5 ideas
Doris Lessing, whose son was a schoolmate, took her into her London home. Decades later, after Lessing's death, Diski recounted living for years with a benefactor who gave her shelter and a literary world but kept an emotional distance, so that rescue and abandonment arrived together.
When a person is rescued by someone who owes them nothing, the rescue creates a debt that can never be repaid. The recipient is expected to perform thankfulness indefinitely. Ordinary grievances with the benefactor then feel illegitimate, so the resentment is suppressed rather than resolved, and it curdles with the gratitude instead of replacing it.
Describing cancer as a fight or a journey puts the patient's character in charge of an outcome that biology decides. The implication is that people who die simply didn't fight hard enough. Diski rejected this language while writing about her own terminal diagnosis, insisting that dying is something that happens to you rather than a contest you win or lose.
Culture treats sleep as lost time to be minimized. Diski treats it instead as a positive pleasure and a legitimate retreat from the demands of other people and the world. Seen this way, the wish to sleep a lot is not a symptom to be corrected. It is a preference for absence that deserves the same respect as a preference for activity.
The psychiatric asylum is remembered mainly as a site of confinement, but it also offered what its name promises: a place where a person in crisis could be mad without having to cope. Closing asylums in favour of community care removed that sheltered space. Distressed people were left to manage alone in a world that makes no allowance for them.