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Q&A: Anansi publisher Sarah MacLachlan on Diana Athill’s 70-year-old Florence Diary

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(photo: courtesy Diana Athill/Anansi)

Diana Athill, the legendary U.K. author and editor, turns 99 on Dec. 21, and to celebrate the occasion, she is sharing a recently discovered travel journal from her first time abroad.

The Florence Diary documents Athill’s 1947 trip to Italy with her cousin Pen, and recounts their adventures: the sights, the food, and the men. The thin volume is accompanied by photographs of their two-week journey, and an introduction by Athill.

Granta Books published the title in the U.K., and House of Anansi Press, which published Athill’s story collection Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, has North American rights. Q&Q spoke to Anansi president and publisher Sarah MacLachlan about The Florence Diary and her relationship to Athill, who over four decades working at the publishing house André Deutsch edited the likes of Philip Roth, Normal Mailer, Simone de Beauvoir, Jack Kerouac, Margaret Atwood, and Mordecai Richler.

Where was this journal discovered?

I’m not altogether sure where it was discovered, other than probably Diana was rifling through her papers and found it and probably told her U.K. publisher, Granta. They jumped on it because, of course, Diana in the U.K. is … she describes herself as something of the “nation’s oldie.” She still writes for The Guardian – she’ll do op-eds and book reviews. She’s still very much in the cultural conversation.

I think they were looking for something that they could publish of hers. Diana agreed to do an introduction talking about what it was like to be a young woman post-war, and having believed that you would never, ever get off the island – that you would always be stuck there – but suddenly have the possibility of travel and what travel affords. It’s a lovely little armchair travel meditation.

AthillHow did the book come to be with Anansi?

Anansi distributed Granta for years, and that’s when I first came into contact with Diana. And my husband, Noah Richler, knew Diana because she was [his father] Mordecai’s first editor.

So we were in London and we had lunch with her, about 2008, and I really loved her – we got along like a house on fire right off the top. She told us how much she loved Alice Munro, and she’d never been to Canada, and so both Noah and I both got it in our heads that to get her to Canada to meet Alice Munro would be our priority.

When we got back, I was talking to [bookseller] Ben McNally and he said they were doing this PEN event celebrating Alice Munro, but needed somebody to interview her. And I said, “I’ve got the answer!” So we were able to bring Diana over. It’s perhaps the most special literary event I’ve ever been at because they loved each other.

She wanted to go to Niagara Falls. It was just a grey, November day, and wet. And she loved the whole thing. We went into the tchotchke shop, and there was a photo booth set up so that you can look like you’re going over the falls in a barrel, or you’re being pushed over. She really wanted to get her picture done. They took a picture of her in the wheelchair and we pretended like we were throwing her over. And so she went away with an eight-by-ten photograph of herself being pitched over the falls by her publishers in Canada. She has a great sense of humour.

Diana’s deaf now, so you can’t phone her and speak very easily. And she can’t type anymore. So the only way to communicate with her is to send her letters. So we have a fantastically old-fashioned correspondence. But she’s still an avid, avid reader and still very with it. She wrote to me the other day saying, “It’s just occurred to me that I’m in the final year of my 10th decade. I’m beginning to feel really old.”

Although the journal is nearly 70 years old, there is still something very contemporary about both her writing and her experiences. What do you attribute that to?

It’s amazing this freedom with which she expresses herself about the boy who she’s quite sure wants to go to bed with her, but she’s just not really up for that – the way she thinks through that whole inevitability that if she went to Rome she might sleep with him, and what would the parents think? I mean, it’s just so today, don’t you think? It’s not gushy, it’s so thoughtful.

Her short fiction is equally of its time and yet very, very modern. A testament to how modern she is, is that Lena Dunham is a huge fan and is going to give us an endorsement for the book, and sent one of her people to interview her for Lenny Letter. Lena represents that generation of young women who is engaged by this fantastic nearly 100-year-old woman.

She was an amazing woman because she was still of her time. She was brought up with nannies – I’m conflating the kind of upbringing she describes, and how in contrast her life was to that upbringing. She doesn’t really believe in marriage and she doesn’t believe in jealousy, and she had a black, Jamaican lover that lived with her and when that waned, she kept living with him, and he then brought a new partner into the relationship. It’s kind of wild.

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(photo: courtesy Diana Athill/Anansi)

This interview has been edited and condensed.