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Giving Up the Ghost
New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied.
Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
“The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me.”
In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children.
Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to “write herself into being”―one novel after another. This wry and visceral memoir will certainly bring new converts to Mantel’s dark genius.
“Mesmerizing.”― The New York Times
Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
“The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me.”
In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children.
Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to “write herself into being”―one novel after another. This wry and visceral memoir will certainly bring new converts to Mantel’s dark genius.
“Mesmerizing.”― The New York Times
240 pages, Paperback
First published May 5, 2003
About the author
Hilary Mantel
105 books7,147 followersHilary Mantel was the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Wolf Hall Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She also wrote A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O'Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother's Day, Vacant Possession, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 566 reviews
January 21, 2018
I'm writing this review from the corner of my bedroom. . . crouched, like an animal, typing with the fingers of my right hand, biting away at the nail of my left thumb.
Ouch. Make this book go away. Can I ship it to you? FedEx it to your door? Or shall I fling it, fling it hard, toward your head? Believe me, I'd be doing you a favor, if I knocked you out cold.
I'd burn it, this book, but I can feel it's not safe to do so here. I feel certain it would leave an oily residue and its essence would reconfigure, gather together in a green vapor and reform into the visage of Hilary Mantel's face from the front cover. And haunt my ass, forevermore.
This damn book. Memoir? Bullshit! If memoir, then a memoir of madness.
Spellbook? More likely. Be careful which words from the text you choose to read aloud.
I can't even give it fewer than three stars, if only for the infrequent lucidity of some excellent advice on writing and for giving credit where credit is due. As in, disturbing me right down to my intestines.
From the author herself: life is not long enough for all the intelligent variations on all the narratives of fear.
Damn straight, lady. You addressed several of my fears in one deceptively little (and deceptively cute) book.
Ms. Mantel, you're a madwoman. You made me eat my nails for sustenance, made me wonder whether I'm wearing the white lab coat of the psychiatrist or the constraints of my own damn white straightjacket. (Which doesn't go well with anything else I wear--especially my new Calvins).
And, Ms. Mantel, what I want to know is . . does the asylum send the manuscripts straight to the publisher, or does your editor come to collect them?
Ouch. Make this book go away. Can I ship it to you? FedEx it to your door? Or shall I fling it, fling it hard, toward your head? Believe me, I'd be doing you a favor, if I knocked you out cold.
I'd burn it, this book, but I can feel it's not safe to do so here. I feel certain it would leave an oily residue and its essence would reconfigure, gather together in a green vapor and reform into the visage of Hilary Mantel's face from the front cover. And haunt my ass, forevermore.
This damn book. Memoir? Bullshit! If memoir, then a memoir of madness.
Spellbook? More likely. Be careful which words from the text you choose to read aloud.
I can't even give it fewer than three stars, if only for the infrequent lucidity of some excellent advice on writing and for giving credit where credit is due. As in, disturbing me right down to my intestines.
From the author herself: life is not long enough for all the intelligent variations on all the narratives of fear.
Damn straight, lady. You addressed several of my fears in one deceptively little (and deceptively cute) book.
Ms. Mantel, you're a madwoman. You made me eat my nails for sustenance, made me wonder whether I'm wearing the white lab coat of the psychiatrist or the constraints of my own damn white straightjacket. (Which doesn't go well with anything else I wear--especially my new Calvins).
And, Ms. Mantel, what I want to know is . . does the asylum send the manuscripts straight to the publisher, or does your editor come to collect them?
December 31, 2015
Hilary Mantel is one of my favourite novelists. Although it's often best not to know much about writers you admire, I'm an incurable sticky beak, so I had to read (or rather listen to) her memoir.
Mantel is just a few years older than I am and I now know that we've had a number of similar life experiences. Not literary-award winning life experiences (obviously), but personal experiences that mark your life forever. So as I listened to the audiobook and reviewed my own life in the course of learning about Mantel's, I felt a kind of kinship with this brilliant, prickly, odd woman, who so often put into words what I only dimly sense. This, for example:
You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.A memoir is an interesting literary phenomenon. It's not a biography, it's not an affidavit. In writing a memoir, Mantel was under no obligation to tell all. She could choose what to disclose and what to conceal. It appears that Mantel chose to conceal quite a bit, which on one level is frustrating, but is also completely understandable. This was Mantel's story to tell, Mantel's opportunity to exorcise some demons, Mantel's opportunity to acknowledge the ghosts that populate her life. I'm grateful that through it she gave me an opportunity to examine my life by comparing it to hers. In doing so I encountered quite a few ghosts of my own.
March 1, 2015
HILARY THE ILLERY
I heard Hilary being interviewed and was grabbed by her weird life, not the usual middle-class sinuous blandishments at all. For a double-Booker winner she’s a walking Disease-of-the-Week movie.
Hilary Mantel has been several different women in her unusual life – young and old, poor and rich, working class and middle class, rejected and vastly successful, really thin and very fat. And she was once well but from the age of 27 she’s been ill. Her disease baffled the doctors (back in the 70s that doesn’t seem to have been too difficult) and was misdiagnosed as depression and anxiety, so she got a psycho-drug programme foisted on her involving major tranqs like Largactil which made her depressed and anxious. And also a bit manic. So that didn’t work, then they gave her major surgery and that didn’t work and then SHE figured out that what she had was endometriosis so they gave her large amounts of antibiotics and that doubled her body weight. Or so it seems. Memoirs (the bonsai version of autobiographies) are annoying mostly, like interrogating someone with their lawyer present. They’re so forthcoming about some things, but other things are avoided – okay, why did her marriage break down and then she remarried the guy exactly? Silence. And did it then break down a second time? Silence. What was up with the step father exactly? Silence. What was life like in Saudi Arabia? Silence. She goes on and on about her weight (this memoir gets called “brave” a lot) but doesn’t say one word about food so the impression is given that the antibiotics and other drugs caused the enormous weight gain all by themselves – is that what they do? But I noticed that this mixture of candour and reticence runs through HM’s fiction too – what I’ve read, A Place of Greater Safety and Wolf Hall. She invites you in, but you never do get the whole picture.
HM is now one of the Great and the Good in Britain, but she can still find herself in pretty hot water for opening her trap about the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton to you), calling her a personality-free shop window mannequin in a recent article. Go Hilary!
This was a strange book, and I didn’t know where I was with it half the time. Like life itself, then.
July 19, 2019
Hilary Mantel’s memoir, written before she gained acclaim for her novels about Thomas Cromwell, is mostly concerned with telling the story of a mysterious illness that plagued her from late childhood. She intermittently experienced wandering pains, intense fevers, extreme weakness, debilitating nausea, and migrainous visual disturbances. Later, in her late teens and early twenties, when she was attending university and during her early marriage, her symptoms were thought to be psychiatric. She was treated with a number of psychotropic drugs—tricyclic antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and antipsychotics—some of which caused her to suffer hellish side effects. She insisted to medical professionals, through the exhaustion and pharmaceutical fog, that her problem was really a physical one; she knew it was: this was not the real “her”. However, the psychiatric team regarded her “denial” as further evidence of psychiatric illness: she was refusing to accept her condition.
