Jenny Diski: 'I didn't care if I lived or died'

Jenny Diski grew out of a miserable youth to become one of the most inventive writers of her generation. Marianne Brace hears her story of chaos, creativity and contemplation

As I walk away from Jenny Diski's house it suddenly strikes me that, during the two hours we spent together, she didn't light up. Not once. There were no cigarettes in evidence, no lingering smell of a recent fag. Diski didn't seem jittery with nicotine craving, like someone deferring a longed-for puff. This is surprising, because in Stranger on a Train (Virago, £15.99) – her new memoir of her rail travels in the US, and of her teenage years – Diski reveals that "much of what I have to describe in this book is predicated on the fact that I smoke ... What I did, who I spoke to, what I had to say, was often very directly related to my wish to smoke ... For the most part, cigarettes dictated my actions".

Diski, as she admits, is full of contradictions. Who else would travel "in order to keep still"? She can find a coffin-like cabin bliss, while also hankering for the vastness of an ocean or the blank repetition of an Antarctic landscape.

Despite a sharp mind, Diski has a passion for oblivion. She also needs to be alone: "I don't get bored, ever, on my own." Yet she has found her stints in mental institutions a tempting option. She dislikes the vulturism of literary biography, and yet has written two riveting memoirs which invite us to glimpse her disjunctive upbringing.

Diski has always used autobiographical material in her novels, but the fine Skating to Antarctica was her first foray into memoir. "I wanted to go to Antarctica and it's very, very expensive," she says matter-of-factly. "I'm very anti-social and wasn't prepared to share a cabin with anyone, so it was even more expensive." She wrote the book to pay her fare. The travelogue also turned out to be a voyage around her mother, whom she last saw in 1966.

Stranger on a Train trawls her past, too. Diski laughs. "I'm faintly ashamed of writing these things but I never thought of them as autobiography – I thought of them as playing around with my material." She sees the past as "moments", and has "a terrible resistance to straightforward chronology".

Someone once told Diski that, with her background, she ought to have turned out not depressive, but psychotic. Her Jewish parents had both been married before, and were both failed suicides. Brought up in a flat on Tottenham Court Road in central London, their daughter had everything a nice girl could want, from skating lessons to satin bows for her hair. There was even a painting of her dead half-brother for her to talk to. But Diski's mismatched parents – a clever, charming con-man and an uneducated, volatile materialist – quarrelled violently. Money was always a problem. Her father first left when Diski was six and her mother had a nervous breakdown. Jenny was fostered. Her father returned, and then left for good five years later.

Diski's mother would not work and thought claiming social security benefit beneath her. Gradually, the bailiffs took everything, leaving mother and daughter to tiptoe on bare floorboards so the neighbours wouldn't know the carpets had been seized. "The only way we got out of it was by me freaking out," says Diski, who was sent to a progressive boarding school by social workers. Here she sniffed ether and was expelled at 13.

Diski then yo-yoed between her parents. She tracked down her father, who found her a job in a grocery store, then in a shoe shop. Jenny told her colleague about wanting to write and the manager overheard. "Most unjust: I was sacked for literary ambition."

Diski went back to her mother. Two days later she took an overdose. "I ended up in the bin, where they kept me for a couple of months." It was at this point that Doris Lessing, the mother of a boy from her old boarding school, offered to take in the 14-year-old Diski. It was a jump from selling slingbacks to meeting "God-like Alan Sillitoe" at dinner. "I had to do some very fast learning," she says.

Diski remained with Lessing for almost four years. Her father died, and Diski and her mother had their last-ever screaming match at Lessing's house. "I'm really not able to think about my mother nicely," she says, stroking a cat. "She had the emotions of a child, needy and profoundly lacking in insight." Diski had adored her father.

She knows her mother's life was not easy. Diski only met her maternal grandfather once, but it was enough. "He was like something out of Dickens. He lived in a hovel in the East End. It was just filthy and disgusting and he drank tea out of a saucer – which I was excited about. When he saw me, he went to the fire and put ashes on his hands and came towards me." She laughs. "I was scared shitless."

Her father's death marked the beginning of another breakdown. Diski spent "the next two years in and out of various bins". She was injecting methyl amphetamine and dropping acid. "I was taking it because I didn't care if I lived or died." Eventually, she decided against spending her life on psychiatric wards. She had a daughter at 30 ("I became gradually less mad through having a child, it structured my life") and wrote her first novel five years later.

She began to write after surfacing from depression. "I just really did wake up and see how to do it." Giving the manuscript to a friend, she remembers thinking about the best way to commit suicide. "It involved going to Australia," she laughs. "I had put myself on the line. It seemed to me to have been a completely insane thing to have done."

Diski makes no distinction between her fiction, non-fiction and journalism. Her novels are ideas-driven (science, religion, dysfunctional families) but "playful". Her novelistic skills shape the non-fiction, and the non-fiction refers back to the novels. "In a sense, Stranger on a Train is a discussion with my novelist self. It lets me talk in an abstract way about what I do and don't do in fiction."

This journey began on a cargo ship crawling across the Atlantic. Diski then made two separate journeys around America on the fancifully named trains Lake Shore Limited, Empire Builder, Coast Starlight, California Zephyr and Southwest Chief. She joined the barfly population of the smoking carriages – the aggressive, the aggrieved, the poor and the perverse, each with a story to tell. They included a Julia Roberts lookalike nursing a growing blood clot where someone had slammed a door against her head, the drunk Raymond, who invited Diski to share his life, and the once-pretty Bet, with her cowboy boots and bereavement.

Diski stayed with Bet's family in Albuquerque and writes about how suburbia took on a nightmarish tinge. Inexplicably, she became gripped by a Misery-type fantasy, believing her hosts were going to imprison her. "I hope it's clear it's what was going on in my head," she explains. Even so, she feels uneasy about how Bet might feel. "It's one of the problems of non-fiction. I couldn't not write it. But I felt it wasn't nice of me to write about it like that."

Fiction has its problems, too. "Every now and again a sentence really works, but mostly writing is about to what extent something doesn't work ... The most terrible thing is the first sentence, because it's closing down an infinite number of possibilities. Each book is a failure to write the book you meant to write ... There's a perfect novel in my head, and I can't get it down on paper."

Having relished the ocean and rolled through the prairie, what next for Diski? The desert? "I suspect the desert's a bit too interesting for me." She fancies an even longer boat trip, alone with the horizon. She muses, "I haven't had enough of sitting and watching emptiness pass."

Biography

Jenny Diski was born in London in 1947. After her parents separated, she lived as a teenager with Doris Lessing (the mother of a fellow boarding-school pupil) for four years. She left school without taking her A-levels, spent time in psychiatric hospitals, and did a series of odd jobs, later training as a teacher and working in a Hackney comprehensive. She also helped found a Free School. Diski is the author of eight novels, starting with Nothing Natural in 1985 and including Rainforest, Like Mother, Then Again, Monkey's Uncle, Happily Ever After, The Dream Mistress and Only Human. She has also published a collection of short stories, The Vanishing Princess. Don't (Granta) is a collection of her essays from the London Review of Books. The bestselling Skating to Antarctica (also published by Granta) was her first memoir. Her second, Stranger on a Train, based on two long-distance railway journeys she made around America, is published next week by Virago. Jenny Diski has a grown-up daughter, and now lives in Cambridge with three cats.