Jenny Diski at home in Cambridge in March.Credit...Gareth McConnell for The New York Times

Jenny Diski’s End Notes

The English writer is facing death the only way she knows how: line by line.

Last July, when the English writer Jenny Diski was told she had inoperable lung cancer and, at best, another three years to live, she responded to the news characteristically — that is, in wry poor taste. “So,” she said, turning to her husband, the poet and academic Ian Patterson, “we’d better get cooking the meth.” The Poet — as Diski always refers to Patterson, with tender-ironic reserve, in her personal essays — was just about able to keep up his end of the morbid repartee that is the currency of their marriage: “This time we quit while the going’s good.” The oncologist and the nurse, apparently not watchers of “Breaking Bad,” looked on blankly.

A death sentence, by all accounts, sets off in people a free-for-all of conflicting emotion, but by the time Diski, who is 67, returned home that afternoon, she had already resigned herself to one thing: She was going to write about it. “I pretended for a moment that I might not,” she says in the essay that appeared a few weeks later in The London Review of Books, to which Diski has contributed more than 200 articles over 25 years, and you can understand her hesitation. As a subject, cancer may be gruesome and topical and unimpeachably serious; but is it interesting? By now, the lineaments of the cancer narrative are so familiar that, as Diski writes, “you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future. Including the surprises.”

The diagnosis thus arrived for Diski as a one-two punch. Not only would she have to endure the illness; as one of the most singular, if underappreciated, personal essayists of our time, she was also faced with its obstacle course of cliché. “Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer,” she told Patterson after they left the doctor’s office. “Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.” In the L.R.B. essay, Diski alights upon a different metaphor: “I try but I can’t think of a single aspect of having cancer, start to finish, that isn’t an act in a pantomime in which my participation is guaranteed however I believe I choose to play each scene. I have been given this role. . . . I have no choice but to perform and to be embarrassed to death.”

Still, it is a role Diski has determined to play against type. Few people could be better suited to the challenge. From a distance — from America, say — it is easy to mistake her for nothing more than a prolific book reviewer. Even in England, where she has won prizes and critical acclaim, her reputation is incommensurate with her spectacular originality. Diski is one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature; she has made a habit, and a career, of writing books that no one else would even think of writing. “What I Don’t Know About Animals” (2010) is an autobiography disguised as a meditation on the “perplexing silence” of the other species with whom we share the planet or, as Diski puts it, “a kind of travel book but with animals instead of travel.” “Skating to Antarctica” (1997) centers on her sudden desire — “a desire as commanding as any sexual compulsion” — to visit Antarctica. (“It wouldn’t be an outrage if I didn’t go to Antarctica, almost everybody didn’t,” she concedes. “But I was, none the less, outraged at the idea of not going.”) In “Stranger on a Train” (2002), she rides the rails around America, striking up conversations with other passengers and staring out the window. One of Diski’s gifts is her ability to catch thought as it flies, and here, as so often in her work, a description of a landscape doubles as a description of the mind going about its odd, fidgety business:

“What is remarkable, what is strange about passing through America, peering at it through the screen of the train window, is that everything is familiar. It is much more as if America is passing through you. . . . Sitting there looking out at the landscape is like having a dye injected so that the tendrils of memory in the brain light up and trace the private history of your mind. As I sit and watch the weird rock formations, sage brush, cactus, and Joshua trees of the desert land go by, the cinema in Tottenham Court Road where I saw my first shootouts jumps vividly into my present. The smell and plush of the carpet underfoot comes flooding back to me, the tense anticipation as the lights begin to fade, the solid dark presence of my father sitting beside me, the blue smoke from his cigarette curling up into the bright beam on its way to the screen.”

What binds together the disparate elements of her genre-confounding work — part memoir, part travelogue, part criticism, part rant — is the force of Diski’s peculiar personality. Even now, crouching beneath extinction’s alp, she remains tenaciously, incorrigibly herself.

