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

Essays

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

By: Jenny Diski
Narrated by: Charlotte Randle, Chloe Diski
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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.©2020 Jenny Diski (P)2021 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Essays European Literary History & Criticism World Literature Funny Nonfiction England
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Critic reviews

One of the most electrifying memoirists of her generation ... A superb volume of autobiographical fragments
One of the most inventive writers of her generation
She is savagely good company
Diski is one of the language's great, if under-appreciated, stylists
The appeal of Diski’s essays was the appeal of Diski herself … brilliant, irritable, mordant, and humane
Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise (Emilia Clarke)
All stars
Most relevant
It is great to be able to read/listen do Jenny Diskis essays. I love her wit and sarcastic flare. Wonderful and moving. Great to hear even Chloe Diskis short but very sensitive afterwords. Great!

Fantastic Jenny Diski

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