By age 27, however, the writing was on the wall, and Mantel parsed most of it herself. She told a specialist at St. George’s Hospital in London that she was sure that she had endometriosis, a disease in which the cells that line the uterus (cells which are shed on a monthly basis) are not restricted to the uterine lining, but have taken up residence elsewhere in the body, wreaking no end of havoc on organs and the patient’s internal environment in general. The specialist at St. George’s mistook Mantel for a fellow physician because her self-diagnosis, based on her intensive, close-reading of a medical text, was correct. Before the age of 30, then, a radical hysterectomy was performed. A length of damaged intestine and scar tissue were also excised. The regimen of drugs—hormone replacement therapy to compensate for early, surgically induced menopause—took a serious toll on her body, particularly on its shape. For almost thirty years, Mantel had been delicate, wafer thin, and fragile. Now she became a ever-expanding bag of flesh, unrecognizable to herself. The hormonal treatment was largely to blame, but the fact that yet another endocrine gland, the thyroid (responsible for metabolism) had also failed was another significant factor.
Mantel tells the reader that this memoir was a long and hard time coming, that she embarked on writing it with a certain trepidation, and that it represents an effort to pull herself together. While Mantel’s discussion of her long illness is quite well done, I found sections of the book frustratingly baroque and opaque. The long chapter dedicated to the middle part of her childhood is particularly taxing to read, as it is poorly organized. Mantel is six years old in one paragraph, eleven and a half in the next. She’s passed the exam to enter grammar school and moving to Cheshire at the end of one chapter, then back in Hadfield, her home town, in the next. Her strange familial relationships are never properly cleared up for the reader. At some point in her childhood, “Jack” (a mysterious friend of the family) came to live with Mantel’s family: herself, her parents, and her two brothers. Before long, Mantel’s father had been relegated to the role of a boarder. Hilary slept in the same back bedroom with him, while Jack moved into her mother’s bed. This unconventional living arrangement occurred in a gossipy, tight-knit, and ready-to-be-morally-affronted Catholic neighbourhood in a small village. Eventually, Mantel’s father disappeared, never to be seen again.
While I understand that Mantel’s goal was, in part, to create a sense of the strangeness of (her) childhood—fulsome descriptions of sensory memories and scenes which point to a child’s confusion about adult behaviour, family rupture, and community censure and ostracism abound—the author’s approach is just too muddled and messy for me. The narrative ends up raising more questions than it answers. Every so often there are “bridging” paragraphs, which move Mantel geographically from point A to point B—for example, from the north of England to London, or from Africa back to England—obviously leaving out huge parts of her story. The reader is expected to make these jumps with Mantel, knowing little about the reason for them.
I liked this book perhaps 50% of the time. About 25% of the time I was indifferent. The other 25% of the book—characterized as it is by overwritten, showy, and obfuscating prose—I greatly disliked. I am not sorry to have read the book. Mantel’s observations about the ways in which her biology betrayed her, her appalling medical treatment, and her difficulties adapting to a much-altered body were all worth learning about. However, I tend to think her material needed to be further steeped in time. I don’t think she was quite ready to write this book. Certainly, the prose needed radical pruning and the mess of memories was begging for the imposition of order. Both would have made this a far more satisfying read for me.
Rating: 2.5
By age 27, however, the writing was on the wall, and Mantel parsed most of it herself. She told a specialist at St. George’s Hospital in London that she was sure that she had endometriosis, a disease in which the cells that line the uterus (cells which are shed on a monthly basis) are not restricted to the uterine lining, but have taken up residence elsewhere in the body, wreaking no end of havoc on organs and the patient’s internal environment in general. The specialist at St. George’s mistook Mantel for a fellow physician because her self-diagnosis, based on her intensive, close-reading of a medical text, was correct. Before the age of 30, then, a radical hysterectomy was performed. A length of damaged intestine and scar tissue were also excised. The regimen of drugs—hormone replacement therapy to compensate for early, surgically induced menopause—took a serious toll on her body, particularly on its shape. For almost thirty years, Mantel had been delicate, wafer thin, and fragile. Now she became a ever-expanding bag of flesh, unrecognizable to herself. The hormonal treatment was largely to blame, but the fact that yet another endocrine gland, the thyroid (responsible for metabolism) had also failed was another significant factor.
Mantel tells the reader that this memoir was a long and hard time coming, that she embarked on writing it with a certain trepidation, and that it represents an effort to pull herself together. While Mantel’s discussion of her long illness is quite well done, I found sections of the book frustratingly baroque and opaque. The long chapter dedicated to the middle part of her childhood is particularly taxing to read, as it is poorly organized. Mantel is six years old in one paragraph, eleven and a half in the next. She’s passed the exam to enter grammar school and moving to Cheshire at the end of one chapter, then back in Hadfield, her home town, in the next. Her strange familial relationships are never properly cleared up for the reader. At some point in her childhood, “Jack” (a mysterious friend of the family) came to live with Mantel’s family: herself, her parents, and her two brothers. Before long, Mantel’s father had been relegated to the role of a boarder. Hilary slept in the same back bedroom with him, while Jack moved into her mother’s bed. This unconventional living arrangement occurred in a gossipy, tight-knit, and ready-to-be-morally-affronted Catholic neighbourhood in a small village. Eventually, Mantel’s father disappeared, never to be seen again.
While I understand that Mantel’s goal was, in part, to create a sense of the strangeness of (her) childhood—fulsome descriptions of sensory memories and scenes which point to a child’s confusion about adult behaviour, family rupture, and community censure and ostracism abound—the author’s approach is just too muddled and messy for me. The narrative ends up raising more questions than it answers. Every so often there are “bridging” paragraphs, which move Mantel geographically from point A to point B—for example, from the north of England to London, or from Africa back to England—obviously leaving out huge parts of her story. The reader is expected to make these jumps with Mantel, knowing little about the reason for them.
I liked this book perhaps 50% of the time. About 25% of the time I was indifferent. The other 25% of the book—characterized as it is by overwritten, showy, and obfuscating prose—I greatly disliked. I am not sorry to have read the book. Mantel’s observations about the ways in which her biology betrayed her, her appalling medical treatment, and her difficulties adapting to a much-altered body were all worth learning about. However, I tend to think her material needed to be further steeped in time. I don’t think she was quite ready to write this book. Certainly, the prose needed radical pruning and the mess of memories was begging for the imposition of order. Both would have made this a far more satisfying read for me.
Rating: 2.5
September 5, 2022
Margaret Atwood:
The written word is so much like evidence-it can be used against you.
Hilary Mantel and her memoir. Thanks to comments by Peter Tillman on one of my reviews, I discovered this remarkable author. I have no recollection of, or whatsoever interest in ghosts, and certainly not on the level in which Hilary Mantel deals with them, but I do believe now that Peter might be a GR earth angel crossing my path unexpectedly! What a delightful discovery Hilary Mantel is. Thank you, Peter. But let me remove my halo for a minute. I do believe in earth angels. Even had a repenting experience to submit to anyone reading my diary one day (not for publication, I ain't no Mantel).
Her behind-the-novel persona was intriguing, to me at least. I was more interested in her reviews than her novels. The first one I encountered in The Guardian, was about Diana. The princess myth: Hilary Mantel on Diana . Conclusion: you've got to love this author!
A next step was to read her memoir. Interesting title to a memoir, right? Giving Up the Ghost. Think about it.
Mantel deals with reality on her own peculiar terms. She is the XX and Christopher Hitchens' the XY of straight talk. In her memoir she explains her own modus operandi:
Persiflage: What a micro summary. What a stunner. My cat just got diagnosed with leukemia and I'm beyond devastated. If I ever consider writing a book, it will be about him. Persiflage personified. And I will forever have Hilary Mantel to thank. A laugh with a tear. It's the only way to get over it. Eventually.
