In Gratitude

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''One of the most inventive, original and disturbing writers of her generation'' - Daily Telegraph

''Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring … In Gratitude amounts to the inner monologue of a highly intelligent, furiously funny, traumatised woman'' - Helen Davies, Sunday Times

''She deserves our unfeigned admiration, not for her bravery or her struggle, or any irrelevant tosh like that, but for writing so well'' - Guardian

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In August 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given ''two or three years'' to live. Being a writer, she decided to write about her experience – and to tell a story she had not yet told: that of being taken in, aged fifteen, by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship. Splicing childhood memories with present-day realities, Diski paints an unflinching portrait of two extraordinary writers – Lessing and herself.

Jenny Diski died a week after the publication of In Gratitude. A cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid memoir, it is her final masterpiece.