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

NBCC Finalist
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

The best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, "an injection of grade-A intellectual adrenaline" (Vulture), selected by the legendary editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.

"Diski 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 an interrogation of universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated--and mordantly funny. With an afterword by her daughter, Chloe Diski, this is a must-have for essay lovers everywhere.