Lately, to cheer me, my husband bought me a collection of stories by Turgenev, jauntily titled Love And Death.

I began with the novella, The Diary Of A Superfluous Man, and was swiftly reminded that I had no reason to feel sorry for myself. Propped against pillows, crunching another paracetamol, I settled down to enjoy it. It is the powerful account of a young man with only a couple of weeks left to live, who thinks of the icebound river outside his window and reflects "I'll probably float away with the last of the snow". Confiding to his journal that "A decent man doesn't speak of his ill health", he decides instead to recount his short life.

Turgenev wrote this, one of his earliest stories, in 1850, at a time when premature death was so common as to be barely worthy of comment. That it was considered distasteful to talk of ailments is the surest sign that all classes were riddled with disease, and rather than risk adding to the general gloom, one was obliged to keep discussion of it for private.

In a recent edition of the London Review Of Books, the essayist Jenny Diski described the day she was told she has incurable cancer. Her immediate response as she sat in the consultant's office was to make a joke, which she later suspected he must have heard countless times before. Was this only the first of the cancer patient cliches she was about to commit, she wondered.

Diski's article makes painful reading. Given "two to three years" to live, she writes: "I do wonder, now he's laid the numbers out, with all the ifs and buts and maybes, how he manages his probability predictions. Does he pop an extra year on after 'or', for luck, like one for the pot? Or does he shift the lower end of the prediction a little towards the future, to soften the felt brevity of a single year to someone whose time is slipping past at the speed of a 67-year-old's perception."

In this scrupulously honest account, Diski fears she will become just one more cancer writer, like so many before her - Ruth Picardie, John Diamond, Tom Lubbock. And yet, as a writer, and in particular one whose entire oeuvre is a form of memoir, she is obliged to record it, because this is what she does. Unlike some others they'll find on the shelf, readers can also be assured that whatever Diski writes will be unflinching and naked, as she always is about herself, and her world.

But should she, or anyone, restrain themselves from writing about illness or dying? Even if Turgenev's dictum were still applicable today - thankfully it is not - etiquette should be ignored. If only the Victorians and those before them had not been so inhibited we would have a host of witnesses to call on. Nor is it morbid to read somebody's reflections on mortality. Indeed, it would feel callous not to, though it takes resolve to learn what they are enduring, when one privately, and passionately, hopes never to have to live with such a finite calendar on the wall.

Today, death is often treated more like an affront than an inevitability. While this is less than helpful, it does at least mean that everyone, no matter their age, is free to express outrage or fear at their own impending demise. Even those who make Methuselah look like a youngster are now given licence to philosophise about a prospect that is uniquely challenging for each of us.

Maybe it is one of our advantages, that compared with earlier generations more of us are able to contemplate our own death with dispassion before it claims us. In so doing, we can also take comfort from those writers who have told us something of what we are about to face. For that reason, but mainly because she is a mesmerising writer, I will be reading whatever dispatches Jenny Diski sends from the departure lounge, and sending her the very best of good wishes in return.