Feature: Interview with literary editor and memoirist Diana Athill

Published: 08 July 2010
by JOSIE HINTON

T0 get a room alongside literary editor and memoirist Diana Athill in her exclusive Highgate residential care home there are certain criteria: You must (according to local rumour) be reading Proust and Kafka. You must have led at least a reasonably interesting life. And you must still be in possession of your marbles – at least until you’re through the front door.

“Of course, if you lose them while you’re there they try to manage with you, unless you’re completely impossible,” she told an audience at St Mary’s Church in Primrose Hill on Wednesday.

“But what I discovered is this place is not a nursing home. People there may look  as if they can’t communicate at all, but if you actually take the trouble to make yourself heard you find everybody is actually very interesting.”

Ms Athill is clearly no exception. During a career in publishing spanning 50 years she has worked with some of the biggest and most talked about authors of the 20th century, and at 92 she is still influencing the publishing world with her frank and revealing memoirs.

Speaking at the Elsworthy Road church on Wednesday night as part of the Primrose Hill lecture series, the writer and editor revealed the daily details of her life that have kept her cheerful about getting old and living in a retirement home.

“There are certain things you have to get used to like the fact that men pass you by in the street without noticing you, which on the whole is actually quite a comfort,” she said. “And this business of travelling when you’re old. You’re whizzed ahead of everybody and it’s often the case that you don’t even need to find your passport. 

“My mother always stubbornly refused to be in a wheelchair while travelling, but she made 

a big mistake. I  went to Canada last year and it was the easiest journey I’ve ever made.”

And despite describing the move to a home as “easily the biggest of my life” – requiring her to whittle down her collection of books to just 300 and say goodbye to her Primrose Hill flat – Ms Athill now welcomes the constant company.

“To begin with I did think, ‘so many grey heads, all old people’. Now of course I know them I really don’t think of them being old at all. What is often forgotten is that most people go on being who they are.”