It seems like such a simple goal. Sitting down to write her first story, Diana Athill gave herself one directive: “I’m going to get it just as it was.”

Memoir has become a genre in danger of being completely debased; yet Athill’s volumes of recollection, now brought together into one pleasingly hefty, elegantly beribboned book entitled Life Class (Granta, £25; Buy this book), are a sturdy breakwater against the tides of ghosted sleb kiss’n’tell.

Athill is best known for Stet, her account of a life in publishing that won deservedly wide acclaim when it appeared at the beginning of the decade; at the age of 83 she burst on to the scene, or so it seemed. But she had been, in fact, a pioneer of a kind of writing that, when she began to practise it, hardly had a name. There was “autobiography”, which was the sort of book a Great Man (usually the writer would be a man, or should be) would write as an account of his Great Life, and his encounters with other Great Folk. When Instead of a Letter was published in 1963 (the year of Sylvia Plath’s suicide; the year that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out), it was called “documentary” — and so it was, the documentary of one woman’s ordinary and yet, in her telling, wholly extraordinary life.

On the surface it’s the story of a young woman from a privileged upbringing suffering the loss of an early love; a fiancé who jilts her, shortly before he is then killed in the war. But it is much more than surface: it is a deep recounting of a whole human being’s whole heart, its apparent death and final renewal. “During that time,” she writes of the period after Paul vanished from her life, “my soul shrank to the size of a pea. It had never been very large or succulent, or capable of sending out sprouts beyond the limits of self, but now it had almost shrivelled away. I became artful in avoiding pain and in living from one small sensation to another, because what else could one do when one had understood that, as far as one’s personal life was concerned, one was a failure ... If one was not to be a walking Francis Bacon picture, a gaping bloody mouth open in a perpetual scream, what could one do but go to the cinema and be grateful for an amusing film; go to bed and feel the smoothness of the sheets and the warmth of the blankets ... After the late shift the tiny sequins of the traffic lights, reduced by masks during the blackout, changed from red to amber to green down the whole length of empty, silent Oxford Street. They looked as though they were signalling a whispered conversation, and they were the kind of thing with which I filled my days.”

It is Athill’s ability to draw the consolation of beauty from the smallest observed moments that turns her telling of her life — at all its stages — into art; it is that ability, too, that nourishes the reader and makes the author a true friend. Life Class demonstrates that real life is not the privilege of the great and the good, the famous and adored: it lies within all our reach, if only we think to look, and to endeavour to get it just as it was.

Diana Athill will be in conversation with Erica Wagner on November 8, 6.30pm, at Foyles Bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2, 020-7437 5660. Tickets are free: to reserve a place e-mail events@foyles.co.uk. Write to us: books@thetimes.co.uk

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