A collection of the best of the indomitable Jenny Diski's essays, one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature (The New York Times Magazine), selected by London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers.

She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be. --New Yorker

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books--selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude--have been described as virtuoso performances, and small masterpieces.

From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated--and mordantly funny.