This memoir is carefully selected windowpane prose done very well. The rest of her persona is disguised in her novelistic characters, acting as autobiographical metaphors. She is the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize for each of the first two volumes in her internationally bestselling Cromwell Trilogy: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She is the first woman to have received this prestigious award twice.
Hilary Mantel is a feminist gone Goth. And not in the least embarrassed by it. Like Christopher Hitchens, she does not hesitate in poking the sleeping bear. Remember he wanted to title his book about Mother Theresa Sacred Cow but instead it ended up being The Missionary Position-Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice.
In fact, (Mantel paraphrased) she absolutely revels in her capacity to offend. She refuses to be intimidated. Her voluntary abstinence from religion, her experiences as a girl in a neighborhood divided into Protestants and Catholics, and her experimental duet with Marxism, drove her to the opposite side of the dogma of the Divine.
It was a volatile existence.
Read her 'boiling detestation' of Margaret Thatcher , whom she regarded as anti-feminist, 'psychological transvestite'.
Alex Clark reports in his interview with Hilary Mantel :
- seeing a neighbor as a tree with green arms and rustling leaves.
Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is running away, when the retreat is tactical and the enemy is a green man;
─Sir William de Kerdeston as an effigy on his own tomb,
─resting if that is the word─in full armor and on a bed of pebbles: his shoulder muscles twitching, perhaps, his legs flexing, every year as we reach the Feast of All Souls and the dead prepare to walk.
(Is there a metaphor hidden in that statement?;
─admitting an addiction to the semicolon: I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time;
─ her struggles with doctors about their incompetent misdiagnoses of her endometriosis, almost killing her, by proxy, with psychosomatic drivel and barbiturates. Having her institutionalized and sedated, leading to memory loss, compromised speech, and blurred vision, seemed to be the solution to her anxiety and stress. She victoriously fought back, with emotional and physical scars to show for it.
In Mantel's case the ghosts have different meanings in her writing. It is not just literary entertainment. It's her way of dealing with psychological realities and the feeling of being haunted. So what does she mean with the title of this memoir? A release of the ghosts which carried her though adversity as a child and later adulthood? Did they scream to be exposed to the harsh light of day? She obviously had a need to do so.
Her means to 'see' them and probably communicate with them is embedded in her novel Beyond Black.
The above statement made me laugh. Because I guiltily agree. Oh do I agree. You have no idea. I always wonder why eulogies tend to 'Deitify' people. Is it a sort of last-resort message to the 'Despots in the skies' - as Christopher Hitchens so deliciously describes religious affinities? Please have mercy on their souls and send them straight up to heaven? As though the deceased who departed for a better world cannot speak for themselves? Is it a final declaration of forgiveness?
Well, yes, come to think of it, they are indeed mute. Even the angels. In Mantel's case, she releases them into print to un-mute them. With the accompanying letter to the 'Despots in the skies'. Some of her ghosts are endearing, others intimidating. Always Persiflage at work. A fundamental kindness underscoring a sort of gentle abrasiveness of thought, but not deeds(Catholicism prevented that). Raw and unpretentious, with no literary concealment of any kind. It's a personal memoir after all.
This is a tale woven from her emotional and physical journeys through the good and bad of religion, her short stays in Africa and Saudi Arabia, her childhood in British towns, her rebelliousness at university, her two-time marriages to her husband, her memories of her colorful, and vibrant grandparents and neighbors in challenging neighborhoods, and her final release of her ghost. Perhaps a plurality of ghosts. (Hope I will not be accused of a being a numbskull by saying so)
You will find an honesty to die for, even if she admittedly re-calibrated the truth here and there behind her windowpane prose.
An excellent memoir.
RECOMMENDED
PS. My ode to Christopher Hitchens can be found IN THIS REVIEW
Another piece of Mantel: Mantel: Witty and ferocious
The written word is so much like evidence-it can be used against you.
Hilary Mantel and her memoir. Thanks to comments by Peter Tillman on one of my reviews, I discovered this remarkable author. I have no recollection of, or whatsoever interest in ghosts, and certainly not on the level in which Hilary Mantel deals with them, but I do believe now that Peter might be a GR earth angel crossing my path unexpectedly! What a delightful discovery Hilary Mantel is. Thank you, Peter. But let me remove my halo for a minute. I do believe in earth angels. Even had a repenting experience to submit to anyone reading my diary one day (not for publication, I ain't no Mantel).
Her behind-the-novel persona was intriguing, to me at least. I was more interested in her reviews than her novels. The first one I encountered in The Guardian, was about Diana. The princess myth: Hilary Mantel on Diana . Conclusion: you've got to love this author!
A next step was to read her memoir. Interesting title to a memoir, right? Giving Up the Ghost. Think about it.
Mantel deals with reality on her own peculiar terms. She is the XX and Christopher Hitchens' the XY of straight talk. In her memoir she explains her own modus operandi:
"I hardly know how to write about myself. Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done. I will just go for it, I think to myself, I’ll hold out my hands and say, c’est moi, get used to it. I’ll trust the reader. This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published. Trust your reader, stop spoon-feeding your reader, stop patronizing your reader, give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least, and stop being so bloody beguiling: you in the back row, will you turn off that charm! Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don’t think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!
But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don’t use foreign expressions; it’s elitist.) I stray away from the beaten path of plain words into the meadows of extravagant simile: angels, ogres, doughnut-shaped holes. And as for transparency—windowpanes undressed are a sign of poverty, aren’t they? How about some nice net curtains, so I can look out but you can’t see in? How about shutters, or a chaste Roman blind? Besides, windowpane prose is no guarantee of truthfulness. Some deceptive sights are seen through glass, and the best liars tell lies in plain words."
Persiflage: What a micro summary. What a stunner. My cat just got diagnosed with leukemia and I'm beyond devastated. If I ever consider writing a book, it will be about him. Persiflage personified. And I will forever have Hilary Mantel to thank. A laugh with a tear. It's the only way to get over it. Eventually.
This memoir is carefully selected windowpane prose done very well. The rest of her persona is disguised in her novelistic characters, acting as autobiographical metaphors. She is the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize for each of the first two volumes in her internationally bestselling Cromwell Trilogy: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She is the first woman to have received this prestigious award twice.
Hilary Mantel is a feminist gone Goth. And not in the least embarrassed by it. Like Christopher Hitchens, she does not hesitate in poking the sleeping bear. Remember he wanted to title his book about Mother Theresa Sacred Cow but instead it ended up being The Missionary Position-Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice.
In fact, (Mantel paraphrased) she absolutely revels in her capacity to offend. She refuses to be intimidated. Her voluntary abstinence from religion, her experiences as a girl in a neighborhood divided into Protestants and Catholics, and her experimental duet with Marxism, drove her to the opposite side of the dogma of the Divine.
It was a volatile existence.
Hilary: "The woman rocking on the fence continued to spit and gibber, because she had primed herself, she had primed herself to her full tirade, she did not know how to abort it. Even as my mother was vanishing, she turned her head back over her shoulder, and saw me; as her green almond-shaped eyes flicked like darting fish, she saw me standing four-square, my hands on my hips, planted and staring at this object, this scrawny disgrace, this apology for a woman, this Protestant, whose tonguelashing was as feeble as the lashing of the tail of a well-stamped scorpion.
When I came inside, dusting off my hands—literally I am sure, and not metaphorically—my mother said, thoughtfully, “You did that very well.” I had developed my shield against Hadfield, the human shield of my flesh; I had developed the requisite indifference to public opinion, but—what was even more important—the snarling willingness for a public brawl. Was it that day, there and then, that my mother made up her mind to get us out? So that I didn’t have to use those weapons, didn’t have to waste my youthful ingenuity working up insults for the next standoff? I thought of the men who went out to fight, Saturday night, tottering into the gutter punctured and drunk, and of the sisters and wives who wiped the vomit off their chins and hauled them home, pocketing their smashed teeth for souvenirs."
