Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism-Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny- Sunday Times''Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise'' Emilia Clarke-She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be- New YorkerJenny 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 pa
