“She had never thought of herself as known in the outside world,” Diski writes of her protagonist, “and felt a strange distress at the idea of existing in someone’s mind as something to be found.” What we are observing is the onset of agency, self-awareness in the most challenging, and contradictory, sense. Let’s stay with that introductory story for a moment, which seeks, actively, to discomfort us but makes the archetypal human in some complicated ways. That’s because Diski is less interested in the conventions of the fairy tale than she is in exploding them, reframing them as part of a more recognizable world. But since she had never tried to leave it, it wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that she was imprisoned.” Yes, she is saying, we are in the territory of the folk tale, but the outcome, the movement of the narrative, will not necessarily unfold as we might expect. Certainly, she had always been there, and she had never left the circular room at the top of the long winding staircase. Diski makes this clear as the opening paragraph continues: “It is hard to say precisely if she was imprisoned there. “There was once a princess who lived in a tower,” Diski begins the first story, “The Vanishing Princess or The Origin of Cubism.” The competing titles, and the tension or disconnection between them, offers a hint of what she had in mind. Gathering a dozen stories, some of which first appeared in New Statesman and the London Review of Books, it seems to be a book of updated myths or legends before revealing its true, and more subversive, intent. Something similar is at work in The Vanishing Princess, which was published in England in 1995 but is only now being issued in the United States. The genius of the book, as well as, say, Skating to Antarctica or The Sixties, which cover some of the same material, is that Diski is too smart to try. It’s the stuff, in other words, of fiction, or it could be - although it also resists being rendered as a coherent single narrative. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness”) and the coming-of-age saga, which in her case involves not only the usual familial indignities but also a stint in a psychiatric hospital and a few years as (yes) Doris Lessing’s ward.
There, Diski eclipses the boundary between two forms: the cancer memoir, which she doesn’t want to write (“Embarrassment at first,” she grumbles, “to the exclusion of all other feelings. Take In Gratitude, her memoir of dying, published just days before her death in 2016. In that, I am not unlike Heidi Julavits, who in her Foreword to Diski’s collection of fractured fairy tales, The Vanishing Princess, acknowledges, “My Diski gateway was her nonfiction and when it came to her fiction, I began with her short stories.” Indeed, I might take this a little further, which is to say that what has drawn me most to Diski is her disregard of genre lines.
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