Never Mainline
On Keith Richards’ autobiography.
There’s some very sensible advice on how to take drugs, too.
Jenny Diski
What Was Wrong With Everything Was People
On being kicked out of Doris Lessing’s house.
Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?
“What I had going for me was teen rage, contempt impervious to offers of compromise; the power of the mask capable of turning ice to marshmallow, and all the time in the world, all the ability to sustain it without surrendering.”
Rape-Rape
Recalling a sexual assault.
On Doris Lessing
At the age fifteen, Jenny Diski, a “foundling,” went to live with Doris Lessing. For fifty years, the two talked every week. Diski promised Lessing that she would never write about her but now, after Lessing’s death, Diski has begun to recount the story of their relationship.
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What To Call Her?
The question of how to name her relationship with Lessing plagued Diski.
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Doris and Me
Lessing invited Diski into her home, but did she want her there?
The Me Who Knew It
On Alison Winter’s Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, and issues of memory in the 20th century.
Underlying the compelling feeling that we are our memories is a further common-sense assumption that our entire lives are accurately retained somewhere in the brain ‘bank’ as laid-down memories of our experience, and that we retrieve our lives and selves from an ever expanding stockpile of recollections. Or we can’t, and then that feeling that it’s on the tip of our tongue, or there but just out of range, still encourages us to think that everything we have known or done is in us somewhere, if only our digging equipment were sharper.
Which One of You Is Jesus?
In 1959, a social psychologist in Michigan brought together three institutionalized patients for an experiment:
[W]hat would happen, he wondered, if he made three men meet and live closely side by side over a period of time, each of whom believed himself to be the one and only Jesus Christ?
