Education
Diski was educated at University College London, and worked as a teacher during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Diski was educated at University College London, and worked as a teacher during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Diski is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. The collections Don"t and A View from the Bed include articles and essays written for the publication. A troubled teenager from a difficult, fractured home with a Jewish father, Diski spent much of her formative years as inor outpatient at various psychiatric institutions.
At the same time, she immersed herself deeply in the culture of the "60s, from the Aldermaston Marches to the Grosvenor Square protests, from drugs to free love, from jazz to acid rock and a flirtation with the ideas and methods of R. Doctorate. Laing.
Diski sets out in her personal memoir to describe her experience of the 1960s: I lived in London during that period, regretting the Beats, buying clothes, going to movies, dropping out, reading, taking drugs, spending time in mental hospitals, demonstrating, having sex, teaching. This could be considered a normative 1960s life-style, while her representation of the era as a sort of golden age is also not atypical of her generation.
However she also describes the darker side of the age – for example its pervasive sexism, institutionalised in the countercultural cult of casual sex – stating that On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn"t take no for an answer. She concludes that, in the words of Charles Shaar Murray, The line from hippie to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as people like to believe.
2003 J. R.
Diski returns repeatedly to the question of how far the cult of the self in the permissive society gave rise to 1980s neoliberalism, greed and self-interest.