https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/20/why-didnt-you-just-do-what-you-were-told-by-jenny-diski-review-supremely-sharp

The late writer’s singular qualities shine through in these brilliant columns for the London Review of Books

When the novelist Jenny Diski was diagnosed with cancer, she wrote in an essay in the London Review of Books (A Diagnosis) that her first feeling was of embarrassment: she did not want to join the herd who had already written about cancer; and yet she recognised that, as a writer, she could not avoid the subject.

If you knew nothing of her, you might assume this to have been the disdainful shunning of what she seemed to see as a cancer club, but it was more that apartness was key to the way she wrote. Debating in another essay (The Natural Death Centre) a friend’s proposal that they jointly buy a plot in Highgate cemetery, she envisaged her possible headstone: “Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” Solitude being her thing, she decided against the grave share, but her DIY epitaph remains appropriate. For in these brilliant, singular, posthumously published columns from the LRB, she writes in an adjacent way: the truth is “over there”.