KIM: Hi, everyone, welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes. Today we’re going to be talking about the unusual connection between the authors Doris Lessing and Jenny Diski. Their relationship was like something out of a storybook, right? You want to tell us about it, Amy?

AMY: I sure do, but first I think we need to back up a little bit. So You know I listen to a ton of audio books, right? When you combine dog walks with driving my kids all over town, I probably have almost three hours in every day when I could be listening to an audio book… so may as well! And while we read a ton of lost lady authors for this podcast, regrettably, it’s not easy to find any of them on audiobook, so I have to branch out, which is fine. And you never quite know what’s going to be available from the library on audio so I never quite know what I might end up listening to next. Case in point, after finishing a recent book, I just did a “browse selections” to figure out what I might want next and the title Why Didn’t You Just Do What You’re Told? by Jenny Diski came up. I immediately recognized the name because our previous guest, author Hilma Wolitzer, had recommended her.

KIM: [Can respond about how you already knew and read a lot of her in the London Review of Books] mention that she’s a British writer.

AMY: Yeah and I, meanwhile, don’t think I’d read anything by her previously. So I was like, “Eh, I’ll give this a shot.” This book is a collection of her essays from LRB and also some excerpts from some of her memoirs. It was published posthumously, in the summer of 2020. She died from cancer in 2016. I really enjoyed this one. It’s kind of a “best of” I’d say, so if you are new to Diski like I was and want to get a smattering of her work, this is the perfect way to do it. These are long-form essays, profiles and book reviews and each selection, on audio book, runs about 15-20 minutes, so it was almost like listening to a podcast. The subjects range from Jeffrey Dahmer and the Titanic to Keith Richards, and arachnophobia. Even topics that you wouldn’t THINK you’d be interested in, she makes interesting, because she writes with this droll sense of humor that feels effortless and almost unintentional. And there’s a lot of history and cultural analysis thrown in. I would laugh out loud probably once every three minutes listening to this book. 

KIM: [responds and can note if there’s anything specific you remember ever reading by her.] She really had a knack for elevating nonfiction writing to a true artform.

AMY: Right. Her book reviews, for example, are so much more than just a book review! She sort of starts with the book and its subject matter as a launchpad to write about all this other stuff. Even topics that I thought I would be not that interested in, like profiles of Margaret Thatcher’s husband or the evolution of the office in society, end up being fascinating and funny.

KIM: She’s also authored 10 novels in addition to her nonfiction!

AMY: [responds] One of her best-known works is her 2005 memoir Skating to Antarctica which is part-travelog, part memoir, weaving a trip she took to Antarctica with a look back at her disturbingly troubled childhood. Anyway, I was about ⅔ of the way through this compilation of her work when I decided to Google her because I liked it so much I wanted to know a little more about her. To my surprise, one of the first things I read when I googled her was that she had been sort of pseudo-adopted by Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Doris Lessing when she was a teenager. I was like, “Wait, what?!” I’m sure there are listeners out there who are like, “Yes, of course,” but it was news to me and I thought it was really interesting.

KIM: Yeah, so what did you find out about this connection? What’s the story there?

AMY: So I went back and read the last memoir she wrote before she died which is called In Gratitude. She was dying from cancer when she worked on this book, so she talks a lot about that experience, but she also writes a lot about this time of her life with Lessing, too. To go back to what I was saying about her traumatic childhood. Her parents were complete disasters and she was sexually abused at home; she was raped by a stranger, attempted suicide and was put in a psychiatric hospital or a “bin,” as she calls it, all before the age of 15. She was also expelled from school and had already stayed at a number of foster homes. The authorities didn’t really know what to do with her. A kid who went to boarding school with her, Peter Lessing, had heard the gossip about her and he asked his mom, Doris Lessing, “is there anything we can do to help this girl out?” Doris (who was at the height of her fame, having just published The Golden Notebook) had never even met Jenny, but she wrote her a letter saying, “My son told me what’s going on, why don’t you come stay with us for a while?” Diski admits it felt like a fairy tale at the time. A real-life fairy godmother has appeared to save her.

KIM: Wow, what a selfless thing to do!

AMY: Yes, she saved Jenny from a horrible home life, for sure. But at the same time, it seems as though this arrangement was pretty complicated; not necessarily “happily ever after.” As you can imagine, turning up an orphan, basically, at the home of an artistic genius is bound to be both intimidating and unnerving, especially for someone who’d already been through so much trauma. 

KIM: This is like something out of a Dickens novel.

AMY: Yes, and Diski says that! She admits she was basically a foundling. When she arrived at Lessing’s house, Doris opened the door holding a grey kitten (Diski thinks the kitten was originally Sylvia Plath’s… because she went to live with Lessing just after Plath’s suicide), and Doris is like, “Welcome, and oh, this cat can be yours.” For Diski, staying at this stranger’s house was completely weird and awkward. And it was made more so by the fact that Lessing’s son, Peter, was still away at boarding school! So it was really just Diski and Lessing rattling around the house for most of the time she was there, and Diski felt on tenterhooks the whole time, basically. She writes:

“By the time that I got to Doris’s I knew from experience how you tiptoed around a house that wasn’t yours, fearing the sound of your own footfall, creaking doors or floorboards. I remembered not knowing the household arrangements, when was it OK or too late to get up, did I wait for others to have breakfast or get on with it myself? Was it OK to use this or that bathroom, which things were special to whom?

KIM: Understandable. Completely understandable.

AMY: Diski goes on to say:

I found myself freezing when I encountered her, as if trying to implode myself, and I couldn’t stop myself saying ‘thank you’ and somethings ‘thank you very much for having me.” I picture myself in those weeks as traditionally Japanese: forever trying to make myself smaller and out of the way, making my bow lower and my thanks outlast their acceptance.”

