The vivacious and charming Diana Athill.
This post is also featured as a guest-blogger article in this week’s #FridayReads blog.
I was very ill the first time I read one of Diana Athill’s books. I left school early on a Friday with a bad cold, my head pounding and my nose dripping uncontrollably. As soon as I got home I drew myself a hot bath and slipped into the steaming water with the elegant but unassuming hardcover edition of Yesterday Morning. Diana Athill, as it turned out, was just what I needed that day. Yesterday Morning is as unassuming and elegant as its cover, but it’s also touching, human, funny, and written with beautiful simplicity — as are all of her books. Reading Athill on a bad day is like having an adorable grandmother there to take care of you.
I’ve now ambled my way through the four books at the core of Athill’s memoirs: Stet, about her career as a literary editor to such big names as Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul; Yesterday Morning, in which she revisits her happy childhood in the country manor her grandparents owned and the complicated relationship between her mother and father; Somewhere Towards the End, her Costa Prize and NBCC award-winning account of growing old with wisdom, wit, and lots of optimism; and Instead of a Letter, which is mostly about her doomed love affair with a man to which she was engaged, who stopped writing for years during his military service, eventually communicated with her by telegram to break up the engagement so he could get married to someone else, and finally died in the war.
Instead of a Letter is the first volume of memoirs Athill wrote, when she was 43, and the latest one I’ve read, in order to unwind at the beginning of the spring holidays. I was surprised to find as much of her bright intelligence and wonderful understanding of the human nature as in all of her other books. There’s a fair bit of overlap in subject matter between all of these, so I wouldn’t recommend reading all of her books in one go, but it’s charming to plunge into one of them every so often. The repetition is part of the charm, part of way Athill tells her story, just like you’d expect a slightly extravagant British lady to recount bits of her life to you.
Yet writing is not Athill’s principal vocation. It’s something that happened to her along the way and something she’s always done on the side. Because of that, I think, she writes with an honesty that is rare and appealing, especially in an era of celebrity memoirs and loud voices that have nothing to say. Athill doesn’t shy away from writing about deeply personal things like sex and humiliation, and lays out her emotions with touching truthfulness and a deep understanding of herself — but she never falls into self-pity. Her prose is simple and straightforward, but all the more enthralling because she doesn’t seek to embellish or excuse. Athill’s goal is to write about life “just as it was”, and it makes her life — and prose — all the more fascinating.
Essential reading, Life Class collects several of Athill's memoirs in a single book.
