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

A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski’s essays, selected by Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books Choose the pursuit of happiness if you really must, but there are better things to do with a life, unless freedom from difficulty is the only acceptable existence. Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own diagnosis with cancer. Her columns in the London Review of Books selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, ranged from subjects as various as happiness, social psychology, self-absorption and cats have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’, and ‘small masterpieces’. Original, opinionated and well ahead of her time, this collection will allow readers old and new to ‘read Diski for the pleasures of Diski, but also read Diski to learn what we may think, in the future, about how, were we possessed by foresight, we might have better performed our humanity in the now’ ( New Yorker ) —- ISBN: 9781526621900