WE ALL wish we were better read, but if you can't be, let people think you are. Twice I reckon I managed to impress with my literary-based trivia, most recently at a posh wedding, on being introduced to a young man called Balthazar, when I wondered out loud: "... as in the beastly beatitudes?" The time before that was six years ago, on a train in Canada, and a young woman's name-tag prompted me to inquire: "Any relation to Jenny Diski?"
I've never read JP Donleavy but I have read Jenny Diski, who today is sitting in her publisher's office in Bloomsbury, London, while Chloe, her daughter and the girl on the train, waits for her on the other side of the glass partition. This is discon
certing for the writer because I've just asked how she went about motherhood, after her own mother made such an appalling job of it.
A reasonable question, given how much Diski, 62, has written about her gruesome childhood, and that her mother creeps in and out of her third memoir, about the Swinging Sixties. At first she says: "I'm not going to talk about that because my daughter gets very cross." But moments later she's explaining how the first memoir, Skating To Antarctica, wasn't prompted by the urge to travel, more to flee a possible reunion with her mother.
She says: "When Chloe was on her gap year she started mouldering on about having a granny somewhere. I told her I didn't want to know. But she went to the records office to find out if she was still alive, so I went to ends of the earth. Luckily for all of us – including, I think, my mother – it turned out she'd died in 1988.
"So what kind of mother am I? Less mad, hopefully."
Born in London to Jewish parents, Diski had adored her conman father (he seduced well-off women) who left when she was six, when her mother suffered a nervous breakdown. That was the age at which Diski says she became depressed and the Sixties, however much they swung, didn't change things. "I was a miserable cow," she says.
Swotting up on Diski, I thought she might be a difficult interviewee. She doesn't do eye contact, and sometimes she answers abruptly, but she can also be funny. "We are the disappointed remnant, the rump of the Sixties" is one of several good lines from the book. When I quote it back at her, she says: "Maybe my publishers should give away knickers with the book saying 'Jenny's disappointed rump', what do you think?"
Then she tells me that the book's themes– Were the Sixties really about changing the world? Weren't the ideas old ones dressed up by Biba? Didn't Sixties "freedom" open the way for Eighties greed and self-interest? – are to be the subject of a debate on Radio 4's Today programme. "Who shall we get on, they said – Pete Townshend? I said Pete Doherty. Someone of this generation who complains that the children of the Sixties are always banging on about them but who doesn't write anything in riposte. I'd love to discuss this with Mr Doherty but the only name they've come back with is Felix Dennis (publisher of Oz in the Sixties; less epochal stuff since]. What am I going to say to him? How's Asian Babes?"
Diski initially turned down her book, called simply The Sixties. "We didn't need any more about the period, and they were all dreadful. Too partisan, too sentimental – or written by ten-year-olds." So what changed her mind? "If someone's insistent enough then eventually I'll do anything."
Perhaps the most headline-grabbing line in the book is: "On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn't take no for an answer." In the flower-power era no one said it with flowers. "Want to f***?" was usual chat-up. "And it was considered rude not to," she says.
Expelled from boarding school for attending an all-night party and sniffing ether, a runaway, an attempted suicide at 15 and a foster-daughter of Doris Lessing (whose dinner-party guests included radical psychologist RD Laing), Diski says she was "the Sixties waiting to happen". In the second of her three "bins" – psychiatric hospitals – she developed a taste for methylamphetamine. Back in the real world of a Covent Garden bedsit, she smoked dope, dropped acid and even tried heroin. The night she thought bugs were crawling over her body persuaded her to quit drugs. Presumably, though, the bugs were preferable to unwanted men.
Diski doesn't romanticise the Sixties; nor does she name-drop. She had a friend who lived with Pink Floyd but he doesn't make it into the book, and his glamour quotient was dulled by him being "as mad as a rat" and convinced "the mother of all pubic crabs" inhabited the flat.
The Sixties was a time of great narcissism – "there's no doubt about that." But she doesn't hold with the view that the hippie begat the yuppie. "We may have been woolly-minded but we were interested in what was going on in the world and concerned about each other – more than the young now, I think."
For the would-be writer, the Sixties was the "solipsistic dream". "Others took drugs and had sex; I did them and sat in a corner and watched all these crazy thoughts zoom past." Diski's bad poetry from that era is kept under lock and key, far away from her current partner, a proper poet, Ian Patterson, but the writing has got much better since then.
So what's her next book about? "Animals," she says. "I much prefer them to humans." v
The Sixties (Profile, £10.99) is published 2 July