Read her 'boiling detestation' of Margaret Thatcher , whom she regarded as anti-feminist, 'psychological transvestite'.
Alex Clark reports in his interview with Hilary Mantel :
In a speech in 2013, Mantel referred to Kate Middleton, by then the Duchess of Cambridge, as “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”; a woman whose primary purpose was to provide the heir apparent with heirs of his own. Both Ed Miliband and David Cameron voiced their disapproval but, “if anything,” she says now, “I think my plea was to consider, these are human beings. I’m on her side, not one of her persecutors.” With the royal family yet again in crisis, she connects the current obsession with royal bodies to the themes she’s probing in The Mirror & the Light: “What is a king? Is he a sort of super-being? Or is he a kind of beast? Does he even rise to the status of human? And all this is explored through Henry’s body. So it’s very much a theme I’ve been conscious of continually. And, of course, it was completely misunderstood by numbskulls.”The memoir is no different. She exudates her preposterous imagination on everything she recounts:
- seeing a neighbor as a tree with green arms and rustling leaves.
Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is running away, when the retreat is tactical and the enemy is a green man;
─Sir William de Kerdeston as an effigy on his own tomb,
─resting if that is the word─in full armor and on a bed of pebbles: his shoulder muscles twitching, perhaps, his legs flexing, every year as we reach the Feast of All Souls and the dead prepare to walk.
(Is there a metaphor hidden in that statement?;
─admitting an addiction to the semicolon: I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time;
─ her struggles with doctors about their incompetent misdiagnoses of her endometriosis, almost killing her, by proxy, with psychosomatic drivel and barbiturates. Having her institutionalized and sedated, leading to memory loss, compromised speech, and blurred vision, seemed to be the solution to her anxiety and stress. She victoriously fought back, with emotional and physical scars to show for it.
In Mantel's case the ghosts have different meanings in her writing. It is not just literary entertainment. It's her way of dealing with psychological realities and the feeling of being haunted. So what does she mean with the title of this memoir? A release of the ghosts which carried her though adversity as a child and later adulthood? Did they scream to be exposed to the harsh light of day? She obviously had a need to do so.
Her means to 'see' them and probably communicate with them is embedded in her novel Beyond Black.
Twenty years after Every Day Is Mother’s Day she returned to the idea of the haunted medium in Beyond Black, for some critics still her best book, because it is her strangest. Corpulent Alison makes her living as a psychic (a “sensitive”, as she calls herself), contacting the dead at large meetings in the commuter towns of the south-east. Her performances are cleverly rigged to satisfy the punters. She tells one bereaved woman that her dead granny likes her new kitchen units; another woman’s dead mother tells her to lose a stone. “Can you accept that?” Alison matches her skills of psychological guesswork to the credulity of her audience. Yet she is no charlatan: she truly believes in her contact with the spirit world, “the place beyond black”. “You say they give trivial messages,” she observes to her steely assistant Colette, “but that’s because they’re trivial people. You don’t get a personality transplant when you’re dead.”
“People are right to be afraid of ghosts. If you get people who are bad in life – I mean, cruel people, dangerous people – why do you think they are going to be any better after they’re dead?” John Mullan: The strange and brilliant fiction of Hilary Mantel.
The above statement made me laugh. Because I guiltily agree. Oh do I agree. You have no idea. I always wonder why eulogies tend to 'Deitify' people. Is it a sort of last-resort message to the 'Despots in the skies' - as Christopher Hitchens so deliciously describes religious affinities? Please have mercy on their souls and send them straight up to heaven? As though the deceased who departed for a better world cannot speak for themselves? Is it a final declaration of forgiveness?
Well, yes, come to think of it, they are indeed mute. Even the angels. In Mantel's case, she releases them into print to un-mute them. With the accompanying letter to the 'Despots in the skies'. Some of her ghosts are endearing, others intimidating. Always Persiflage at work. A fundamental kindness underscoring a sort of gentle abrasiveness of thought, but not deeds(Catholicism prevented that). Raw and unpretentious, with no literary concealment of any kind. It's a personal memoir after all.
This is a tale woven from her emotional and physical journeys through the good and bad of religion, her short stays in Africa and Saudi Arabia, her childhood in British towns, her rebelliousness at university, her two-time marriages to her husband, her memories of her colorful, and vibrant grandparents and neighbors in challenging neighborhoods, and her final release of her ghost. Perhaps a plurality of ghosts. (Hope I will not be accused of a being a numbskull by saying so)
You will find an honesty to die for, even if she admittedly re-calibrated the truth here and there behind her windowpane prose.
An excellent memoir.
RECOMMENDED
PS. My ode to Christopher Hitchens can be found IN THIS REVIEW
Another piece of Mantel: Mantel: Witty and ferocious
September 23, 2022
NYT obit....
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/bo...
============
I always have some interest in the background of good writers. Mantel is a prodigious researcher and an excellent stylist. Her Cromwell books speak to that. I was interested in finding out more about her.
Her memoir is a harrowing tale. She is raised RC, but once she's a senior at a convent school she has silently chucked it all. But the really bad experience she has as a child is the Church not allowing her doting mother to divorce her evil father. No question this emotionally marks a child for life. (My favorite book for peeling this kind of abuse open for any of us is "The Drama of the Gifted Child" by Alice Miller. Immensely helpful).
This recent New Yorker article does a great job of tying her childhood experiences in her memoir, and her beliefs, to all her books, not just the most famous ones.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/bo...
============
I always have some interest in the background of good writers. Mantel is a prodigious researcher and an excellent stylist. Her Cromwell books speak to that. I was interested in finding out more about her.
Her memoir is a harrowing tale. She is raised RC, but once she's a senior at a convent school she has silently chucked it all. But the really bad experience she has as a child is the Church not allowing her doting mother to divorce her evil father. No question this emotionally marks a child for life. (My favorite book for peeling this kind of abuse open for any of us is "The Drama of the Gifted Child" by Alice Miller. Immensely helpful).
This recent New Yorker article does a great job of tying her childhood experiences in her memoir, and her beliefs, to all her books, not just the most famous ones.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
September 24, 2022
I am heartbroken that she has died. Hilary Mantel is the writer we all aspire to be, brilliant, profound, accurate and so so good word by word. I am finding some kind of comfort, closeness in reading her 2004 memoir.
October 21, 2015
Hilary Mantel has remarked that she had mixed feelings about publishing her memoir. She decided to set down her own story in an attempt "to seize the copyright in myself".
She writes beautifully about her early years and with astonishingly vivid recollections she captures her childhood mind. She is old beyond her years with a need to make sense of her world from a touchingly young age. She has an enquiring and elaborate imagination, an interest in understanding others and a hunger for knowledge.
As a young woman she suffers with chronic ill health and incompetent doctors. She struggles to keep hold of her own identity. Her ghosts are the missed opportunities, the people she remembers, the parts of herself that she has not been able to explore.
Mantel writes an engrossing, moving memoir with a wise, clear and true voice.
She writes beautifully about her early years and with astonishingly vivid recollections she captures her childhood mind. She is old beyond her years with a need to make sense of her world from a touchingly young age. She has an enquiring and elaborate imagination, an interest in understanding others and a hunger for knowledge.
