Recently, in a bar, I was reading “In Gratitude,” by the British writer Jenny Diski, when a loud guy with tall hair asked me what it was. I stumbled a little before saying, “It’s a cancer memoir.” I immediately felt as though I’d committed a small betrayal. Diski, who died in April, at sixty-eight, began batting at the flock of associations attached to that label shortly after her diagnosis, in 2014, when she started writing what she called “another fucking cancer diary.” (Most of the book first appeared as a series of columns in the London Review of Books.) Her first reaction upon hearing her diagnosis was “embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness” in anticipation of the “preordained banality” that awaited her, she tells us. She was thinking not only of the illness itself—the pain, the scans, the chemo, the radiation, the remission, the return, and all the other familiar medical stages and interventions—but also of the performance of the illness, the story lines of hope and letdown and endurance that the cancer patient must march through and can’t help but exemplify for others. Cancer patients are said to be on a journey; they do battle; they win, or they bravely lose. Diski recoils at the familiar metaphors. “I am and always have been embarrassed by all social rituals that require me to participate in a predetermined script,” she writes.
But even the defiant cancer patient, the one who refuses to engage with cancer on previously established terms, has become a recognizable role, with a script at the ready. “There is no way to be an impatient, or a mispatient, or even an unruly patient,” Diski laments. Cancer, that common and yet unfathomable disease, is also, as Susan Sontag observed forty years ago—when she was being treated for cancer for the first time—an avatar, in our culture, for the more common and more unfathomable fact of mortality itself. It is an almost impossible subject for a writer who wishes to say something new. Faced with tropes and generalities, Diski writes, “I can’t find the right question to break through that, to talk about the cancer that is me and mine, what it is, how it is, how it and I are with each other.”
At least half of Diski’s cancer memoir isn’t about cancer at all. She also chronicles her complicated relationship with the novelist Doris Lessing, whom Diski went to live with when she was fifteen. At that time, Diski was bouncing between the care of her nightmarishly unstable parents and placement at various schools and institutions, where she was sent to get her away from them. She met Lessing’s son at one of those schools. Then, while she was at the Lady Chichester psychiatric hospital, she received the letter with Lessing’s offer. It felt “like a fairy story,” she replied. And it was: the tale of the abandoned waif taken in by the fairy godmother who happens to be a famous author. Things quickly grew fraught, however: Diski was a sullen and stubborn teen-ager, and Lessing was domineering and insensitive. Diski felt enormously grateful, but also resented that she owed so much; Lessing insisted that gratitude wasn’t necessary, but also, apparently, expected her foundling to be appropriately appreciative, and to clean up her act. (The dynamic between them lends the book’s title a bitter edge.)
The two sections of the book have little in common on the surface, but they share a recurring tension, between the way a story is expected to go and how it actually happens, between the lived reality and the words that give it shape. In the L.R.B., the first essay about Lessing was titled “What to Call Her?” (“Adoptive mother” and “caretaker” had never quite fit.) Early on, Diski, seeking reassurance, asked Lessing a question that had been bothering her: “If you don’t really like me, there’s nowhere you could send me back to, is there?” Lessing responded by wordlessly getting up and leaving the house. This is not how things are supposed to go with your fairy godmother.
They were intimately involved in each other’s lives until Lessing’s death, in 2013. But Diski never reconciled her gratitude and her anger toward Lessing, and never figured out what to call her. In writing about their relationship, she lays claim to another story that, like the “pantomime” of cancer, has always seemed beyond her control. Still, she consistently steers the narrative away from tidy conclusions. She doesn’t want to fix the story line so much as she wants to see beyond it. And she does not proceed in a linear fashion; she describes her years with Lessing in between scenes of recent hospital visits, memories of her earlier childhood, and digressions on illness and mortality. It can make a reader feel out of place, or as though she’s waiting for a train that’s never going to arrive. We are used to stories in which heightened emotions lead to one catharsis or another. This story just ends.
At some point, Diski and Lessing agreed never to write about each other. But Lessing broke the pact decades ago, when she based a character in the 1974 novel “Memoirs of a Survivor”—a difficult and inscrutable teen-ager named Emily, who is adopted by the narrator—on Diski. That version of their story ends with the narrator clearing out an old room in her house to uncover, magically, a “bright green lawn under thunderous and glaring clouds and on the lawn, a giant black egg of pock-marked iron.” A beautiful stranger appears, the egg splits open, and Emily and the rest of the characters follow the stranger into the egg, to another world, fading away.
“No, I don’t know either, it was 1974,” Diski writes.
A lot has been written about Diski’s final book and about her death. As she joked in an interview last year, a burst of attention “is like a prize you get when you have cancer.” Most of these pieces have started, as mine does, with her defiance of the platitudes surrounding the disease. It’s an obvious point of ingress, because it communicates something essential and true about her contrarian tone, while also giving the reader a foothold on the familiar terrain of the cancer story. And, as Diski said in that same interview, “cancer is like sex, isn’t it? It’s a really good draw.” But it’s impossible to highlight Diski’s insistence that she wasn’t being brave or strong without implying that there’s something extra brave and extra strong about that resistance. There’s no way out. Really, what is different and moving about “In Gratitude” is not Diski’s refusal of cancer’s clichés so much as the way that she chews on them, wincing, until she finds the unknown in “the too well known.”
“I am appalled at the thought, suddenly, that someone at some point is going to tell me I am on a Journey,” she writes early in the book. But rather than avoiding that image thereafter, she comes back to it, and turns it around and around:
There’s something of Beckett, whom she references often, in the way that Diski works over an image, plays with it, repeats it, and rolls it around until all the corners have been knocked off. “Gone nowhere. No where to go. No she to go to it,” she writes, contemplating death. It often seems as though she is trying to diffuse the impact of what she writes, undercutting it, contradicting it—as if to say, “Just thinking out loud. Nothing final here.” The thought she finds most calming in the face of death is that “I have been not here before. . . . I have already been at the destination toward which I’m now heading.” Or, in Beckett’s words, “I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store.” She discovers comfort, and art, and something of her own, not in finding a resolution but in flattening out the narrative arc, in telling the story as if it were going nowhere.
What you don’t quite see in the book—what was more evident on Diski’s Twitter feed and on her personal blog, which she maintained until the end—is the way that cancer can take a person apart. In the essays, she describes the pain and fatigue and the injuries she suffered when, woozy from the drugs, she had several bad falls. Online, you saw it happening in real time, her syntax struggling through a lot of garble—it must have been difficult to type. You wonder how she completed a book during her illness, and why. But Diski approached writing as a fact of her existence, like one of her essential organs—she called it “the point” of her life. When she began the cancer memoir, it was the fact of the writing, more than what was to be written, that mattered. “I’m a writer,” she explains. “I’ve got cancer. Am I going to write about it? How am I not?” She was in the business of naming things, but also of questioning those names; of giving outlines to what is shapeless, and then pointing to the fuzziness of those outlines, to all the holes on the edges. In writing about herself, even in writing about her own death, she was also writing about writing: asking what difference it makes what you call things, or whether you put things in words. And answering that it makes all the difference, but also, in the end, not much at all.
