Essay collections can range from the deeply personal aspects of self to speculation on the external world, commenting on the lives of other people, places, or things. They may be serious, lighthearted, funny, and critical. Perhaps the best collections endeavour to include a little of each. With a keen eye, Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor and long-time friend of Jenny Diski, has curated a selection of Diski’s essays from the London Review of Books which does just this.
There is a little something for everyone here in Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Diski’s essays range from topics like life and death, love and children, to the peace of solitude and the hardship of her struggles with mental health. A great number of the included essays are book reviews and critical explorations into the lives of well-known public figures ranging from writers and musicians to serial killers and wealthy entrepreneurs. The common thread throughout these pieces, however, is the connection between her subject, her own lived experience, and the larger human condition. Diski is simply brilliant at drawing out the commonalities, as well as the particular oddities, of our lives.
Among the 33 essays which comprise this collection, the following are just a few stand-outs that are sure to dazzle readers with both their subject matter and Diski’s signature approach:
- “Stinker”: A look at well-known children’s author Roald Dahl through the lens of his biography by Jeremy Treglown, which Diski found ultimately disappointing because Dahl is “exactly what he seemed to be”: a “not very nice man who wrote not very nice, though hugely popular, books and short stories for children and adults.”
- “The Natural Death Center”: A humorous take on one of life’s most difficult topics — death — via a story about a friend who offered to share a cemetery plot with Diski. Deciding on an eternal resting place is a complicated matter.
- “The Girl in the Attic”: A meditation upon the life of Anne Frank and the many ways Diski related to her through the very typical thoughts of a teenage girl shared in her infamous diary.
- “XXX”: An examination of Stanley Milgram’s experiments “to find out how far individuals would go to obey authority” and a reflection upon what the results say about the core of human nature.
- “A Diagnosis”: An incredibly raw, profoundly personal journey inside Diski’s head as she receives the news she has inoperable, incurable cancer.
Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? is a fairly lengthy collection, a potential barrier which may be resolved by breaking up the book, reading an essay or two each day. Some of the more obscure British pop-culture references throughout are also likely to land better with readers who hail from the UK, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, Diski’s work is phenomenal, a master class in not just writing essays with substance and style, but in the human matters of vulnerability and self-exploration. Perceptive and humorous, often darkly so, Diski’s writing begs to be read, thoughtfully chewed upon, and revisited as we each work our way through the beautiful and bewildering chaos we call life.
Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of April 20th 2021. Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for providing me with an advance copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
Will you be picking up Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski’s essays, selected London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.
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.
