Why Didnt You Just Do What You Were Told: Essays

(Paperback)

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Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny Sunday Times 'Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise' Emilia Clarke She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be New Yorker 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 Didnt 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.

Reviews

One of the most electrifying memoirists of her generation ... A superb volume of autobiographical fragments * Daily Telegraph *
One of the most inventive writers of her generation * Independent *
She is savagely good company * Daily Telegraph *
Diski is one of the language's great, if under-appreciated, stylists * Guardian *
The appeal of Diskis essays was the appeal of Diski herself brilliant, irritable, mordant, and humane * Paris Review *

Author Bio

Jenny Diski was born in 1947 in London, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of ten novels, four books of travel and memoir, including Stranger on a Train and Skating to Antarctica, two volumes of essays and a collection of short stories. Her journalism appeared in publications including the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the London Review of Books, to which she contributed more than two hundred pieces over twenty-five years. jennydiski.co.uk