As a young woman she suffers with chronic ill health and incompetent doctors. She struggles to keep hold of her own identity. Her ghosts are the missed opportunities, the people she remembers, the parts of herself that she has not been able to explore.
Mantel writes an engrossing, moving memoir with a wise, clear and true voice.
September 16, 2011
The back of this book is unhelpful; it makes it seem as though the whole thing is about her infertility. That's part of the story, but it's not even most of it. Most of it is about growing up Catholic, going to schools taught by nuns, growing up in a family, trying to make sense of life from a child's perspective. The mysteries of adults and the struggle to unravel them. How it is when Father is displaced by another man who is unkind, and how the neighbors know and try to shame your mother.
Later she talks about health problems that dogged her most of her life, and she was ill served by doctors and modern medicine. She was diagnosed as a young woman as having psychiatric problems and given drugs that altered her vision and her memory, and finally got her self off of them and away from doctors. Later her illnesses and the drugs she had to take made her body change shape and she is eloquent about how strange that was. For me that was the most moving part of the book. How being fat changes you, changes the way people look at you. Besides this she remakes her life again and again, and mentions those changes in the most casual way, which puts me in awe of her.
She begins the book as a child and as a young woman with no agency, no certainty, and ends it as someone who seems to understand herself and the world well and to have taken charge of her life. It's good to see.
Later she talks about health problems that dogged her most of her life, and she was ill served by doctors and modern medicine. She was diagnosed as a young woman as having psychiatric problems and given drugs that altered her vision and her memory, and finally got her self off of them and away from doctors. Later her illnesses and the drugs she had to take made her body change shape and she is eloquent about how strange that was. For me that was the most moving part of the book. How being fat changes you, changes the way people look at you. Besides this she remakes her life again and again, and mentions those changes in the most casual way, which puts me in awe of her.
She begins the book as a child and as a young woman with no agency, no certainty, and ends it as someone who seems to understand herself and the world well and to have taken charge of her life. It's good to see.
August 19, 2019
The first half of the book is an endearing collection of Hilary's childhood memories, the second half deals with her failing health and the loss of her ability to have children.
January 31, 2015
Growing up, people often told me that life was no picnic (I'm not sure why, since I was already a gloomy little pessimist). These days it seems a very unfashionable thing to say, especially to kids. But although life was, and is, pretty good, I sometimes mutter this to myself and feel oddly comforted by it. Because life really can be shitty sometimes. Insisting that all obstacles can be overcome, anything is possible, you can do whatever you want etc seems so counterproductive to me, because it obviously isn't true. Shit happens, and while you may try to deal with it as graciously as possible, there are times when there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Admitting this is in itself a relief, I think. Maybe I'm just a grumpy misanthrope, but inspirational stories about overcoming adversity make me gag.
So naturally I enjoyed Mantel's autobiography. She's had her fair share of adversity, and she's not coy about it. There's no self-pity involved, but she's brutally honest and unapologetic about the bad stuff. It makes for grim reading, but impressed the hell out of me. And yeah, she's one of the most successful British authors at the moment, so I'm sure there's some inspiration to be found there as well for those who crave it.
So naturally I enjoyed Mantel's autobiography. She's had her fair share of adversity, and she's not coy about it. There's no self-pity involved, but she's brutally honest and unapologetic about the bad stuff. It makes for grim reading, but impressed the hell out of me. And yeah, she's one of the most successful British authors at the moment, so I'm sure there's some inspiration to be found there as well for those who crave it.
November 10, 2018
Da ich kaum (Auto-)Biografien gelesen habe, fehlen mir die Vergleichsmöglichkeiten und ich kann dieses Buch nur schwer einordnen. Es hat mich ohne Zweifel beeindruckt, das heisst, vor allem hat mich die Person beeindruckt, diese Hilary Mantel, die Hilary Mantel hier beschreibt.
Da ist die Verlockung groß, über den Menschen zu schreiben, der mit einer schweren Krankheit bewundernswert umgeht und der sein Leben über das Schreiben definiert; es soll aber in einem Review das Buch besprochen werden und nicht der Mensch.
Dass Hilary Mantels Romane verdammt gut geschrieben sind, weiss ich von den zwei bislang erschienenen Bänden ihrer Thomas Cromwell Trilogie: Wölfe und Falken . Für ihre Autobiografie musste sie einen völlig anderen Ton finden. Wie sie am Anfang schreibt, ist ihr das nicht leicht gefallen, letztlich aber sehr gut gelungen. Mich hat ganz besonders der ausgeprägte trockene Humor angesprochen, mit dem sie auch sehr persönliche und teilweise höchst unerfreuliche Begebenheiten kommentiert. Der Text wechselt häufig zwischen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, vom Ich zum Du und erzeugt dadurch dynamische Spannungsbögen und einen abwechslungsreichen Erzählverlauf.
Mehr als die Hälfte des Buches sind der Kindheit und Jugend gewidmet. Es hat mich fasziniert, mit welcher Überzeugungskraft sie in die Rolle des Kindes, der Pubertierenden oder des jungen Mädchens schlüpft, die Dinge aus deren Blickwinkel erzählt und die Situation gleich darauf mit einer witzigen Anmerkung aus gegenwärtiger Sicht versieht.
Der letzte Teil behandelt ihre Umzüge, neuen Wohnorte, Südafrika, Saudi Arabien und vor allem die Krankheit, die sie überall hin begleitet. Hilary Mantel beschreibt Symptome und Folgen ihrer Endometriose inklusive zwanzig Jahre Fehldiagnosen, Verlegenheitstherapien u.a. mit schweren Psychopharmaka, erfolglose Operation, Hormonbehandlungen und all die dazugehörigen körperlichen, psychischen und sozialen Nebenwirkungen ohne jedes Selbstmitleid und absolut vorwurfslos, trotzdem erkennt man zwischen den Zeilen deutlich das enorme Leiden, das dieses Leben begleitet.
Die in den Medien immer wieder und gerne zitierte Affinität der Autorin zu Geistern muss ich nach der Lektüre relativieren. Auch wenn von Geistern die Rede ist, hat das absolut nichts mit Esoterik oder paranormalen Phänomenen zu tun. Es handelt sich vielmehr um diesen Grenzbereich zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit, dieses "hätte sein können" und das ganz fein wahrgenommene innere Erleben, für das gerade Autoren oft ein ausgeprägtes Sensorium haben. Wenn Hilary Mantel ihre nicht geborenen Kinder als Geister bezeichnet, existieren sie in ihrem Geist, ihrer fiktionalen Wirklichkeit.
Eine sehr lesenswerte und interessante Autobiographie einer bewundernswerten Frau!
Da ist die Verlockung groß, über den Menschen zu schreiben, der mit einer schweren Krankheit bewundernswert umgeht und der sein Leben über das Schreiben definiert; es soll aber in einem Review das Buch besprochen werden und nicht der Mensch.
Dass Hilary Mantels Romane verdammt gut geschrieben sind, weiss ich von den zwei bislang erschienenen Bänden ihrer Thomas Cromwell Trilogie: Wölfe und Falken . Für ihre Autobiografie musste sie einen völlig anderen Ton finden. Wie sie am Anfang schreibt, ist ihr das nicht leicht gefallen, letztlich aber sehr gut gelungen. Mich hat ganz besonders der ausgeprägte trockene Humor angesprochen, mit dem sie auch sehr persönliche und teilweise höchst unerfreuliche Begebenheiten kommentiert. Der Text wechselt häufig zwischen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, vom Ich zum Du und erzeugt dadurch dynamische Spannungsbögen und einen abwechslungsreichen Erzählverlauf.
