She writes in an essay about Germaine Greer: I haven’t been NEARLY mad enough.”īut even when she doesn’t talk directly about herself or her own experience, there’s an intelligence and humor that immediately identify the writing as hers. “I should have been MUCH madder than I was. Or in a review of a book on asylums, which she is barely able to write because, having spent much of her childhood in one herself, she begins to get competitive with all the inmates described:Īs I read, I saw myself flitting through the pages of Taylor’s account like a precursor-ghost, or perhaps more a tetchy sprite, engaged in a debate with her text, ticking off the similarities between her experience and mine and weighing up the differences…. Sometimes she does this head-on, as when she discusses Roman Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old girl along with her own at age fourteen. “I’ve never been apologetic about that, or 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 start with me, and often enough end with me,” she once wrote.

But the essays are always as much about herself as the subject at hand. Jenny Diski covered nearly every conceivable topic in her essays for the London Review of Books: shoes, Stanley Milgram, the women’s movement, Karl Marx. Her husband and Thomas’ father was an ass: a fool who thought it funny to frighten a small child, who could not resist the small, mean act of betrayal that proved him more powerful than his four-year-old son.” Such a great quote on insecure men and patriarchy in general.Jenny Diski, Cambridge, England, August 2002 Diski was able to convey a lot through the form, and managed to ceaselessly surprise me throughout the collection.Īlso, in this collection I read the thing that’s kept reverberating in my mind since. It was easy for me to connect with the oddball female heroines who find it hard fitting into the society. But Diski’s stories, a lot of which are based, I presume, given the coincidences, on her own life, are spectacular. Also, despite being a feminist activist, I do not have a specific affinity for feminist fiction: it is often too strongly on the nose. I am not a big fan of short stories in general: quite often it’s hard for me to beat the feeling that I’m reading a diary, or someone’s notes for an unfinished novel. And although she is less known than her Nobel prize winning mentor, Diski, who died in 2014, is a remarkable literary and political talent all of her own. Immersed in the literary atmosphere and finally able to get a proper education, Diski became a writer herself. Finally, Doris Lessing, a friend of her mother’s, took Jenny Diski in. Jenny Diski had a sad childhood a large part of which she spent in the psychiatric ward, which did not prevent her from living the life of a youth in the 60s London to the fullest: protesting, taking drugs, and getting culturally smart.

The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski