Jenny Diski interview: 'The mediocrity of fiction is really to do with feeling cosy’

The author taken in by Doris Lessing as a teenager, whose work challenges sensitivities, is now busting the cliches of the cancer diary

In his essay “Why I Write”, George Orwell looked back to the childhood springs of his writing: “I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.” I have thought of that line a few times reading Jenny Diski. For 30 years she has been one of the most individual, wildly various writers in English literature, a prolific author of novels, short stories, reviews, essays, travelogues, memoirs – though part of the individuality is that she makes those distinctions between genres or forms seem flimsy and artificial: “It’s all writing.”

Over the last year and a quarter, Jenny (we’re friends, I think: don’t imagine this is an objective appraisal) has been writing a series of monthly articles in the London Review of Books that have won her a new set of readers, and a new level of admiration from her fans. The pieces were occasioned by two deaths. The first was Doris Lessing’s, two years ago, at the age of 94. In 1963, Jennifer Simmonds was a difficult, scared 15-year-old: the boarding school to which she had been sent by the local council had expelled her, she had run away from her parents (who had abused her in ways that seem both absent-minded and creative), she had been raped by an American stranger in London, she had tried to kill herself with an overdose of Nembutal, and was now confined to a psychiatric unit in Hove. A former schoolfellow, Peter Lessing, told his mother about this scandalous girl, and Doris, already famous as the author of The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook, wrote to her, offering a home – an act of enormous generosity, but with tightly prescribed limits: home never came with guarantees of security, or love. Still, their relationship – not quite parental, not quite friendly – lasted 50 years; and though Lessing put fictionalised Jennys into several of her novels, Jenny did not feel able to write about Lessing while she was alive.

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