Diana Athill

Somewhere Towards the End

In 1917, famed English editor Diana Athill was born into an upper-middle-class life in Norfolk, England, complete with a stately mansion and servants. But life wasn’t easy: the family finances were foundering, and her parents were deeply unhappy together. In her late teens she discovered that her sister, Patience, had been conceived as a result of her mother’s affair with an army officer.

From Somewhere Towards the End:

“…One life can contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving…”

At fifteen, Athill fell in love with Tony Irvine, an Oxford graduate and RAF pilot. They were engaged to be married when he left for World War II but, after two years, he wrote asking to be released from their engagement so he could marry someone else. Shortly afterward, he was killed in action. The pain of this event devastated her for the next twenty years and resulted in an aversion to being tied down; in numerous affairs she was “the other woman.” In 1951, she and the Hungarian publisher André Deutsch put together the company that bore his name. As an editor, she worked closely with legendary authors such as Norman Mailer, Simone du Beauvoir, and Margaret Atwood.

Athill began writing in earnest in her early forties. She wrote Somewhere Towards the End, a memoir, at the age of eighty-nine. Almost a decade later and in assisted living, Athill does not count out the possibility of another memoir.

She has said, “I think the fact that I’m in my nineties and still compos mentis, and able to write and have a nice time, is encouraging to people. They can look at me and say, ‘There is somebody who is old—which I am dreading—but there, it’s not so bad.’”

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Yesterday Morning. A vivid, compelling memoir of childhood and old age.

Divine GreenTini

Diana Athill’s mother’s last words before she died, in describing her final gardening activity of going to buy a eucalyptus tree to plant: “It was absolutely divine.”

1½ oz. Midori

1½ oz. gin

1 maraschino cherry

Shake ingredients, except the cherry, in a shaker and pour into a martini glass. Garnish with the cherry. Serves 1.