In Gratitude

2016 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Autobiography

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…"So—we'd better get cooking the meth," I said to the Poet.

In August 2014, writer 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, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the cliches and try to write about it. And she also decided, facing death, to tell a story she has not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen, having been expelled from school, by the author Doris Lessing, and their complex relationship over fifty years.

From one of our most original voices comes a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about memory and writing; ingratitude and anger; one extraordinary, uneasy relationship; living with illness and facing death.