Mehr als die Hälfte des Buches sind der Kindheit und Jugend gewidmet. Es hat mich fasziniert, mit welcher Überzeugungskraft sie in die Rolle des Kindes, der Pubertierenden oder des jungen Mädchens schlüpft, die Dinge aus deren Blickwinkel erzählt und die Situation gleich darauf mit einer witzigen Anmerkung aus gegenwärtiger Sicht versieht.
Der letzte Teil behandelt ihre Umzüge, neuen Wohnorte, Südafrika, Saudi Arabien und vor allem die Krankheit, die sie überall hin begleitet. Hilary Mantel beschreibt Symptome und Folgen ihrer Endometriose inklusive zwanzig Jahre Fehldiagnosen, Verlegenheitstherapien u.a. mit schweren Psychopharmaka, erfolglose Operation, Hormonbehandlungen und all die dazugehörigen körperlichen, psychischen und sozialen Nebenwirkungen ohne jedes Selbstmitleid und absolut vorwurfslos, trotzdem erkennt man zwischen den Zeilen deutlich das enorme Leiden, das dieses Leben begleitet.
Die in den Medien immer wieder und gerne zitierte Affinität der Autorin zu Geistern muss ich nach der Lektüre relativieren. Auch wenn von Geistern die Rede ist, hat das absolut nichts mit Esoterik oder paranormalen Phänomenen zu tun. Es handelt sich vielmehr um diesen Grenzbereich zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit, dieses "hätte sein können" und das ganz fein wahrgenommene innere Erleben, für das gerade Autoren oft ein ausgeprägtes Sensorium haben. Wenn Hilary Mantel ihre nicht geborenen Kinder als Geister bezeichnet, existieren sie in ihrem Geist, ihrer fiktionalen Wirklichkeit.
Eine sehr lesenswerte und interessante Autobiographie einer bewundernswerten Frau!
March 1, 2020
The first part of the book is funny and endearing. As a child she had an extraordinarily wonderful imagination. This also had a dark side, however, because of a scary religion that was taken seriously and a, at the time, most unusual family set up.
The last part on the author’s health problems is very sad, infuriating because of the smug incompetence of most of the medical doctors that nearly poisoned her, and awe inspiring for the sheer force in her to persevere, ultimately retrieving the correct diagnosis herself from a medical textbook in Botswana.
A fascinating read that filled me with admiration for the author.
The last part on the author’s health problems is very sad, infuriating because of the smug incompetence of most of the medical doctors that nearly poisoned her, and awe inspiring for the sheer force in her to persevere, ultimately retrieving the correct diagnosis herself from a medical textbook in Botswana.
A fascinating read that filled me with admiration for the author.
September 16, 2016
Mantel's memoir - written before she published Wolf Hall - is a compelling read. It mainly focusses on her childhood and the development of her illness. It is rather horrifying to be reminded how women with 'unclear' physical symptoms were treated in the 1970ies...
3.5*
3.5*
August 1, 2017
I'm the sort of person who wonders what people think about, and the form that those thoughts take; and there is nothing more fascinating to me than insight into a person's mind. In this memoir, Mantel generously shares the most abiding, most haunting, thoughts and recollections of her life - starting with earliest childhood. Not all childhood reminiscences are interesting, and Mantel does dwell lingeringly upon the minutiae which makes up her early years, but when the reader is granted access to a mind as unique as Hilary Mantel's, the details of a childhood (Irish Catholic, Northern, 1950s) are incredibly interesting. As she says herself, her senses have always been hyper-aware - a form of synthaesia, perhaps - or maybe just an extremely sensitive consciousness. It is also obvious that she possessed a formidable intellect, imagination and will - even from a very early age. The combination of all of these means that her writing - at turns impressionistic, and then very sharp-edged - is extraordinarily vivid.
In many ways, Mantel has had a painful and difficult life: not only has she suffered from myriad illnesses, most notably the endometriosis which led to a hysterectomy before the age of 30, but she endured a very strange childhood. When she was a little girl, a man named Jack started coming round for tea. "One day Jack comes for his tea and doesn't come home again." By the time she was 7, her mother, Jack and two small brothers had left the family home in Hadfield (outside Manchester) and moved across the county border into Cheshire. Astonishingly, she never sees her own father Henry again. "As the decade wore on and my family became established in its new life, I felt like a death's head at a feast. Henry, my father, might as well have been dead; except that the dead were more discussed. He was never mentioned after we parted: except by me, to me. We never met again."
Her father's absence is just one of the many "ghosts" which feature in this memoir. Ghosts are diffuse in both meaning and number. Some emanations are literal, while others are just suggestions or possibilities (like the children that Mantel will never be able to bring forth into the world). Although Mantel does refer to her writing - one of my favourite instances being when she refers to an old pine table with love because she has "a nervous sort of nostalgia for any surface I have written a book on" - it takes a backseat to the losses in her life. It's interesting that the introduction to the book describes Mantel as a woman who combines "clear thinking with a cracking sense of humour". There are occasional glimpses of this humour, or what Mantel describes as a characteristic flippancy, but lightness is very much overshadowed by darkness and pain. I would guess that humour is a stronger note in her social personality, or perhaps this story has been shaped by its attention to, and interest in, the losses and the ghosts.
There is an interesting paradox at work here, and I think it is probably true of many woman - maybe not so much in this generation of young women, but for those born in a more misogynistic time. Although Mantel is clearly a formidable and successful woman, and one of the most respected contemporary British writers, she is well-aware of her own internal damage. Her account of how her physical pain was completely discounted for years - and either assumed to be psychosomatic, or a symptom of (choose one) being overly ambitious, nervous or hysterical - is really quite horrific to read. She describes her own passivity in her relationship with misguided male doctors as being partly due to a belief "that I always felt that I deserved very little, that I would probably not be happy in life, and the the safest thing was to lie down and die." And yet she has endured much, and continues to do so - and perhaps has managed to find some happiness in life and the fulfilment of her ambitions.
Some of my favourite lines:
Mantel mentions that it was her grandfather's job to stoke the Co-op boiler in Hadfield. "I didn't take hellfire seriously. I had some idea what would be the extent of the devils' coal bill."
And I loved this description of the families who lived in new-built "executive" homes in Surrey. "They seemed to have sprung straight from a pot in Homebase, putting out glossy, polished leaves; they had parents, but they had them as weekend accessories, appearing on summer Sundays like their barbeque forks."
In many ways, Mantel has had a painful and difficult life: not only has she suffered from myriad illnesses, most notably the endometriosis which led to a hysterectomy before the age of 30, but she endured a very strange childhood. When she was a little girl, a man named Jack started coming round for tea. "One day Jack comes for his tea and doesn't come home again." By the time she was 7, her mother, Jack and two small brothers had left the family home in Hadfield (outside Manchester) and moved across the county border into Cheshire. Astonishingly, she never sees her own father Henry again. "As the decade wore on and my family became established in its new life, I felt like a death's head at a feast. Henry, my father, might as well have been dead; except that the dead were more discussed. He was never mentioned after we parted: except by me, to me. We never met again."
Her father's absence is just one of the many "ghosts" which feature in this memoir. Ghosts are diffuse in both meaning and number. Some emanations are literal, while others are just suggestions or possibilities (like the children that Mantel will never be able to bring forth into the world). Although Mantel does refer to her writing - one of my favourite instances being when she refers to an old pine table with love because she has "a nervous sort of nostalgia for any surface I have written a book on" - it takes a backseat to the losses in her life. It's interesting that the introduction to the book describes Mantel as a woman who combines "clear thinking with a cracking sense of humour". There are occasional glimpses of this humour, or what Mantel describes as a characteristic flippancy, but lightness is very much overshadowed by darkness and pain. I would guess that humour is a stronger note in her social personality, or perhaps this story has been shaped by its attention to, and interest in, the losses and the ghosts.
