Skating to Antarctica

Only after learning the details of the author's upbringing will readers understand why she never contacted her mother after her father's death in 1966. Novelist Diski (Nothing Natural) was brought up in a London Jewish community, the only child of a father who specialized in confidence games and a suicidal mother who alternated between depression and violent outbursts. Both parents played sexual touching games with her, she reports, in this powerful memoir. Diski describes how she and her mother were evicted for nonpayment of rent after her father left home and how she endured years of unstable school and living arrangements because her parents were too self-involved to care for her. Diski was treated for depression in psychiatric hospitals and learned to value the quiet she found there. Woven into this harrowing memoir are beautiful descriptions of a trip she took to Antarctica, whose blank landscape Diski compares to the safety and isolation of the mental hospital. Recently her own daughter, Chloe, decided to search for Diski's mother and learned that she died nine years ago, a fact that has provided the author with some closure to the pain of her childhood. (Aug.)