1 February 2012

The Me Who Knew It - a piece by me on Alison Winter's very good book on 20th century memory research in the LRB here and a LRB blog post on 'scientific' mind-reading.

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12 December 2011

A new piece by me In the upcoming Harper's Magazine, on the unsatisfactoriness of Mad Men and its relation to films it echoes of the 1960s.

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20 September 2011

Article by me on the subject of shoplifting in this week's issue of the New Yorker

Also a podcast I recorded for the New Yorker about the article here

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20 September 2011

U.S. publication of What I Don't Know About Animals from Yale University Press.

Editorial Review - Publishers Weekly vol. 258 iss. 34 p (c) 08/22/2011

Don't be fooled by the title--British novelist, essayist, and memoirist Diski (Skating to Antarctica) knows quite a bit about animals. In this treatise, she tackles the unknowable: philosophical questions about animals' consciousness; what she refers to as "an abyss of knowledge that we simply can't cross"; and ethical questions about how humans treat them. Beginning with childhood memories, she examines the cartoon animals she watched in the cinema, as well as her many trips to the zoo, where she once witnessed a chimpanzees' tea party. As an adult, she visited the Kenya Tsavo wildlife reserve and studied elephants with Dr. Barbara McKnight, and a Somerset farm during the lambing season. At age 58, she overcame arachnophobia by participating in the "Friendly Spider Programme" offered by the Zoological Society of London. In addition, Diski examines animals in the abstract, discussing the ideas of Derrida, Bentham ("perhaps the founding father of the animal rights movement"), and controversial animal trainer/philosopher Vicki Hearne, among others, and reflects on passages from the Bible and other creation stories that involve animals. While her anecdotes make for engaging reading, Diski raises far graver questions than the cover image of cuddly lambs would suggest. 

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14 September 2011

New piece by me in the LRB. Which One of You is Christ? 

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May 2011

Here's a New York Times Magazine piece by me on the word cunt. And an article about Humphrey Bogart in the LRB.

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February 2011

Sweden: Dagens Nyheter book club are reading my newly published novel, Apology for the Woman Writing, in February. I'll be in Stockholm 21 February to discuss it - current pneumonia permitting.

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30 November 2010

 A generous review of What I Don't Know About Animals from Ruth Padel in The Guardian

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30 November 2010

I'll be doing a talk, reading, discussion thing at the London Review Bookshop, Bury Place, London WC1. 7pm

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15 November 2010

BBC Radio 4: Book of the Week, Monday to Friday, 9.45-10am and 12.30am: What I Don't Know About Animals

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6 November 2010

Daily Mail running an extract from What I Don't Know About Animals. Maybe, possibly, who can say?

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4 November 2010

My new book, What I Don't Know About Animals is published.

Buy it at the LRB Bookshop (for independent bookshop goodness) or Amazon

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2 October 2010

Eat your savings - it's the patriotic thing to do.

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19 September 2010

A new Diary piece by me in the latest London Review of Books on the pros and cons of the pursuit of happiness. 

Behaved quite badly at Foyles by having a ill-tempered brief moan about the awful record of New Labour with Chris Mullin, who shut me up by saying that the most important thing a political party has to do is to get elected. Shut me up because a) it's true and b) it's the reason why there is no chance of a decent politics. See the cynical Blair and the perhaps less cynical Obama. Altogether discouraging. But probably makes perfect sense if you just want to play careerist politics. See my latest post at the LRB Blog for the full kvetch.

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12 September 2010

Foyles celebrates Indie Alliance Weekend

Sunday 12^th September, 1.45-2.30pm, Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Rd: Me, Me, Me  - A Panel on Memoir

Jenny Diski, Rupert Thomson and Jean Baggott and Chris Mullin

Flannery O'Connor once said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write about for the rest of their days.  But surely it isn't all fodder for memoir. Our panellists look at what of our lives can be transferred to the page and what, if anything, is best left unwritten.

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7 September 2010

See my LRB Blog post and Sign up for Facebook group: Subversively Move Tony Blair's Book to the Crime Shelf in Bookshops and have fun.

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14 August 2010

A new review in the LRB about noise, a review of a really good book on the subject by Garrett Keizer, and a general wail of misery by me. Also a post about roadkill in the LRB Blog. 

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3 July 2010

Here, from the Bookslut blog, is not just a very flattering review of The Sixties by me, just out in paperback from Profile, but a good essay on the period and what's been written about it. There's a picture of me as a hippie on the cover of the paperback: I look younger and surrounded by foliage. That's how it was then.