There is an interesting paradox at work here, and I think it is probably true of many woman - maybe not so much in this generation of young women, but for those born in a more misogynistic time. Although Mantel is clearly a formidable and successful woman, and one of the most respected contemporary British writers, she is well-aware of her own internal damage. Her account of how her physical pain was completely discounted for years - and either assumed to be psychosomatic, or a symptom of (choose one) being overly ambitious, nervous or hysterical - is really quite horrific to read. She describes her own passivity in her relationship with misguided male doctors as being partly due to a belief "that I always felt that I deserved very little, that I would probably not be happy in life, and the the safest thing was to lie down and die." And yet she has endured much, and continues to do so - and perhaps has managed to find some happiness in life and the fulfilment of her ambitions.
Some of my favourite lines:
Mantel mentions that it was her grandfather's job to stoke the Co-op boiler in Hadfield. "I didn't take hellfire seriously. I had some idea what would be the extent of the devils' coal bill."
And I loved this description of the families who lived in new-built "executive" homes in Surrey. "They seemed to have sprung straight from a pot in Homebase, putting out glossy, polished leaves; they had parents, but they had them as weekend accessories, appearing on summer Sundays like their barbeque forks."
June 15, 2016
It's always interesting to read a few reviews with different opinions from your own as it makes you think about your critical approach to a book. I can see why some people did not like this book, it is not an uplifting or happy story. She has suffered, and even when not directly suffering does not seem to have been happy. However, I have given it a full 5 stars for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it is wonderfully written. Although Mantel is now a well known prize winning author, this is in fact the only thing I've ever read by her. Her use of language, the rhythm of her writing and her style is masterful. There is a lot for anyone interested in the craft of writing to admire. Secondly, her insight into her life and the things she has gone through is brilliantly described. Thirdly, although it is not a happy book, it is not without humour, mostly through the way she writes than humorous episodes themselves. Occasional sentences or even half sentences are funny.
Criticisms? Not many, but I will flag two. One is that it is in some ways a book of two different halves - her childhood and then as an adult. Her childhood is broad, whereas her adult life is very much her coping with a serious medical condition which was misdiagnosed for years. But then, given the pain she was in, it probably was an overriding aspect of her adult life. Second, the last ten pages or so did not work for me. I thought it ended weakly. But the rest is so good I can forgive this.
Firstly, it is wonderfully written. Although Mantel is now a well known prize winning author, this is in fact the only thing I've ever read by her. Her use of language, the rhythm of her writing and her style is masterful. There is a lot for anyone interested in the craft of writing to admire. Secondly, her insight into her life and the things she has gone through is brilliantly described. Thirdly, although it is not a happy book, it is not without humour, mostly through the way she writes than humorous episodes themselves. Occasional sentences or even half sentences are funny.
Criticisms? Not many, but I will flag two. One is that it is in some ways a book of two different halves - her childhood and then as an adult. Her childhood is broad, whereas her adult life is very much her coping with a serious medical condition which was misdiagnosed for years. But then, given the pain she was in, it probably was an overriding aspect of her adult life. Second, the last ten pages or so did not work for me. I thought it ended weakly. But the rest is so good I can forgive this.
February 14, 2010
This may be my least favorite Mantel, but I still savored every page. As a memoir, this one's going to be little too oblique for most people, especially fans of this great writer--and I do mean great. She won the 2009 Booker Prize, and it was long overdue. If, like me, you were hoping to learn something about Mantel's writing process, you're going to feel frustrated. Her famous quote about what advice she'd give to beginning writers ("Eat meat. Drink blood.") is here, but she doesn't spend much time on how she gets her stories down on the page. She's performing an exorcism of her own past, and admits in a couple of places that it's a profoundly personal act, leaving me with the impression that the scarcity of detail in this book is fully conscious on her part. This book primarily serves her own purposes, and she doesn't need precise detail to call up the images of her childhood. What she gives the readers is highly evocative allusion. I'll follow her anywhere, so she can't disappoint me. However, at the end of this memoir, I'm left feeling feeling much the same as I was at the beginning: very nosy.
January 29, 2018
Memories are focused on her early childhood and youth years when her illness progressed more and more.
Unfortunately, I have to say that the first part of the book was boring and such detailed descriptions of childhood adventures and reflections always raise question in me ... but I find the second part very interesting (the main focus is on her illnes), especially from the point of view, how the women with unclear/undefined health problems were treated in the 1970s.
Unfortunately, I have to say that the first part of the book was boring and such detailed descriptions of childhood adventures and reflections always raise question in me ... but I find the second part very interesting (the main focus is on her illnes), especially from the point of view, how the women with unclear/undefined health problems were treated in the 1970s.
May 30, 2013
Hard to believe that I just discovered Hilary Mantel, the Booker prize-winning author of Wolf Hall and, most recently, Bring Up the Bodies. Giving Up the Ghost, 2003, is one of the best autobios I have ever read. Her writing swept me away with its clarity and brilliance and at times made me laugh, pleased with the distance she could go in a paragraph. She has told a lot of truth in this book; it calls to mind Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, also about an exceptionally intelligent and gifted Brit-girl with resilience. (In Winterson's case, the adoptive mother was nuts, as well as neglectful).
Mantel's experience with endometriosis is a nightmare, and that it went on in the 1970s is unforgivable -- in the end, she did not get even a more modern, for that time, surgical cut. She suffered hugely, given various drugs for mental illness (not her problem) and side effects, one of which made her fat, fat, fat. Reading about how she was treated during that phase will be familiar. But despite the years of suffering and misdiagnoses, Mantel continued to research and write.
Mantel's experience with endometriosis is a nightmare, and that it went on in the 1970s is unforgivable -- in the end, she did not get even a more modern, for that time, surgical cut. She suffered hugely, given various drugs for mental illness (not her problem) and side effects, one of which made her fat, fat, fat. Reading about how she was treated during that phase will be familiar. But despite the years of suffering and misdiagnoses, Mantel continued to research and write.
October 8, 2020
This is a hard book to recommend. It is a raw autobiography on the one hand of Hilary Mantel's early life. It is brilliantly written. The first half chronicles Hilary's early life and school years and sheds much light on what it means to be brilliant child in an ordinary school. The second part chronicles in her shadowy struggles with her health and the ghost children left behind by her infertility. It will leave you mourning with her. I am so glad I read it, but it may be tough for some. Her command of English is staggeringly beautiful.
October 2, 2022
I gave a rare five stars to this book which I was engrossed in and found so very interesting.
Hilary was born in the same year as I was, 1952 and I found so much of our lives coincided that I could empathise totally with what she was saying. I had one of the same satin dolls with the pointed head and round cloth face and a magic slate, I wondered if Hilary also had one of the pictures of a bald man that had iron filings loose at the bottom and a little magnet pen that you could to use draw them up and put hair and a beard on him? I really wanted to sit and chat and say to her 'do you remember that' and 'did do that.' We both went to convent schools and also lived for a time with our grandmothers. Hilary was a delicate and very pretty child and also highly intelligent she had a great love of books and read everything and anything she could get hold of, I have a passion for books. As she grew older she had many misdiagnosed illnesses and this affected her mental health for a while, she developed a healthy mistrust of doctors in general and gynaecologists in particular with which I thoroughly concur. Things were so different in the sixties and seventies for women, male doctors either seemed to be embarrassed by women's health problems and tried to convince them that it was something else or disbelieved them entirely and told them there was nothing wrong.
