Published: 03/02/2022
ISBN: 9781783787401
Granta Books
176 pages

After A Funeral

Diana Athill

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’.

Only a few totally honest accounts of a human life exist. To see the truth of your own life you must have gotten beyong all illusions about yourself, and probably about the world, as well. Few of us do. Diana Athill is one of the few.

Washington Post

A book which gives a new dimension to honesty, a new comprehension to love

Vogue

Anyone who believes that human relationships are important cannot fail to be moved by this book

Daily Telegraph

The Author

Diana Athill was born in 1917. She helped André Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Athill’s distinguished career as an editor is the subject of her acclaimed memoir Stet. She is the author of seven further volumes of memoirs, Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End, Alive, Alive Oh!, A Florence Diary, and a collection of letters, Instead of a Book, all published by Granta. Her only novel, Don’t Look At Me Like That, was first published in 1967. In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and was presented with an OBE. She died in January 2019.