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Jenny Diski, Author Who Wrote of Madness and Isolation, Dies at 68

Jenny Diski at the London Review Bookshop in 2010.Credit...Writer Pictures, via Associated Press

Jenny Diski, a British writer who channeled the turmoil of her early years, which included suicide attempts and confinement in mental hospitals, into a stream of richly observed and mordant novels, memoirs and essays, died on Thursday at her home in Cambridge, England. She was 68.

The cause was a lung tumor and pulmonary fibrosis, her agent, Peter Straus, said.

Ms. Diski got off to a late start as a writer. She was almost 40 when she published her first novel, “Nothing Natural,” about a single mother embroiled in a sadomasochistic relationship that leads to a mental breakdown. Its steely, unblinking account of sexual degradation and psychic disintegration impressed those who were not appalled by its sexual politics. The Washington Post’s review carried the headline “A Sad Day for Feminism.”

Ms. Diski went on to explore madness, depression and isolation in nearly a dozen novels and a series of memoirs; some of them, like “Skating to Antarctica” (1997) and “Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America With Interruptions” (2002), masqueraded as travel books. She contributed more than 100 essays to The London Review of Books. Many were collected in “Don’t” (1998) and “A View From the Bed” (2003).

“I believe we have to make sense of the world we live in; we have to know its boundaries, how to control it,” she told The Guardian of London in 1987, discussing “Rainforest,” her second novel. “And when we cannot do this, I believe it leads to chaos, the essence of which is unorganized emptiness, and that is quite terrifying.”

After Ms. Diski found out that she had inoperable lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis in the summer of 2014, she started writing a chronicle of her illness and treatment for The London Review. It also included reflections on her childhood and on her tangled relationship with Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who took her out of a mental hospital when she was a teenager and into her London home. The memoir, “In Gratitude,” was published this month in Britain by Bloomsbury and will be released in the United States in May.

In her first posting for The London Review, Ms. Diski issued highly characteristic instructions to her husband, Ian Patterson, on leaving the oncologist’s office for the first time. “Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer,” she told him. “Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.”

Jennifer Jane Simmonds was born on July 8, 1947, in London. Her father was a con man, black marketeer and philanderer who deserted the family temporarily when Jenny was 6 — leading her mother to suffer a mental breakdown — and permanently when she was 11.

She spent time in foster care and in mental hospitals. At 14, she was raped by an American who had lured her into a deserted recording studio. Shortly after that, she tried to commit suicide for the first time.

Ms. Lessing came to the rescue after Ms. Diski had been expelled from her boarding school and had taken an overdose of barbiturates, leading to another round of hospitalization for psychiatric treatment.

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Ms. Diski’s nonfiction book, published in 2002, masqueraded as a travelogue.Credit...Picador

Peter Lessing, a classmate, wrote to his mother of Ms. Diski’s plight. Ms. Lessing, who had left two children of her own behind when she moved from what was then Rhodesia, took her into her London home, where she stayed for three years. The atmosphere was heady and bohemian, the relationship complex. Ms. Diski later appeared in fictional form as the sullen, sarcastic Emily Cartwright in Ms. Lessing’s dystopian novel “Memoirs of a Survivor” (1974).

Once on her own, she became caught up in the drugs, sex and politics of the London counterculture, a period she evokes in her 2009 memoir, “The Sixties.”

She trained to become a teacher and taught at state schools in London. In 1976, while working for a radical magazine, Children’s Rights, she met and married Roger Marks, who invented a new surname for them, Diski.

The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her husband, Ian Patterson, a translator and director of English studies at Queens’ College, Cambridge, Ms. Diski is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Chloe Diski, and two grandchildren. Ms. Lessing died in 2013.

After working for two years toward a degree in anthropology at University College, London, Ms. Diski dropped out and sank into a profound, long-lasting depression, eventually breaking free when she began writing her first novel.

Her fictional output was highly unpredictable. The narrator of “Like Mother” (1988) is a baby born without a brain. In “Only Human: A Comedy” (2000), a retelling of the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah, God provides the narrative voice. “Apology for the Woman Writing” (2008), a work of historical fiction, deals with Marie de Gournay, the amanuensis to the essayist Michel de Montaigne.

Ms. Diski once confessed to having conflicted feelings about fiction. “I hate writing stories,” she told Bomb, the American arts magazine, in 1999. “I hate plot. I hate characters. I just know that I have to have them or I think I have to have them, but they’re not really what I want to be writing about.”

The search for that elusive something propelled her from one subject to the next. She sometimes described each new book as an effort to reclaim the failure of the last. And more often than not, she found her best subject to be herself.

The territory could be bleak. The lure of Antarctica, she wrote, was in part the continent’s all-encompassing whiteness, reminiscent of the sterile white walls in the many hospitals of her youth. Life was struggle. Life was solitude, wrapped in nothingness. This was the theme she explored in “On Trying to Keep Still” (2006), an account of her solo travels.

“What I really want is to be on a boat for a very long time without anyone else on it,” she told Bomb. “But then I’m not a sailor, so that’s a problem.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Jenny Diski, Writer With Inner Turmoil, Dies at 68. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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