Emilia Clarke Discusses Her Love of Reading and the Book That Helped Her Process Her Father’s Death

In 2011, HBO’s Game of Thrones, a TV adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s gritty fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire made its debut and propelled a number of young actors into stardom.

Emilia Clarke soon became recognised across the globe for her role as Daenerys Targaryen AKA The Mother of dragons, who blazes a trail of fire and blood in a patriarchal society with three dragons at her side. Clarke has appeared in a number of high profile roles outside of Thrones, from Star Wars to the Terminator franchise, but when she’s not acting, she loves diving into a good book.

In a recent interview, Clarke discussed her love of books, and one title, in particular, that helped her grieve her father’s passing.

Jenny Diski

Speaking on the BBC’s Cultural Frontline Programme, Clarke said: “I normally live in bookshops and I read all the time. I am unhappy if I’m not in the middle of a book.”

One of Clarke’s favourite books she’s read recently was Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? which was published posthumously last year and compiles 33 of the best essays by writer and novelist Jenny Diski, who passed away in 2020. The compilation serves as a study of human nature and covers everything from rock stars to Orangutans, and Clarke chanced upon the book completely by accident earlier this year.

“Without being able to walk into a bookshop I signed up to a book subscription service, so every month I get delivered a book and I get very excited that I don’t know what it is,” said Clarke. “And this was one of them.

“I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal.”

In February, Clarke posted a picture of herself on Instagram with a copy of the book, recommending it to her 27 million followers. Her post was soon seen by the poet and academic Dr Ian Patterson, who was married to Diski until her passing. “It was very wonderful to see the picture of you holding the book, and I suddenly was switched back to when Jenny was still alive and we were watching Game of Thrones,” Patterson said to Clarke via the BBC World Service.

Patterson stated that Diski has been a fan of the series, particularly Clarke’s character. “She would really have loved to be a mother of dragons, she was completely taken with that idea. Really good escapist cop shows or something like Game of Thrones, it allows you to clear your mind of the things that are worrying you and anxieties,” he said.

“That’s been the thing about Jenny in this book of essays. I’ve travelled back in time with her to find a book that truly, in this time, took me out of myself,” explained Clarke.

“I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like.”

The collection features essays Diski wrote between 1992 to 2014, with the final essay, called A Diagnosis, which sees her reflecting on the day she was informed she had inoperable lung cancer. Despite the bleak news, Diski’s husband recalls she took it with good humour. “The doctor said ‘you realise that this is cancer’, and she said ‘Oh well, I better get cooking the meth’. A reference to the TV programme Breaking Bad, which most people had seen – but not the oncologist.”

Diski had a talent for approaching even the darkest topics with wit and humour, and Clarke described herself as “howling with laughter ” at her essay “The Natural Death Centre”. The essay also reflects on the passing of Diski’s father when she was only 17, a loss Clarke can identify with.

“I lost my Dad four years ago and it still feels like it was yesterday. And since his death, I think about death a lot and I consider his a lot. And so to read her take on it was just really tonic for the soul.”

“The way that she writes about it, it makes you feel OK,” said Clarke.

Five years after his wife’s death, Patterson explained “reading the book and talking about her in this way brings her back with quite a lot of force”.

“That’s how we live on,” agreed Clarke.

Clarke has also faced her own mortality, having suffered from two aneurysms, one of which caused her to suffer aphasia and left her unable to remember her name, an experience she wrote about in the New Yorker in 2019. Her praise for Diski’s collection of essays is yet another reminder of the powerful healing qualities possessed by books.