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 August 2014 Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer & 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) & also to tell a story she has not yet told that of being taken in aged fifteen by the author Doris Lessing & the subsequent fifty 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 & history with Doris Lessing the fairy-tale rescue from the bin' as a teenager the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family & 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 & the drug-taking twenty-something in & out of psychiatric hospitals Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers
- Lessing & 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 & writing ingratitude & anger; about living with illness & facing death