![]() in 1995 and appearing now for the first time in an American edition. Her first stint in the Bin is told in the story “Strictempo,” one of a dozen, not all of them autobiographical, collected in The Vanishing Princess, her only book of short stories, published in the U.K. ![]() The question was how long was she going to stay there and whether when she left she could take that feeling of safety, that whiteness, with her. There were others there who were worse off than she was, perhaps including the doctors and nurses, and she could observe them. They made her feel safe in ways she never quite felt in her parents’ homes, at boarding school, or out in the topsy-turvy London of the 1960s. She liked the white sheets of the hospital bed, and the white walls. But there were things she liked about being there, to a point. One of her refrains was that she was never quite mad enough actually to belong in the Bin. ![]() She would return to psychiatric hospitals in her early 20s, and it was an experience she revisited over and over again in her writing. Jenny Diski wound up in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager after being kicked out of boarding school, getting sacked from a couple of jobs, running away from her father’s home, and returning to her mother, who was herself in the midst of an ongoing nervous breakdown. Let’s start in the Bin, as she always called it. ![]()
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