“It’s probably more seemly to stay mum,” Diski told me recently. We were sitting in the living room of the two-story terraced house in Cambridge that she shares with Patterson, or rather, I was sitting, and Diski lay semi-recumbent on the pillow-clogged sofa, underneath a gray cashmere blanket, waving a battery-operated hand fan (“my fetish object”) around her face. All things considered, not least the three-month course of chemo and radiation she recently completed, Diski didn’t look too bad. For a start, her straightened, lunar-gray bob was wholly intact; the drug used in her treatment had spared her the ordeal of baldness. Reclining in a pink cashmere sweater, drowsed by the morphine she knocks back from a medicinal shot glass several times a day, she gave off an air not so much of beleaguered exhaustion as of voluptuous languor. Even the cast she wore on her right arm — she had fallen in the bathroom and broken her wrist — did not detract from her composure.

“Because I’m a writer,” she said, gesticulating with her good arm, when I asked about her decision, in spite of her qualms, to go ahead and write a cancer diary anyway. “I could either shut up, that’s the end, get on with dying. Or, get gripped, which is what happened.” We are the richer, if less impregnably complacent, for it. A marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation, Diski’s cancer essays are bracingly devoid of sententiousness, sentimentality or any kind of spiritual urge or twitch. (Ten have appeared in the L.R.B. over the past nine months.) Mary-Kay Wilmers, the magazine’s enthrallingly soft-spoken editor, told me that she encourages writers “not to pretend they’re more distant from themselves than they are.” Diski, who is close friends with Wilmers, was keen to stress her debt to the L.R.B.; it is hard to think of many other major literary publications that would have given her the space to pursue her personally inflected investigations over so many years.

If the cancer essays are a study in constriction and depletion (“Two to three years. Will the battery on the TV remote run out first?”), they also testify to an inner life of undiminished hyperactivity. Time may be running out, but Diski’s style, and the mind it discloses, is still prone to sudden, wayward expansions:

“When I look back from my current spot in the land of hiatus, the entire process” — of chemotherapy and radiotherapy — “makes me think of clubbing baby seals, although the seals I’m familiar with aren’t adorable chubby babies, but glossy, black, athletic adults leaping for fish at feeding time in London Zoo when I was small, and gigantic elephant seals lounging on the shore in an Antarctic bay paying not the slightest attention to me as I picked my way through the spaces they leave between them. Vast blubber sacks, lolling, shapeless with fat, their truncated trunks flaccid, concealing lipstick-red mouths and throats that appear when they open wide to yawn. No, not them: baby seals, small, helpless, newborn, cute white ones with big watery eyes.”

Like Nabokov, whom she reveres, Diski remains vividly in touch with her previous selves; her sentences are time machines, blipping between eras (the child at London Zoo, the middle-aged author exploring the Antarctic) at the speed of thought. From Nabokov, she has also inherited a certain strategic recklessness with figurative language. She likes to swell the vehicle of a metaphor (in this case, the poor baby seals) until it overwhelms the tenor (here, her own battered cells). Cancer treatment as a massacre of baby seals: The image is perverse, but hardly any more so, when you think about it, than the “poison infusions” and “death rays” of modern oncology.

As the future recedes, the past rushes in to fill the vacancy. Diski’s has been some past. Of the misfortunes that can befall a person, there aren’t many she has avoided. Born in Central London to a pair of “suicidal hysterics,” as she describes them, both of whom sexually abused her, Diski grew up in the years of postwar austerity. Her father, a professional con man and prolific adulterer, abandoned her and her mother several times before finally disappearing for good. “Except once,” Diski notes, in “Skating to Antarctica,” “when we saw him at Tottenham Court Road tube station and my mother chased him with the knife she kept in her handbag expressly for the purpose of killing him should they ever meet by chance. He outran her.” Her mother, unstable at the best of times, drifted into psychosis; when they were no longer able to pay the bills, and bailiffs came to take away their possessions, Diski was instructed to go barefoot about the house, “in case the downstairs neighbors guessed we were carpetless.” Her adolescence was spent floating among foster families, in and out of psychiatric hospitals. At 14, she was raped by a stranger — a singer, he claimed — who had lured her into a recording studio in Notting Hill. Soon after that, she attempted suicide for the first time. In the background, the ’60s were happening, and the era’s drugs and delusions hastened Diski’s mental unraveling.