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2 July 2010

There's a new review by me in the latest issue of The London Review of Books  on the subject of arsenic poisoning. 

Also an article on a free school I helped set up in the 1970s (not exactly shades of Gove) in The Independent on 22nd June.

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 2 July 2010 --  About Writing

 It's a bit like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. You can look at the same scene but find it different every time you turn the viewer. Writing is what I'm talking about. Writing as a way of life. It's a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. A requirement to keep trying different ways to describe something that urgently needs describing even if you aren't entirely sure what it is. I quite understand the action painters of the mid-20th century. You chuck paint at a canvas in the hope that some accident will result that expresses just what you want to explain. What you want to explain has no words and can't be drawn. And you don't want to explain it, exactly, you just want to put it out there in the right shape, in the right order, which it never is, no matter how many times you try.

The real mystery is why the need to explain it is so great since it seems to me that it is really only to myself that I am trying to explain it; the reader is an innocent bystander who comes long after I have decided to try once more to fail better with the next book. A question comes up again and again in my head: if I were paid a living wage to write manuscripts and put them in a vault, never to be published, or to burn them once they were completed, would I be content? So, after having written eight novels, writing a non-fiction book about a journey to Antarctica and a search for my maybe-or-maybe-not-dead mother was another way of trying to get at what I'm trying to get at. Plots in fiction and stories of real-life events are simply components of the ongoing business of getting at it. Whatever it is.

Before I wrote Skating to Antarctica, which is somewhat travel and somewhat autobiography, I wrote a novel called The Dream Mistress, and both have mothers and bleak landscapes in them. My mother, of course, and bleak landscapes I either knew (back alleys in inner cities) or wanted to know (icebergs in a stony southern ocean), but I have no doubt that both, though they mean something to me, are screen memories for something bigger, deeper, larger. Everything is a layer over everything else; memory and imagination are the excavation tools. God help us if we ever got to where we thought we were going.So while the autobiographical details in Skating to Antarctica are as true as my memory and the memories of others can manage, they need not be. I mean it doesn't matter if it's all true or if I made it up. It doesn't matter, either, if I actually went to Antarctica or stayed home and invented it in my study. What matters to me is how the two strands work together in the artefact of the eventual book. It would be possible, I suppose, for a reader to corroborate the stories I tell about my childhood or to try to find the people I write about on the boat sailing around the Antarctic peninsula and discover if I was there or not. But once you had found out, say, that I had actually made the journey and had those childhood experiences, how would it change the book? How would it alter the relation between the author rocking in her bunk in the south Atlantic, and remembering the corridors of the block of flats in Tottenham Court Road?

The Dream Mistress is a novel about a woman finding a sick tramp in the street and wondering if it is her vanished mother. It is also about the days after the end of a relationship. I was interviewed on the radio just after it was published. The interviewer said that he enjoyed the book, but there was one bit that troubled him. The main character, Mimi, remembers an event in her childhood when she and a gang of friends were adopted by a stray dog. It wouldn't go away. It loved them. They loved it. But none of them was allowed to keep the dog, so they ritually killed and ate it on an old bombsite where they played. "Eating the dog was a bit far-fetched," he said. Which, of course, it was. Though that is not to say it couldn't have happened, or even that it didn't happen. The interviewer seemed to be saying that it was unreasonable that I should expect him to believe it (although he didn't complain about a scene in which a dead infant is miracled back to life). I think it is unreasonable to believe anything, and reasonable to write anything. A book is an adventure that both writer and (when it is made available) reader embark on. But each does it alone and makes of it what they can. I tell stories. Who knows if I tell the truth?

 From The Guardian 2005

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14 June 2010  --  Staying In

My old friend Michael, a painter, called me the other day. We've been friends since we were troubled teenagers in and out of loony bins, morosely drinking and drugging away our days, and pretty much given up on by everyone. Michael and I talk on the phone now and then to giggle with astonishment at the way we've managed to arrange our lives so that we find ourselves doing what we want — painting, writing, getting on with it quietly. "I don't speak to anyone all day long. I go for a walk every day, then work, and it's all in silence," he said, delighted with his achievement. "Same here," I said. "But I only go out once a week." Michael gasped at the level of my accomplishment.

It's not merely silence I want, but uneventfulness, and continuing uneventfulness at that. I have a rush of wellbeing if I see a blank week in my calendar. An appointment during the week darkens it, and gnaws away at me in the background of whatever I'm doing until the event (even a pleasurable one) is over and done with. You can call it neurotic, or what you will, but reclusiveness works for me.

From The Sunday Times, June 6th 2010