Dying for attention

Not content with Facebooking our every foible, Instagramming the births of our children and live-tweeting our daily lives, more and more of us are now making a public spectacle of dying. We’re inviting strangers not merely to ‘like’ expertly filtered photos of our breakfasts, but to admire the way we peg out. Nothing better captures the death of privacy than this publicisation of death.

It began with the literary set. It’s a rare writer these days diagnosed with a terminal illness who doesn’t get a book out of it. Jenny Diski is the latest public dyer. She’s giving readers of the London Review of Books a blow-by-blow account of her death by lung cancer, covering everything from the diagnosis to her chemo sessions. It’s moving and sometimes gripping, but it feels wrong.

To draw back the curtain on a woman’s death scene and watch her skin turn ‘deep red with flaky patches’ — shouldn’t that be for friends and family, not for strangers? Even Diski seems to have doubts.