Diana Athill's childhood was idyllic, brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Aged only 15, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They travelled to Oxford, engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way. In this modern memoir, Diana Athill dissects the terrible consequences of loss and her struggle to rebuild a personality destroyed by sadness.

Instead of a Letter

Literature & Fiction

Diana Athill

Contemporary

ROBIN CLARK

Instead of a Letter [Hardcover] [Jan 01, 1984] Diana Athill

INSTEAD OF A LETTER

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Carroll&Graf

For nearly five decades Diana Athill edited (nursed, coerced, coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language—among them V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and Norman Mailer. A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house Andr Deutsch Ltd., Athill takes us on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate insider's portrait of the glories and pitfalls of making books. 
Stet is spiced with candid insights about the type of people who make brilliant writers and ingenious publishers and the idiosyncrasies of both. It brims with Athill's memories of serving as confidante, midwife, and sometime therapist to great literary figures: Nobody who has read Jean Rhys' first four novels can suppose that she was good at life, but no one who never met her could know how very bad she was at it; "It was my job to listen to [Naipaul's] unhappiness and do what I could to ease it, which would not have been too bad if there had been anything I could do." Most of all it is Athill's voice that captivates—intimate, lively, generous, humorous, the voice of a favorite aunt who is as warm and big-hearted as she is worldly and irreverent. 
Packed with delights, Stet is about the world of books, about people who write them and the process of making them, a world dissected with sharp and irresistible honesty. It is an invaluable contribution to the world of literature.

Stet

Arts & Literature

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things that Matter

After four decades as an editor with André Deutsch, Diana Athill (b.1917) began a second career as a writer with her memoir, Stet, in 2001. Alive, Alive Oh! is her fifth book, reflecting on being very old and looking back, not on literary work, but on memorable experiences of places and things including her grandparents' garden in Norfolk, a miscarriage in her forties, and a £21 holiday at the new Club Méditerranée, Corfu, in the 1950s.

Alive, Alive Oh : And Other Things that Matter

Granta Books

What matters in the end? In the final years of life, which memories stand out? Writing from her retirement home in Highgate, London, as she approaches her 100th year, Diana Athill reflects on what it is like to be in her nineties, and on the moments in her life which have risen to the surface and sustain her in her later years. She recalls in sparkling detail the exact layout of the garden of her childhood, a vast and beautiful park attached to a large house, and writes with humour, clarity and honesty about her experiences of the First and Second World Wars, and her trips to Europe as a young woman. In the remarkable title chapter, Athill describes her pregnancy at the age of forty-three, losing the baby and almost losing her life, and her gratitude on discovering that she had survived. With vivid memories of the past mingled with candid, wise and often very funny reflections on the experience of being very old, Alive, Alive Oh! reminds us of the joy and richness to be found at every stage of life.

A Florence Diary

Travel

Travel Writing

This is the story of how and why a talented writer came to kill himself. When Diana Athill met the man she calls Didi, an Egyptian in exile, she fell in love instantly and out of love just as fast. Didi moved into her flat, they shared housework and holidays, and a life of easy intimacy seemed to beckon. But Didi's sweetness and intelligence soon revealed a darker side - he was a gambler, a drinker and a womanizer, impossible to live with but impossible to ignore. With painful honesty, Athill explores the three years they spent together, a period that culminated in Didi's suicide - in her home - an event he described in the journals he left for her to read as 'the one authentic act of my life'.

After A Funeral

Parenting & Relationships

Athill's debut, and a modern classic memoir: a moving story of love and loss, heartbreak and hope during the second world war.

Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend

Essays & Correspondence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Diana Athill. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Diana Athill

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Diana Athill. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Instead of a Letter

INSTEAD OF A LETTER

Stet

Alive, Alive Oh : And Other Things that Matter

Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things that Matter

A Florence Diary

After A Funeral

Instead of a Letter

Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend

Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend