not even a Rolling Stone.
[Dennis Hopper] got stuck on the problem of having arrived too late, as each generation does, and being left to watch as the last of the great heroes disappeared. I still regret being just too late to sit in Les Deux Magots with Beckett or hang out at Shakespeare and Company with the Beats.
It's decidedly irritating, but also rather tragic, when head-turning young women, not content with being what they presently are, take the time to look at you in triumph, never doubting that they are going to stay young forever - or perhaps they think the old and the young are born that way. The only defence against them is also a kindness: silence and knowledge.
Feminists may or may not have chucked out constricting undergarments and razors when they were young, but none of them dreamed they would dye their hair to eliminate the grey, or cover up their arms to conceal creased and creped skin, or wonder: is this skirt OK for a woman of my age? When Gloria Steinem snapped back at the 'compliment' that she didn't look her age with 'This is what forty looks like, no one thought that in later years it would still be thought flattering to say a woman looked ten years younger than she was.
Opposition between the generations is a perfect shield for a government under fire for cutting welfare while destroying the NHS, privatising education and doing nothing about the depletion of reasonably priced housing. Let the young blame the old not the coalition. In addition, there is the now institutionalised pressure from all around to 'age well'. Government and official bodies issue warnings about eating wrongly and not getting enough exercise. We are told to take our wellbeing and our ageing process into our own hands. The idea of ageing badly looms over us: those who become ill or develop age-related conditions are to blame for failing to keep themselves bright and sparky. They have grown wilfully old and expect the world to take care of them. It all plays into the neoliberal notion that the old are demanding welfare and medical aid for which the young have to pay. Dependency, more or less inevitable with increasing age, becomes something about which the old should apologise.
I was handed my script, though all the lines were known already and the moves were paced out. There are no novel responses possible. […] And then the weariness. A fucking cancer diary? Another fucking cancer diary. I think back to cancer diaries I have read, just because they're there. You don't seek cancer diaries out, they come at you as you turn the pages of magazines and newspapers or thumb through Twitter and blogs. Can there possibly be anything new to add? Isn't the cliché of writing a cancer diary going to be compounded by the impossibility of writing in it anything other than what has already been written, over and over? Same story, same ending. Weariness.
July 5, 2021
Some of the essays in this collection I found absolutely impenetrable and possibly too British to comprehend, but most of them are fucking OUTSTANDING. This is a collection I plan to return to over and over again.
June 18, 2021
Got just over halfway through — this is a hefty read! The writing style is heavily British and was, at times, difficult for me to relate to. There were a few essays that I really enjoyed, though, including the profile of Anne Frank.
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