Writer

Born: July 8 1947;

Died: April 28 2016

JENNY Diski, who has died aged 68, was an extremely good writer whose work defied easy categorization; though she produced ten novels and award-winning travel writing, she was probably best-known for her essays and diary sketches, most of which appeared in the London Review of Books.

She had a devoted following drawn from its readership, who regarded her beautifully written contributions as one of the best things in the magazine. Since “A Diagnosis”, which appeared in the edition of September 11 2014, she had documented her terminal cancer with the same ironic, idiosyncratic and unflinching clarity that characterized her other writing.

“I write fiction and non-fiction, but it’s almost always personal,” she explained. “I start with me, and often enough end with me. I’ve never been apologetic about that, or had a sense that my writing is ‘confessional’. What else am I going to write about but how I know and don’t know the world?”

But then what Jenny Diski knew about the world included experience of highly dysfunctional relationships, depression and the bohemian radicalism of the 1960s, in which she was deeply embroiled, and which she described in her memoir The Sixties (2009).

She was born Jenny Simmonds on July 8 1947 in London. Her Jewish father was a professional con man and serial adulterer; her mother had periods of full-blown psychosis. Both were “suicidal hysterics” and both, separately, sexually abused her. Her father eventually decamped, never to be seen again. “Except once,” as Jenny Diski recorded in Skating to Antarctica (1997), “when we saw him at Tottenham Court Road tube station and 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.”

Jenny Simmonds spent much of her adolescence in psychiatric institutions. She was expelled from St Christopher’s, a progressive boarding school to which she had been sent after her north London day school could not cope with her, after climbing out a window to go to a party.

She then worked in a shoe shop and a grocer’s, and had spells in foster homes. Once, she ran away to her mother, who was living in a bedsit in Hove. After a few days “the wisest move seemed to be to take what remained of my mother’s Nembutal, lie down neatly on the bed and wait to die”. She had several spells “in the bin”, where she “felt quite at home”.

At 16, she went to live with the novelist Doris Lessing, whose son she had known at school, and who had encouraged his mother to take her in. That relationship, which Lessing fictionalized in her novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1973), was equally unconventional, but introduced Diski to London’s literary world, and to fashionable figures from the counter-culture of the 1960s, such as the deranged Scottish anti-psychologist, RD Laing. She became politically radical, promiscuous and keen on drugs, which did her mental state no good. “The first half of my life was very busy,” she noted wryly, in an interview with the New York Times last year.

By the early 1970s, she had completed her education at University College London and became a teacher with a free school started by Roger Marks, whom she married in 1976. Together, they devised and adopted the surname Diski; their daughter Chloe was born in 1977, and they separated in 1981 (Roger Diski, who went on to found a successful ethical travel firm, died in 2011.)

Her first book was the novel Nothing Natural (1986) which dealt, controversially, with a sadomasochistic relationship; the following year’s Rainforest also dealt with sexual obsession (Jenny Diski researched Borneo by visiting Kew Gardens). Several other novels dealt with mental illness in one form or another: Then Again (1990) and the following year’s Happily Ever After. In Monkey’s Uncle (1994), The Vanishing Princess (1995) and The Dream Mistress (1996), madness was employed in the service of magical realism; Only Human and After These Things (both 2001) drew inspiration from the Bible.

Her non-fiction was sometimes travel writing, though it was usually as much a memoir. As well as Antarctica, she toured America in the smoking car of a train for Stranger on a Train (2002) and produced collections of essays; On Trying to Keep Still (2006), partly inspired by Montaigne, an abiding interest, and What I Don’t Know About Animals (2012) – she almost always had a cat, beginning with Grey Cat, who greeted her when she first landed on Doris Lessing’s doorstep.

In the late 1990s, she met the poet and translator Ian Patterson at a literary party; she moved from London to Cambridge, where he teaches at Queens’ College, to be with him (though at first they maintained separate houses).

Her personal columns in the LRB dealt with every subject under the sun, though they were dominated by her illness since her diagnosis with lung cancer. She reacted to the news by saying to her husband “We’d better get cooking the meth”; afterwards she was unsure whether the medical staff, who looked blank, did not watch Breaking Bad, or whether they had heard the line too often before.

She was vehemently opposed to cliché, especially about disease. “Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer,” she told Patterson. “Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.”

Her most recent book, rushed to publication just a few days ago, described her relationship with Lessing. She could not decide whether to call it Gratitude or Ingratitude; she settled on In Gratitude. She claimed that knowing she was about to die had given her no special insights, comparing it with giving up smoking 15 years ago. “I kept waiting for the world to smell wonderful. But no, I just didn’t have cigarettes any more.”

“It’s a unique experience,” she said of dying. “I’ve never done it before, and I won’t be doing it again.” Her husband and daughter from her first marriage survive her.

ANDREW MCKIE