“The first half of my life was very busy,” Diski said to me, by way of summary, sounding a little incredulous. The second half, during which she “more or less stayed at home,” has arguably been busier still. Diski has published 10 novels. Her first, “Nothing Natural,” a hair-raisingly cleareyed account of a sadomasochistic love affair, came out in 1986; her most recent, “Apology for the Woman Writing,” from 2008, concerns the no-less-troubling relationship between Montaigne and a fanatical female admirer, Marie de Gournay. It is her nonfiction, however, to which she turned only later in her career, after a mounting disaffection with the novel form, that represents the most arresting claim on our attention.

A damaged past is a valuable commodity in today’s literary marketplace, dominated as it is by competitive self-exposure. The remarkable thing about Diski’s life-writing, by contrast, is its cerebral, anti-sensationalizing tone, the way it tacitly rejects the notion that early trauma retains an ineluctable hold on the self. Like Montaigne, she writes a curious brand of intellectual autobiography, in which her ideas and impressions — her response to reading “Moby-Dick” for the first time or her evolving views on psychoanalysis — are given as much salience as what, in more conventional hands, would constitute the main events.

In person, Diski is much like her prose: She talks about herself, and her present condition, with poised alienation. “It’s a unique experience,” she said of dying. “I’ve never done it before, and I won’t be doing it again.” Like the rest of her, Diski’s voice had taken a beating: froggy and phlegm-laced, a brittle truce between Received Pronunciation and her native London drawl, you can hear in it all the decades of cigarettes (Diski began smoking when she was 12) and, now, the lung cancer that has spread along her lymph nodes. Although the treatment seemed to have stalled the disease’s momentum, it had also worsened the pulmonary fibrosis (an incurable scarring of the lungs that, in effect, slowly suffocates the patient) with which Diski was diagnosed several years ago. It is now looking more likely that the fibrosis will kill her first.

Death, however, is only one-half of the story that Diski has been unfolding in the L.R.B. There is a portion of her overfull youth that, until now, has remained a blank. “If one cares about literary biography, it’s partly a duty,” she told me soberly. “At the same time, it’s a hunk of my life that’s not been there. And it’s irritated me, because there are inexplicable things. So I think it needed to be written about.”

In 1963, when Diski was 15, she received a letter from Doris Lessing, the future Nobel laureate, asking if she would like to come and live with her. At the time, Diski’s life was not going well. The previous year, after being expelled from boarding school — her offenses included climbing out her bedroom window in order to attend a late-night party in the nearby woods and stealing ether from the chemistry lab — she had tried to kill herself by swallowing a bottle of Nembutal. After her stomach was pumped, the doctors had her committed to Lady Chichester Hospital, a psychiatric facility. Of all the spooks and freaks who populate her past, the inmates she encountered “in the bin” were the ones she spoke of with the greatest fondness. All of them, she told me, “were narrators of one sort or another. They were all stories.” They were also, she said, extremely kind: “I felt quite contained and looked after by them.”

It was during her time at Lady Chichester that Lessing’s unlikely invitation arrived. “Ah, I see,” she remembers thinking. “That’s what’s going to happen to me next.” Lessing’s son, Peter, who was a classmate of Diski’s until her expulsion, had persuaded his mother to take her in. The head psychiatrist at Lady Chichester gave his blessing to the idea, and before long she was installed in the spare room of Lessing’s Camden home. Lessing got her new foster daughter into another school and paid for her to be psychoanalyzed. She also introduced Diski, already an aspiring writer, to the metropolitan literati. Having spent her childhood in a largely cultureless home, Diski found herself at the same dinner table as Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe and R.D. Laing. “People sat around and drank wine and enjoyed themselves and had sex with each other,” Diski said, recalling the permissive, bohemian mood of the Lessing household.

Since Lessing’s death in November 2013, at age 94, Diski had been mulling how she might address the three years she spent as her foster daughter, and the ambivalent friendship they maintained for the next half-century. After the cancer diagnosis, it occurred to her that she might tackle the two subjects, Lessing and her illness, together. “Really it’s the form, that’s what excites me,” she said. “It’s a kind of pull-me, push-me thing.” Diski, who has written of her dislike for what she calls “straight autobiography,” has deployed the same double-barreled structure before. In “Skating to Antarctica,” she interleaves her Antarctic voyage with recollections of her early childhood. In “Stranger on a Train,” the atmosphere in Amtrak smoking cars (“a circumscribed space with a group of others all with our lives on hold”) keeps sparking memories of her time in psychiatric hospitals.

