The future flashed before my eyes in all its preordained 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 August 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, laden with cliche. Being a writer, she decided
to write about it (grappling with the unoriginality even of this) and to
tell a story she had not yet told: that of being taken in, aged 15, by
the author Doris Lessing and the subsequent 50 years of their complex
relationship.
In September 2014 Jenny Diski began writing in the London Review of
Books, describing her experience of living with terminal cancer,
examining her life and history with Doris Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue
from 'the bin' as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an
unfamiliar family and the influence this had on her.
Swooping from one memory to the next - alighting on the hysterical
battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, stacking
shelves in Banbury and the drug-taking 20-something in and out of
psychiatric hospitals - Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary
writers: Lessing and herself.
From one of our most original voices 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.
From the acclaimed author of Skating to Antarctica comes a
breathtakingly honest and original memoir about living with terminal
cancer and her relationship with Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning
author who adopted her as a teenager.
