The author Jenny Diski, in a bravura essay for the London Review of Books, has laid out the details of her inoperable cancer diagnosis, writing: "Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing."

In the first instalment from her new memoir – "a fucking cancer diary? Another fucking cancer diary" – the novelist writes of how, when told about her cancer, she made a reference to Breaking Bad ("we'd better get cooking the meth") before feeling a "flood of embarrassment, much more powerful than alarm or fear, that engulfed and mortified me at finding myself set firmly on that particular well-travelled road … I was faced with the prospect of a rather lengthy (in one view) public/private performance by which to be excruciated."

Given "two to three years" by her doctor, Diski, who is 67, writes of how "on the one hand, to die pushing seventy years of age is no great tragedy, even if my id would like to know what the fuck age has got to do with being rubbed out", but how, "even so, such reasonableness doesn't take account of the kind of thoughts that run swiftly through my mind. Two to three years. Will the battery on the TV remote run out first? How many inches will the weeping birch grow, the one planted by the Poet for my sixtieth birthday (soppy old radical versifier)?"

Author of 10 novels, four books of travel and memoir, two volumes of essays and a collection of short stories, Diski will, she says, be writing about her experience. "We'd hardly got home before I said: 'Well, I suppose I'm going to write a cancer diary.' … I'm a writer. I've got cancer. Am I going to write about it? How am I not? I pretended for a moment that I might not, but knew I had to, because writing is what I do and now cancer is what I do, too."

Listing previous memoirs by writers including John Diamond, Tom Lubbock and Ivan Noble, as well as Susan Sontag's essay about illness, Diski wonders "can there possibly be anything new to add? Isn't the cliche of writing a cancer diary going to be compounded by the impossibility of writing in it anything other than what has already been written, over and over? Same story, same ending. Weariness."

But, she concludes, "it doesn't very much matter what you write, but how you do it, that is crucial, and that nothing I wrote, or you wrote, is ever going to be the same as what she wrote and he wrote, unless, as Truman Capote said, what you're dealing with isn't writing, but typing. So I've got cancer. I'm writing."

Diski's diary will be published in parts in the London Review of Books. The author thanked readers for the "kindly thoughts" which have poured in since its publication online this week. "Too grumpy and chemoed to reply individually at the mo. Appreciated, but more to be read than pitied," she wrote on Twitter.