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Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?
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About This Book
A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, selected London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude have been described as "virtuoso performances," and "small masterpieces."From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated and mordantly funny.
Reviews
"And her essays – dare I say it – earn a blessing even when what they consider is cursed."
"It's as if she was beginning, after two decades of writing for the LRB, to sense the well running dry ..."
"These essays were among the 200 or so she published in the eccentrically brilliant London Review of Books (LRB), between the early 1990s and her death in 2016."
"Many writers envied the space that Wilmers gave her, but few could have made such good use of it."
"They tantalize, in a bleak way, with the suggestion that invention might arise from inertia and depression as much as, or more than, from creativity (whatever that is) or hope ..."
"With an afterword by her daughter, Chloe Diski, this is a must for Diski admirers and all essay lovers."
"Her intelligent essays on wide-ranging topics (from childhood memories to Stanley Milgram's famous study of obedience) will leave readers wondering why they have not been aware of her ..."
"[Diski's] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost."
"Diski's works are varied and surprising, and she puts a fresh spin on the personal essay with her bracing, singular prose, never veering into self-indulgence: To miss these essays would be a shame."
"Jenny Diski...writes a lot about death, and a reader is grateful for her humor."
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