The race from the Big C to the Big D

In Gratitude Jenny Diski

Bloomsbury, pp.256, £16.99, ISBN: 9781408879900

The ‘journey’ — at least the one played out in public — begins with an announcement that you are incurable. Patient waiting follows, described in monthly essays written for a respected publication. Jenny Diski (non-small cell adenocarcinoma, London Review of Books) calls this personally singular but culturally familiar experience the race from ‘the Big C to the Big D’.

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Taggedanger, Book review - memoir, Cancer, Clive James, Doris Lessing, dying, embarrassment, Ian Patterson, Katie Roiphe, Oliver Sacks, Psychiatry, terminal illness, the Maudsley, the NHS

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Jenny Diski, now terminally ill with cancer, longs ‘to die easily’ — in contrast to her former complicated life, vividly portrayed in her challenging memoir

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