Diski describes this method in one of her recent L.R.B. essays. In the mid-1980s, Lessing came to visit her at Friern Hospital in North London, where Diski, who was then in her late 30s, was recovering from a nervous collapse. At the root of her breakdown, Diski says, was a sense of mortification at her failure to get any work done. Lessing suggested she simply write down her life story: “It’s interesting enough, and there are editors who can deal with sorting out your sentences and that kind of thing.” Diski, dismayed that Lessing thought her sentences needed fixing, recoiled from the simplicity of this approach. What she had not yet come to understand “was how writing gathers everything into itself to make a satisfactory piece. My story, someone else’s story, a place, an idea, a dream, human anatomy, the mind acting on the world, vice versa, some or all and more yet unthought of, had to be combined in the right amounts in order to make a book, an essay, fiction, nonfiction, history, comedy, whatever, work. I was enough of a writer to know that writing the story of my interesting childhood was not being a writer.”

Once Diski did get going as a writer, she and Lessing agreed to a kind of literary nonaggression pact: Lessing would not write about Diski if Diski would not write about Lessing. Even now, I sensed a note of anxiety in Diski’s attitude toward her current project. When I asked her if she had any titles in mind for the finished work, she said: “ ‘Gratitude.’ Or: ‘Ingratitude.’ I can’t decide which.” Diski’s portrait of her foster mother is certainly one of excruciating ambivalence, but how could it be otherwise? Lessing was a figure of spiky contradictions: a crusading humanitarian who left behind two young children when she moved to London from Rhodesia in 1949 to pursue her literary vocation; a novelist of acute psychological penetration who seemed oblivious to the psychological wounds she inflicted on her son Peter; someone who felt toward others, as Diski said to me, “a sense of obligation without affection.”

Lessing was in her mid-40s and had recently published “The Golden Notebook,” which was widely, if not universally, hailed as an epochal masterpiece, when Diski came to live with her. A few months into her stay, Diski became mopey and withdrawn. One night, after Lessing asked her what was wrong, Diski stuttered out a question: Did Lessing even like her, and if she didn’t, where else could she go? Instead of reassuring her (or telling a reassuring lie), Lessing stood up and silently left the house. The next morning Diski came downstairs to find a letter (“At the top was my name, no ‘Dear,’ just Jenny scrawled in Doris’s almost indecipherable handwriting”) waiting for her on the kitchen table. In it, Lessing attacked her for her “demanding and threatening behavior” and accused her of emotional blackmail.

The episode is striking for the way it subtly suggests that Lessing (on the one hand, freighted with guilt over the children she left behind; on the other, ambivalent about this new child she has saddled herself with) was almost as helpless as Diski, her responses scripted by her own complicated past. As she delivers her blunt assessment of the young Diski (“if I was going to manage to become a grown-up rather than remain a manipulative infant, I had to learn not to behave as if I were still living in the psychologically poisoned atmosphere of my childhood”), Diski the writer, 50 years on, delivers her own implicit, and rather more nuanced, assessment of Lessing. For all the imaginative sympathy of her foster daughter’s portrayal, it seems doubtful that Lessing would have been altogether pleased with Diski’s scrutiny. A writer is someone who spies on her own life, and the lives of others; exact, unwavering observation is itself a kind of betrayal.

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Diski, right, in 1963, with the author Doris Lessing, with whom she lived for three years in her teens.Credit...Photograph from Jenny Diski

“What if I don’t die on time?” Diski asked me teasingly. The Poet, a soulful, ironic man in his mid-60s, had joined us in the living room, and his presence seemed to call forth Diski’s darker comic impulses. The two of them met at a London literary party in the late 1990s. Before Patterson, Diski told me, she hadn’t been in a relationship that lasted much more than a year; her first marriage, in the late 1970s, lasted, she said, “about a minute.” (The marriage, however, did produce a daughter, Chloe, whom Diski credits with saving her life; she and her ex-husband, Roger Diski — the two of them invented the surname together — remained good friends until his death in 2011.) Shortly after she and Patterson began dating, Diski decided to leave London, until then her lifelong home, for Cambridge, where Patterson is a professor of English at Queens’ College. A devout solitary, Diski at first resisted full cohabitation, moving into the house across the street from the one in which we now sat. It was only several years later that they finally moved in together.

