In Gratitude

Reviews / Votes

Jenny's pain and fury are still hot in this fascinating but uncomfortable read ... Clear-sighted, defiant and written with Diski's customary furious elegance, it is a remarkable last word from a writer who survived to live and love, almost despite herself * Jane Shilling, Daily Mail * Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... In Gratitude amounts to the inner monologue of a highly intelligent, furiously funny, traumatised woman, "trembling at the prospect of extinction" ... She cannot be subsumed into the wider narrative or by Lessing. In Gratitude assures Diski the last word * Helen Davies, Sunday Times * One of the most inventive, original and disturbing writers of her generation * Daily Telegraph * Remarkable ... Honest and spirited ... As the scenes of her traumatic and chaotic childhood pass she reminds us, sentence by sentence, not only that she emerged to become every bit the writer she always dreamed of being, but also that, despite everything, along the way she learned a great deal about love * Tim Adams, Observer * A different kind of cancer memoir, and an almost entirely platitude-free one ... plain-spoken, harrowing and invariably moving ... The details are incisive, and she stacks them carefully ... There's a raw, almost feral quality to Ms. Diski's writing about cowering in Lessing's long shadow. It's a trait she brought to so much of her writing. It's just like her to leave us a title, In Gratitude, that slowly sheds its softness and sends up a mischievous flare * Dwight Garner, New York Times * As a study of influence and the monstrous egos of writers, In Gratitude is up there with Thomas de Quincey's account of Wordsworth and Paul Theroux's tale of befriending V S Naipaul ... But Diski has always been a badass ... The tone of In Gratitude is, accordingly, cocky and belligerent ... It is the combination of entitlement and indifference to opinion that gives Diski's voice its serrated edge and makes her such a savagely good recorder of herself. Read me if you like, she implies in In Gratitude, but you don't have to like what you read * Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph * Diski's line is simple: 'I want to die easily.' This deeply human wish bears no resemblance to the rich messiness of Diski's life, nor the challenging delight of her writing * Kate Wormersley, Spectator * My favourite reading this year -- Blake Morrison She deserves our unfeigned admiration, not for her bravery or her struggle, or any irrelevant tosh like that, but for writing so well * Guardian * A marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation ... Bracingly devoid of sententiousness, sentimentality or any kind of spiritual urge or twitch * New York Times * A suberb, original and unsentimental writer * Guardian Summer Reading * In Gratitude reminds us what pleasure, what company and nourishment there is in just thinking, especially if you do it well, as she does here -- Anne Enright * Irish Times *