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

'A tonic for the soul ... I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal'b - 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.