In Gratitude

By: Jenny Diski

Narrated by: Kim Hicks

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 cliché. 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.

©2016 Jenny Diski (P)2016 Audible, Ltd

Critic reviews

"She deserves our unfeigned admiration, not for her bravery or her struggle, or any irrelevant tosh like that, but for writing so well." ( Guardian)
"A marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation.... Bracingly devoid of sententiousness, sentimentality or any kind of spiritual urge or twitch." ( New York Times)

Good prose but not plot

Plot consistently disappoints. Things almost happen. Excellent descriptions of the inner life, but what was going on outside?

Jenny's writing will astonish you

Jenny Diski's birthday is July 8, 1947. Very near mine. But she is dead and, I am alive. There is no explaining that fact. But, Jenny, in her book, In Gratitude, explains 🤔many things. Her goal, achieved, was to write truthfully. If you like truthful writing, as I do, you will appreciate this book. (Please note: I did not say you would like this book.)

me and cancer and Doris as I approach the end

As honest and vivid a take on enduring cancer treatment as I've read. A writer like few others in our life time.

A sad way to die

Excellent narrator bit the book is hard to read. Too sad. The author repeats herself with the story of her difficult relationship to Doris Lessing.