Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski

Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski

NBCC Finalist
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

The best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, "an injection of grade-A intellectual adrenaline" (Vulture), selected by the legendary editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.

"Diski 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 an interrogation of universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated--and mordantly funny. With an afterword by her daughter, Chloe Diski, this is a must-have for essay lovers everywhere.

Jenny 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 articles over twenty-five years.

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