Skating to Antarctica

""The one truly generous act of my mother's that I could really put my finger on: her leaving me alone," writes Jenny Diski of the woman she has neither seen nor heard from - to her great relief - since 1966, the year of her father's death. Both parents were suicidal, absconding hysterics who would return from mysterious stints away to play bizarre sexual games with their daughter. Life with them engendered in Diski a profound desire to escape into oblivion. As a teenager, oblivion meant heavy drug use and the white of psychiatric wards; as an adult the boundless, blank iciness of Antarctica becomes her imaginary, and ultimately her actual, haven." "Diski finds her characteristic dispassion is at risk when her own daughter, Chloe, develops a keen desire to know the fate of her missing maternal grandmother. Chloe's research efforts get serious just as Diski embarks on a ship bound for Antarctica. Her journey to the end of the world thus takes on an evocative and ironic weight, providing the ideal space and time in which to consider the possibility that her mother is still alive, time to remember herself as a child, before years of neglect and rejection hardened her heart."--Jacket.