Remembering Jenny Diski

Jenny Diski—novelist, essayist, and occasional blogger—died yesterday at the age of 68, from the cancer she had been documenting for the London Review of Books since 2014. We asked eight writers to reflect on what her life and work meant to them.

Haley Mlotek: “She trusted us to understand she was telling her story as a boundary, but not a border, around a feeling we would recognize in ourselves.”

Michelle Dean: “There was a lot of fear and consequence in her work, but by the time she was writing about something she was neither careful nor hesitant about laying things out. She knew what she meant.”

Charlotte Shane: “Her character saturated her writing: fiction and essays spiky with the sort of droll, exacting intelligence that terrifies and inspires in equal measures.”

Joanna Walsh: “She was always open, critical, combative, funny, warm, and unafraid.”

Bridget Read: “It was like she was balls-to-the-walls writing and dying, a phrase that sounds imbecilic but I think captures her unwillingness to bend to conventions of subtlety or tranquility in both.”

Laura Marsh: “Jenny Diski understood things about the world I grew up in that no one else seemed able to begin to explain.”

Rumaan Alam: “Lessing made it to 94; Diski only 68. She was shortchanged, but to have been [Lessing’s] Maureen seems to me the measure of a life well lived.”

Marta Bausells: “There was no bullshit, no sugar-coating, no imposed toughness.”