Monday, December 08, 2014

Jenny Diski on Doris Lessing: ‘I was the cuckoo in the nest’

Writer Jenny Diski was taken in by Doris Lessing in 1963 when she was a teenager, but the relationship soon soured. Now Diski, recently diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, has finally decided to tell her side of the story

Jenny Diski at home in Cambridge.
Jenny Diski at home in Cambridge. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
‘The thing is,” Jenny Diski tells me, with a smile about her eyes behind her round glasses, “nobody is better at having cancer than me, in the sense that I like nothing more than sitting on the sofa doing fuck all and trying to write.”
She is sitting on that sofa, in the front room of the terraced house in Cambridge that she shares with her second husband, Ian Patterson, a poet and teacher at the university, surrounded by her books, and his, sipping at a flask of green tea that is painful for her to swallow, by turns wrapping and unwrapping herself with a cashmere blanket. “No, honestly,” she insists, kidding neither of us, “I am probably the best person for this to happen to. I lose less of myself than most people because I am naturally solitary, I’ve never liked going out much, except to the odd party… ”
Diski is 67. As readers of her recent mordantly brilliant series of essays for the London Review of Books will know, she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August. 
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