And Lessing, while kind, was just sort of too matter of fact, “Oh, make yourself at home.” She didn’t really offer Diski anything in the way of explicit direction of HOW to make herself at home and Diski never had the courage to ask the basic, practical questions running through her mind. 

AMY: Yes, so Diski says she felt half gratitude and half anger and fury and resentment for having to feel gratitude, like her bill to Lessing would never be settled. And also remember how troubled she was, right? She was a sullen, damaged kid, so she proved no real peach to have around. Lessing repeatedly had to deal with her getting into drugs or going back into psychiatric hospitals, etc.

Some other interesting anecdotes: Diski says Doris also used to stand on her head for 20 minutes every day. She was into meditation. And then very early on when Diski moved in, Lessing made an appointment for her to go see a gynecologist and get fitted for a Dutch cap, which was a sort of diaphragm. Diski was 15 and was not even thinking about having sex at that point, but Lessing was insistent. She also remembers lots of talks with Lessing about sex at the kitchen table (she apparently learned all about Lessing’s own sex life.) 

KIM: I’m not surprised given that this is the author of The Golden Notebook. How long did she live with Doris Lessing? 

AMY: Around five years. She admits that Lessing probably didn’t anticipate when she made the offer that it would end up being so permanent. She probably thought it would just be a few weeks or months. Lessing also had attempted to get Diski enrolled back in boarding school over the years, but no one would accept her. Things came to a head when Diski was around 19 and she ended up leaving, but the two women were a part of each others’ lives for 50 years until Lessing’s death.

KIM: I’m surprised she didn’t formally adopt her at some point. 

AMY: I guess initially Lessing had offered, but Diski’s biological mom had raised a stink and threatened to sue her if that ever happened. So it never came about.

KIM: Did Diski think of her as her adopted mother?

AMY: Not really, and she talks about that in this memoir, how difficult it was for her entire life to label her relationship with Lessing. She felt really uncomfortable calling her “my mother,” so she mostly referred to her as “the woman I live with.” Or she’d jokingly call her “Auntie Doris” or “my benefactor.” In interviews, Lessing sometimes called her “a waif whom I rescued.” When Diski eventually had a child as an adult, Lessing awkwardly asked her, “Do you want her to call me Grandma?”

I think the key word to sum up a lot of their relationship is “awkward,” really. I get the sense they thought of each other as “family,” but certainly not the warm, huggy, share-your-feelings type of relationship. Lessing was a pretty unemotional sort of person. Diski tells a story that when Doris told her at one point that her father had died, she sort of did a “there-there,” awkward pat-pat with the front of her fingers on her shoulder, and she writes, “It couldn’t really be called a hug, but she tried, and I felt strangely as if I should comfort her, for the effort she’d had to make.” So Lessing was pretty emotionally distant, but she was kind to her in a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense way. And side note: Lessing had two other children from a previous marriage that she basically abandoned when she moved from Africa to England. That’s another whole story (very reminiscent of The Lost Daughter) but yeah, she’s not the most maternal figure you’ll ever meet.

KIM: Okay, so I’m curious about how living with Doris Lessing would have shaped Diski as a writer. Does she talk about that at all?

AMY: Well, the interesting thing is that Diski already knew BEFORE she met Lessing, that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. She was a voracious reader. So you can only imagine what it was like to suddenly be living with a world-famous author. Right away, she found herself immersed in this hive of artistic, literary people. Famous writers would come over for dinner and she would just sit there, shy and not saying a word, listening to their intellectual discourse. Or she’d go along to see a movie with Doris and her smarty-pants friends and marvel at their criticism of the movie after the fact. Diski writes:

These people all seemed so finished, so confident. And they wrote and were read, and by doing so they were deities to me, the hopeless unfledged writer whose sentences were never buoyed with confidence.

KIM: I can’t imagine being a fly on the wall with all these intellectuals and writers. 

AMY: Yes, she writes that she gradually stepped into the conversation around those dinner tables “like the three-year-old keeping up with the bigger children.” (but she adds that she never had any confidence in what she said or thought.) Diski was highly intelligent, and Lessing did see that and appreciate it. In fact, when Diski had replied by letter to Lesson’s initial invitation to come live with her, Lessing told her friends that she thought the letter was intelligent, humorous and well-written, which convinced her she was doing the right thing.

KIM: I know you said Lessing was kind of distant, emotionally, with her, but I’d be curious to find out more about her side of this and what she felt.

AMY: Well, interestingly, both women made a pact with each other that they wouldn’t write about each other at one point, but Lessing broke that pact with a novel she wrote in 1974 called Memoirs of a Survivor. There’s a character in that book clearly based on Jenny, so that might be a good source to find out Lessing’s perspective.

KIM: Wow, how interesting… this whole story could make a good movie, I feel like. 

AMY: Yeah, and getting back to the title of that last memoir by Diski, In Gratitude, it sort of speaks to her feelings about the whole thing. She felt like she could never possibly repay the debt to Lessing for taking her in. Lessing tried to wave it all off, saying people had helped her through difficult periods in the past and one day Diski might be in a position to help someone else too. But then you can also read the title a different way, too, right?

KIM: Aaahh… Ingratitude. 

AMY: Yeah, because Diski acknowledges she was always kind of filled with rage at having to feel grateful. So yeah, it was complicated, at the end of the day.

KIM: So that’s all for today’s episode, we hope you enjoyed it and if you did, consider taking a minute to repay US by leaving a five-star review wherever you listen.

AMY: Yes, that’s the sort of gratitude that goes a long way with us! We’ll meet you back next week with another lost lady of lit!

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was created by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.