“That does worry me,” Diski went on, pursuing her impish line of thought. “At what point does this come to an end, or do people say, ‘Come on!’ Which is what’s happening with Clive James, isn’t it? People are beginning to say, ‘Well?’ He’s been saying he’s been dying for a long time. And now there’s Oliver Sacks, who I feel I’m rather going head to head with.” A few days earlier, Sacks published an Op-Ed in The New York Times in which he revealed that he has terminal cancer and a matter of months to live. He felt “intensely alive,” and in the time left, he hoped “to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.” Already, it seemed, the imminence of death had sharpened his perceptions: “Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”

Diski shrugged when I asked her what she thought of the essay. For her, Sacks was a “self-involved sentimentalist.” Whatever you make of that judgment, it is instructive to compare his response to cancer with Diski’s. Her essays are full not of rejuvenated sensitivity but of blurred vision, brain fog, a redoubled insistence on the provisional, cobbled-together nature of the self and its knowledge of the world. Besides furnishing her with a subject, death does little for Diski. “It’s like peeping over the edge of the world while remembering you’ve left your spectacles on the kitchen table,” she writes of her cruelly paradoxical situation: knowing that death is on its way without knowing when exactly it will arrive. The lyrical tone is smothered in the very next sentence, however: “Or more accurately, like eating custard and ice cream while watching endless hours of ‘Inspector Morse’ in the hope that your chemo brain will have wiped at least one episode from your memory bank.” In other words, it’s like what it is.

We are drawn toward the self-described death for many reasons (pity, morbid prurience, schadenfreude), but perhaps the main one is the unexamined belief that the dying have something to tell us: some wisdom, some insight into the nature of things that is available only to those for whom the petty day-to-day concerns of life have fallen away. Diski rebuffs this expectation, exposes it for the wishful thinking it is. The critic Greil Marcus, a fierce admirer of Diski’s work, told me that what he found so distinctive about her recent essays was the way in which they talk about cancer “not in terms of what kind of sustenance it provides or what kind of lessons it gives but on its own terms.” Nor, he continued, does Diski say: “ ‘I’m not going to let cancer stop me from doing what I do.’ There’s no breast-beating, there’s no self-congratulation, there’s no seducing the reader into admiring her.”

When I asked her if, in the past few months, she’d begun to see the world differently, Diski responded without hesitation: “No.” She recalled the experience of giving up cigarettes 15 years ago: “I kept waiting for the world to smell wonderful. But no, I just didn’t have any cigarettes anymore.”

A taxi drew up outside. Diski had an appointment at the hospital for an X-ray on her wrist.

“You’re sure you don’t mind coming?” she asked me as we made our way out into the cold glare of the late winter afternoon.

“Not at all,” I replied. “As long as you don’t mind.”

She shrugged and then, after a pause, said, “I don’t give a toss, really.”

Lessing did not honor the terms of the agreement that she and Diski made. A fictionalized version of her foster daughter appears in Lessing’s dystopian novel “Memoirs of a Survivor,” which was published in 1974, eight years after Diski moved out. The book’s unnamed narrator takes in a young girl, Emily Cartwright, who appears in her living room one day without explanation. Her sullen and acerbic presence is a source of considerable resentment for the narrator, who sees on Emily’s face “a sour little smile, as if she was thinking: I’ve got you, you can’t escape me!”

Diski’s recent essays, you come to realize, are an act of reclamation. Although Diski says she recognizes herself in Emily, she also remembers another self from that time, “the me of my own feeling and behavior, which seemed always at odds or out of true with Doris’s analysis.” If the cancer sections of her recent essays are written against conventional ideas of how the dying ought to behave, the Lessing sections are written against Lessing’s view of what Diski was like as a young woman, the fictional version of herself that has been in circulation for many years.

“She can’t really cope with her sense of herself as seen by other people,” Patterson told me in his rooms at Queens’ College. “She finds it difficult to be responded to, to see herself mirrored in other people’s responses.” Why did he think this was the case? “It’s probably something to do with an inability to be certain of anything apart from herself. She had to rely on herself from the age of about 4.”

