When the English writer Jenny Diski learned that she had inoperable cancer in 2014, her distress at the prospect of dying was rivaled by her fear that her life would play out as a cliché: "The future flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality." Diski (1947-2016) spent her career as a writer of fiction and nonfiction avoiding clichés, and readers can be assured that Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?, a collection of 33 of her incisive and pugnacious essays for the London Review of Books, is a bromide-free zone.
Diski wrote withering social criticism and had an outsize talent for distilling discomforting truths. On the sinking of the Titanic: "It was, of course, a gift for those who saw disaster in modernity." On Charles and Diana's split: "Take the bright lights away and you have a regular messy divorce, friends taking sides, money, adultery, using the kids. The only remarkable thing was that he left her for an older woman." Readers of Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? who are new to Diski's work will be awed not just by her die-cut sentences but also by the range of her apparent authority.
The thread linking all these pieces, which span 1992 to 2014, is Diski's personal history, which comprised a harrowing childhood ("I came from a family of suicidal hysterics") and intermittent mental health problems. How she managed regularly to self-disclose without toggling over into self-absorption is a secret that she has taken to her lamentably early grave. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer