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

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.