Books like In gratitude by Jenny Diski

In July 2014 the British writer Jenny Diski received a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer and was told she had only a couple of years left to live. Faced with the stark certainty of her mortality, she turned to her own voice for a response that felt entirely her own, deciding to write about the experience rather than let it be told for her. Four decades earlier, at age fifteen, Diski was taken in by the novelist Doris Lessing; the two women shared a complicated, lifelong relationship that became a central theme of her later work. In her memoir she recounts the fairy‑tale rescue, the struggle to adapt to an unfamiliar family, and the influence that Lessing had on the shape of her literary career. She also revisits scenes from her adolescence—her chaotic, illness‑ridden teens, expulsion from school, psychiatric hospital stays, and turbulent friendships—filtered through the lens of the final months of her own life. The book is a candid, cerebral portrait of two remarkable writers, blending memory, narrative craft and the brutal honesty of living with a terminal illness. It offers readers insight into Diski’s struggle with grief, anger, sickness and the pursuit of meaning amid inevitable death.

First publish date: 2016