Jenny Diski's Curious Women
To my mind, the quintessential Jenny Diski moment comes in her essay “Rape-rape,” published November 2009in the London Review of Books. Considering the director Roman Polanski’s statutory rape of a teenager alongside her own assault at 14, Diski explains, “I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was 14—I was embarrassed into it.”
It’s the kind of thing you’re not supposed to admit. It’s shameful, it’s uncomfortably honest, and it is a relief to hear it told with clarity and directness. Diski, in this essay, insists on telling her own story of what her rape meant to her, examining it just as skeptically as she would a new biography of Princess Diana. It was not “the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me,” nor “spiritual murder,” she writes. “I had no sense that
