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In gratitude

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Description
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
"Transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction." —Heidi Julavits, New York Times Book Review
From "one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature" (The New York Times Magazine) comes a breathtaking memoir about terminal cancer and the author's relationship with Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing.
In July 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given "two or three years" to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the clichés and try to write about it. And there was another story to write, one she had not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship.

In the pages of the London Review of Books, to which Diski contributed for the last quarter century, she unraveled her history with Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family, the modeling of a literary life. Swooping from one memory to the next—alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, the drug-taking twenty-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals—and telling all through the lens of living with terminal cancer, through what she knows will be her final months, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers—Lessing and herself.

From a wholly original thinker comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death.
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ISBN:
9781632866868
9781632866882
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Grouping Information

Grouped Work ID5f16b8aa-4f63-85a5-f455-07f34b457fcd
Grouping Titlein gratitude
Grouping Authorjenny diski
Grouping Categorybook
Grouping LanguageEnglish (eng)
Last Grouping Update2024-03-28 02:11:39AM
Last Indexed2024-03-28 02:24:37AM

Solr Fields

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author
Diski, Jenny
author_display
Diski, Jenny
available_at_catalog
Central
South Natomas
Sylvan Oaks
detailed_location_catalog
Central
South Natomas
Sylvan Oaks
display_description
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
"Transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction." —Heidi Julavits, New York Times Book Review
From "one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature" (The New York Times Magazine) comes a breathtaking memoir about terminal cancer and the author's relationship with Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing.
In July 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given "two or three years" to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the clichés and try to write about it. And there was another story to write, one she had not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship.

In the pages of the London Review of Books, to which Diski contributed for the last quarter century, she unraveled her history with Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family, the modeling of a literary life. Swooping from one memory to the next—alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, the drug-taking twenty-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals—and telling all through the lens of living with terminal cancer, through what she knows will be her final months, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers—Lessing and herself.

From a wholly original thinker comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death.
format_catalog
Book
eBook
format_category_catalog
Books
eBook
id
5f16b8aa-4f63-85a5-f455-07f34b457fcd
isbn
9781632866868
9781632866882
itype_catalog
Adult Book Non-Fiction
last_indexed
2024-03-28T09:24:37.294Z
lexile_score
-1
literary_form
Non Fiction
literary_form_full
Non Fiction
local_callnumber_catalog
823.914 D611i 2016
owning_library_catalog
Sacramento Public Library
owning_location_catalog
Central
South Natomas
Sylvan Oaks
primary_isbn
9781632866868
publishDate
2016
publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Bloomsbury USA, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
recordtype
grouped_work
subject_facet
Authors -- Great Britain -- Biography
Cancer -- Patients -- Great Britain -- Biography
Diski, Jenny -- Health
Lessing, Doris, -- 1919-2013
title_display
In gratitude
title_full
In Gratitude
In gratitude / Jenny Diski
title_short
In gratitude
topic_facet
Authors
Biography & Autobiography
Cancer
Diski, Jenny
Health
Health & Fitness
Lessing, Doris
Nonfiction
Patients

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