Skating to Antarctica

Paperback: 256 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.61 x 8.00 x 5.28
Publisher: Ecco; (July 1, 2001)
ISBN: 0060957964

"I am not entirely content with the degree of whiteness in my life. My bedroom is white: white walls, icy mirrors, white sheets and pillowcases, white slatted blinds. It's the best I could do."

Jenny Diski's obsession with the cool purity of white began early in life, when as a small child, she was taken for weekly skating lessons at the local ice rink. Between practicing figure eights, she would watch the Zamboni move across the ice scraping away the pitted, blade-scored surface: "It was all taken away in minutes and underneath was pure, untouched surface again, gleaming milky white, virgin, immaculate ice." This gleaming, immaculate ice stands in stark contrast to Diski's dark and emotionally fraught home life with two abusive parents. Skating to Antarctica is an unusual blend of travel essay and personal memoir, one that uses the phases of a physical journey to trace the trajectory of the inner life. Both journeys begin for Diski when her 18-year-old daughter Chloe decides to search for the maternal grandmother she has never met. It has been 30 years since Diski last saw her mother, and she has no desire to find her; is it merely coincidence that she books her passage to Antarctica shortly after Chloe begins the hunt?

Weaving painful memories of a childhood spent entangled in her parents' vicious sexual psychodramas and an adolescence in and out of mental wards into an account of her slow journey south, Diski imbues both voyages of discovery with a resonance that comes largely from twinning these tales.