It reminded me of what Diski had said apropos of the letters she was receiving from readers of her cancer essays: “People saying, ‘I wish I could do something, you’re in all our thoughts’ and how much my work has meant to them. Which actually makes me want to scream, because I have no intention of helping anybody, ever.” I asked her what she did intend. “Just to write,” she said. “I like the idea that the writer writes and the reader reads and there’s pretty much a Chinese wall between the two.” Ever watchful for the dishonest remark or emotion, Diski immediately acknowledged this was a “fantasy,” but perhaps even the most relentlessly skeptical people can’t do without certain necessary illusions.

At the hospital, Diski was told she had a choice to make about her wrist.

“Operation, no operation,” she told Patterson and me after emerging from the radiologist’s office. “It’s impacted. If I don’t have an operation, it will hamper me, my movements. It won’t hurt for typing, I’ll be all right for typing, but I’ll have a bit of a problem. I’ll be slightly . . . deformed.”

Patterson nodded gravely. “If you were 20, I’d say — ”

“I know. I said: ‘Look, I’ve got lung cancer. I don’t want an operation.’ ”

“That seems sensible. That’s what I’d say.”

Quickly reconciled to this comparatively innocuous piece of bad news, Diski went off to have her cast changed.

When I returned the next day, I found Diski in bed, propped up against a bank of pillows, her finely lined face caught in the wan glow of the MacBook resting on her lap (the next installment of her L.R.B. memoir was due soon). She was eager to set something straight. However nonchalant she may have seemed the day before, she wanted me to know that the reality of her experience was far more complicated: “I’m perfectly capable of holding two, or more, contradictory things in my mind. If I say, on the one hand, ‘Death is an awfully big adventure’ (thank you Peter Pan for that quote) and swig morphine and tell jokes with Ian, that doesn’t also mean that I’m not terrified at the prospect of my own nonexistence.”

In recent weeks, the terror has been more in evidence than the composure. At the beginning of April, shortly after she was told that she had one more year to live, and that henceforth the care would be merely palliative — steroids, antibiotics, morphine, together with counseling sessions at the nearby hospice where, when the time comes, she plans to die — Diski began a Twitter spree that continued more or less unabated for the next month. A fugue of demented wordplay and splenetic typos, it is by turns hilarious, baffling and disquieting:

I’m not dead today but I did sleep with half a Tunnock’s biscuit on my chest which is a warning.

I can’teen think. I think the planet is made of butter it tries to be.

The poet says I mustn’t tweet or everyone will know I’m mad. And it’s a state secret.

Also the cat’s out of the bag. I’ve been mad for donkeys ears and donkears are very. Long as we know. So what’s the point of pretending.

I’ve just been told that the people who scream and are agitated here in the hospice aren’t ready to die. Haven’t thought about it enough.

Best get thinking, I’d say.

It’s hard to stop, once you’ve started scrolling down the page. The sense of immediacy — that we are witnessing firsthand the writhing of a mind in extremis — is exhilarating or, at any rate, titillating. But the tweets aren’t half as revealing as what Diski puts down on the page; for the most part, to use a word she favors, they are just babble. Perhaps their real use, if any, is to throw her essays into relief, to point up the difference between an online “personality” and the self that emerges, through infinite patience and cunning, over the course of a life’s work. “The experience may be a great bubbling mess of muck,” Diski told me, laboring to sit up more straightly in her bed, “but I’ve used it and played with it and turned it into . . .”

“Sentences?” I offered.

“Sentences,” she said.

The morning was getting on. Diski had been an alert and exacting presence, but she also gave the impression of inhabiting two realms simultaneously. Now, her gaze lingering on her laptop, she seemed to be feeling the tug of the inner life. I was conscious of keeping her from pressing business. After all, she was on deadline; there were still more sentences to write.

A correction was made on 
June 28, 2015

An article on June 14 about the writer Jenny Diski rendered incorrectly the name of the institution where her husband, Ian Patterson, teaches. It is Queens’ College, not Queen’s.

How we handle corrections

Giles Harvey is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, among other places.

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