Skating to Antarctica

This travel journal traces a personal journey to Antarctica. For over 30 years Jenny Diski was content to leave the question as to whether her mother was alive or dead unanswered. Not knowing the fate of the violent woman she last saw shortly after her father's death in 1966 filled her with a sense of relief rather than of loss. Then, just as Diski is planning a trip to the dream world of ice, her own teenage daughter decides to investigate what had happened to her crazy, missing maternal grandmother. Diski's unexamined desire to travel to the whiteness of Antarctica becomes a more complicated journey than she expected as cabin 532 of the Russian-crewed ship takes her further than just the world of icebergs. She also voyages back into the faded landscape and closed-off world of her childhood - to her distraught mother, her conman of a father and a child called Jennifer. Her mother had taken Jennifer ice skating from the age of two, hoping for an ice princess as a daughter. What she got was something icier. Jenny Diski is the author of "Nothing Natural", "Rainforest", "Like Mother", "Then Again", Happily Ever After", "Monkey's Uncle" and "The Dream Mistress, as well as a collection of short stories called "The Vanishing Princess".