Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?

A selection of Jenny Diski's much-admired columns for the London Review of Books, chosen by her long-time editor Mary-Kay WilmersDiski was undoubtedly one of the best essayists that the UK has produced, described as 'ahead of her time' by the New Yorker - this is the first posthumous collection of her workWe should have strong support from the London Review Bookshop, Daunts and other indiesFor readers of Zadie Smith, Emilie Pine, Patricia Lockwood, Jia Tolentino, Leslie Jamison and Olivia SudjicJenny Diski was born in 1947 in London, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of ten novels, four books of travel and memoir, including Stranger on a Train and Skating to Antarctica, two volumes of essays and a collection of short stories. Her journalism appeared in publications including the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the London Review of Books, to which she contributed more than two hundred pieces over twenty-five years. jennydiski.co.ukFinalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism 'Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny' Sunday Times 'Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise' Emilia Clarke 'She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be' New Yorker Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'. From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated - and mordantly funny.A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, selected by Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of BooksOne of the most electrifying memoirists of her generation ... A superb volume of autobiographical fragmentsOne of the most inventive writers of her generationShe is savagely good companyDiski is one of the language's great, if under-appreciated, stylistsThe appeal of Diski's essays was the appeal of Diski herself . brilliant, irritable, mordant, and humane