A fearless writer who kept it real
Jenny Diski
Author
BORN JULY 8, 1947 – DIED APRIL 28, 2016, AGED 68
AS THE writer of 10 novels, short stories, travelogues, essays and memoirs, Jenny Diski was as fearless as she was frank. No subject was off limits. She proved that in 1986 with the publication of her very first novel Nothing Natural which dealt with a sadomasochistic relationship.
It caused outrage among some feminists with its overtly graphic descriptions but the controversy did nothing to quash Diski’s delight in shattering taboos.
In her next book Rainforest she tackled sexual obsession and several more novels dealt with madness, isolation and mental illness.
Most recently she chronicled her terminal lung cancer for the London Review Of Books in her same unsentimental and unapologetic manner. In her first entry she wrote: “Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.”
Jenny Simmonds was born into a Jewish family in London and endured what can only be described as a hellish childhood. Her father James was a con man, black marketeer and serial adulterer who deserted the family temporarily when Jenny was six, leading her mother Rene to suffer the first of several mental breakdowns. He then left for good when she was aged 11. Both parents abused her. She was placed in and out of foster care, was raped at 14 and not long afterwards attempted suicide for the first time. As a result she had numerous spells in the “loony bin” where she said she felt quite at home.
Many years later, as recorded in her memoir Skating To Antarctica, Diski saw her father once again at Tottenham Court Road Tube station. “My mother chased him with the knife she kept in her handbag expressly for the purpose of killing him should they ever meet by chance. He outran her,” she wrote.
At the age of 16 and after being expelled from St Christopher’s boarding school, she went to live with novelist Doris Lessing whose son Peter had been an acquaintance of hers at school.
Despite living with Lessing for the next four years the pair had a fractious relationship. “She was the least motherly, least warm person I’ve ever known,” Diski once said.
Eventually she moved out to live in a squat, although she went on visiting Lessing and the writer continued to support her.
Once on her own she became caught up in the drugs, sex and politics of London’s counterculture, a period she evokes in her 2009 memoir The Sixties.
Although Lessing wanted her to go to university Diski decided to train as a teacher. In 1976, while writing for radical magazine Children’s Rights, she met and married Roger Marks who invented a new surname for them, Diski.
The couple went on to have a daughter a year later and set up a free school in Camden for children who were getting into trouble on the streets. The marriage didn’t last and as she neared the age of 40 Diski decided to take up writing full- time.
After her first book other novels followed in quick succession including Happily Ever After and Only Human: A Divine Comedy as well as her memoirs. Her last, In Gratitude, was published shortly before her death and details Diski’s relationship with Lessing, who died in 2013.
Diski is survived by her second husband Ian Patterson, a Cambridge don and poet, and daughter Chloe.