Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski, read by Charlotte Randle and Chloe Diski.

A tonic for the soul ... I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal' Emilia Clarke

‘Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny’ Sunday Times

‘She 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 a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated – and mordantly funny.

Critics Review

One of the most electrifying memoirists of her generation … A superb volume of autobiographical fragments

Daily Telegraph

One of the most inventive writers of her generation

Independent

She is savagely good company

Daily Telegraph

Diski is one of the language’s great, if under-appreciated, stylists

Guardian

The appeal of Diski’s essays was the appeal of Diski herself … brilliant, irritable, mordant, and humane

Paris Review

Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise

Emilia Clarke

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