In Gratitude
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- €10.99
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
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'One of the most inventive, original and disturbing writers of her generation' - Daily Telegraph
'Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring … In Gratitude amounts to the inner monologue of a highly intelligent, furiously funny, traumatised woman' - Helen Davies, Sunday Times
'She deserves our unfeigned admiration, not for her bravery or her struggle, or any irrelevant tosh like that, but for writing so well' - Guardian
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In August 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given 'two or three years' to live. Being a writer, she decided to write about her experience – and to tell a story she had not yet told: that of being taken in, aged fifteen, by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship. Splicing childhood memories with present-day realities, Diski paints an unflinching portrait of two extraordinary writers – Lessing and herself.
Jenny Diski died a week after the publication of In Gratitude. A cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid memoir, it is her final masterpiece.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This revealingly raw memoir by British author Diski (What I Don't Know About Animals) about living with terminal cancer is even more poignant in light of her death on April 28, 2016, shortly before the book's U.S. publication. She spends time indulging in (entirely justifiable) self-pity, but in a manner that is witty and enlightening. From the beginning, Diski draws readers in, describing her emotions upon receiving a cancer diagnosis as "embarrassment" tinged with exhaustion. She then interweaves her experiences dealing with cancer and the subsequent chemotherapy with her memories, highlighting her teenage years living with writer Doris Lessing and the tenuous bond they forged over the next 50 years. Diski dredges up her difficult childhood with bizarre parents an abusive, perfectionist mother and unscrupulous father which led to time spent as the youngest patient in a psychiatric unit. Painting a vivid picture of the extreme exhaustion caused by chemo, she relates finding refuge in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which "have always offered me the common sense of my situation." She concludes the book with a series of floating ruminations on life and death. Both heavy and light, Diski's beautifully written memoir is worth any reader's time.
