Book Club Reading Guide: Skating to Antarctica

Discussing Jenny Diski's remarkable memoir with Sam Baker

Hello,

Our next True Stories Book Club is on Sunday 9th July, 7pm UK time. This time, my guest Sam Baker and I will be speaking about the late Jenny Diski’s book Skating to Antartica.

Here’s a brief reading guide to get you up to speed. Subscribers can send in questions for me and Sam to answer, and you can either watch live on Sunday, or catch the replay at your leisure.

About the book

Jenny Diski’s 1997 memoir meets travelogue is a tour de force, taking readers’ expectations of both genres and giving them something altogether more strange and poignant.

A suddent compulsion to visit Antarctica - despite intensely disliking the idea of travel - sees Jenny explore where her long-held desire to experience ‘white out’ comes from. As she sets out on her unlikely journey, she tackles the emotional terrain of a rocky childhood and the depths of her periods of mental ill health.

It may sound bleak, but everything she writes is trenchantly funny somehow, dark but elegant, and I genuinely think she should be remembered in the same way as Joan Didion.

Buy Skating to Antarctica here.

About Jenny Diski

Jenny Diski was born in 1947 in London, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of 10 novels, five books of travel and memoir, two volumes of essays, and a collection of short stories. Her journalism appeared in the London Review of Books, among other publications. She died in Cambridge in April 2016.

About Sam Baker

Sam Baker is an award-winning writer and broadcaster whose podcast and community The Shift with Sam Baker explores the truth about being a woman post-40.

Hope to see you there on Sunday 9th July!

Take care,

Katherine

Note: this email may include affiliate links which means I will receive a small commission for any purchases made