My heart went out to Hilary, as the medication made her gain weight and people started to be judgemental I could have cried, I almost shouted out YES when she said that people say to her 'you are looking well' oh my, I know that one, I think I shall be looking well in my coffin.
I cannot see that being a bigger person makes Hilary any less attractive as a person she is not! All those people who use various euphemisms for being overweight should just try describing what is beautiful about a person, there is always plenty and as for Hilary, they could start with her brilliant mind and wit.
This memoir of a girls life from the fifties to the present day is a really great read and I would recommend it to all women not just from that time but to younger women too. It is informative, funny, and it just might make them a little more tolerant of other females, as they should be.
Thank you Ilary (as she calls herself in the book).
I am reposting this review as my little tribute to a great lady and gifted author. Rest in peace Hilary.
Hilary was born in the same year as I was, 1952 and I found so much of our lives coincided that I could empathise totally with what she was saying. I had one of the same satin dolls with the pointed head and round cloth face and a magic slate, I wondered if Hilary also had one of the pictures of a bald man that had iron filings loose at the bottom and a little magnet pen that you could to use draw them up and put hair and a beard on him? I really wanted to sit and chat and say to her 'do you remember that' and 'did do that.' We both went to convent schools and also lived for a time with our grandmothers. Hilary was a delicate and very pretty child and also highly intelligent she had a great love of books and read everything and anything she could get hold of, I have a passion for books. As she grew older she had many misdiagnosed illnesses and this affected her mental health for a while, she developed a healthy mistrust of doctors in general and gynaecologists in particular with which I thoroughly concur. Things were so different in the sixties and seventies for women, male doctors either seemed to be embarrassed by women's health problems and tried to convince them that it was something else or disbelieved them entirely and told them there was nothing wrong.
My heart went out to Hilary, as the medication made her gain weight and people started to be judgemental I could have cried, I almost shouted out YES when she said that people say to her 'you are looking well' oh my, I know that one, I think I shall be looking well in my coffin.
I cannot see that being a bigger person makes Hilary any less attractive as a person she is not! All those people who use various euphemisms for being overweight should just try describing what is beautiful about a person, there is always plenty and as for Hilary, they could start with her brilliant mind and wit.
This memoir of a girls life from the fifties to the present day is a really great read and I would recommend it to all women not just from that time but to younger women too. It is informative, funny, and it just might make them a little more tolerant of other females, as they should be.
Thank you Ilary (as she calls herself in the book).
I am reposting this review as my little tribute to a great lady and gifted author. Rest in peace Hilary.
April 5, 2013
This is a compelling and readable memoir. It's melancholic but tinged with humour. There is a sense of longing for another self but ultimately a coming to terms with the ghost of the person she might have been.
This book is largely a childhood memoir. As you can imagine Hilary was a bright and precocious child, she amuses herself with tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the round table and desires the life of the knight errant but alas at the age of four she is disappointed to find that she doesn't turn into a boy! There is some upheaval in her family which she bravely takes on the chin. She then details her days at a convent secondary school, her time at university and her struggle against some of her chauvinistic lecturers at Sheffield University~
"Some people have forgotten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn’t patronise you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favour".
The third part of the book concerns her struggle with illness. I was aghast at the way she was treated by medical professionals. She went through absolute hell and was given misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis and as a result was prescribed unhelpful drugs that added new symptoms to the mix.
Obviously all the important elements are there but I didn't think that the parts of her story were linked smoothly although maybe if she had beefed them up a bit the book would have been too long. She omits information about her writing. I wanted to know more about her writing habits, technique, the process, time of day she wrote etc... I really like Hilary Mantel the person. I can't wait to read her Thomas Cromwell series. If a book of her essays and articles is compiled I will be first in the queue. Below are some examples.
Funny, insightful article on losing prizes but eventually wining the Man Booker prize.
http://moreintelligentlife.com/conten...
That brilliant and needlessly controversial (thanks to the daily mail) lecture on royal bodies.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-m...
This book is largely a childhood memoir. As you can imagine Hilary was a bright and precocious child, she amuses herself with tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the round table and desires the life of the knight errant but alas at the age of four she is disappointed to find that she doesn't turn into a boy! There is some upheaval in her family which she bravely takes on the chin. She then details her days at a convent secondary school, her time at university and her struggle against some of her chauvinistic lecturers at Sheffield University~
"Some people have forgotten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn’t patronise you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favour".
The third part of the book concerns her struggle with illness. I was aghast at the way she was treated by medical professionals. She went through absolute hell and was given misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis and as a result was prescribed unhelpful drugs that added new symptoms to the mix.
Obviously all the important elements are there but I didn't think that the parts of her story were linked smoothly although maybe if she had beefed them up a bit the book would have been too long. She omits information about her writing. I wanted to know more about her writing habits, technique, the process, time of day she wrote etc... I really like Hilary Mantel the person. I can't wait to read her Thomas Cromwell series. If a book of her essays and articles is compiled I will be first in the queue. Below are some examples.
Funny, insightful article on losing prizes but eventually wining the Man Booker prize.
http://moreintelligentlife.com/conten...
That brilliant and needlessly controversial (thanks to the daily mail) lecture on royal bodies.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-m...
September 7, 2015
My god, what is this thing? Her prose, her way of putting on the page that which she claims she can not describe and does not and yet does: electric tingles. Memoir feels too small a word for this story. Read it!
August 24, 2023
Giving up the Ghost is the twice Booker Prizewinning author Hilary Mantel’s memoir of her early life, penned before the Thomas Cromwell novels brought her the well-deserved laurels and acclaim. I say well-deserved even as I haven’t read anything else from her, for this memoir alone has me brimming with admiration towards her craft.
Here, Mantel recounts her experiences growing up Catholic, her traumatic remembrances of early life—“the story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me”—on which the induced absence of her father settled like a haunting dust, her lifelong struggles with debilitating illnesses and the indifference of the medical institution, her painful conciliation with the lurking spectres of her unborn children, her unled and aborted probable lives, and all the houses and homes she has had to pack up and leave behind—all of which is simply, beautifully, astoundingly distilled in the title of the book alone. But inside it, too: each turn of phrase, each extraordinary instance of a perfectly placed semicolon, each dry snatch of witty humour finding its place in an otherwise profoundly sad narrative caught me by the neck. There is so much here of the minutiae and the miasmas of the author’s childhood that I wouldn’t normally have cared for, but the manner in which she entrusts them to the readers made me dwell in them.
A lot of people have said that they’d have liked this book better if it shed more light on Mantel’s writing process, which baffles me—childhood is formative to every writer and ‘Ilary’ (“my family have named me aspirationally, but the aspiration doesn’t stretch to the “H””) was no exception; every chapter explains something about how she came into writing, the anxieties that led her there and those the act generated in her, and why she stayed with it till—as we now know—the end. The fact of Mantel being a writer—by nature, nurture, instinct, or what you will—is one of the principal threads holding this memoir together:
Here, Mantel recounts her experiences growing up Catholic, her traumatic remembrances of early life—“the story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me”—on which the induced absence of her father settled like a haunting dust, her lifelong struggles with debilitating illnesses and the indifference of the medical institution, her painful conciliation with the lurking spectres of her unborn children, her unled and aborted probable lives, and all the houses and homes she has had to pack up and leave behind—all of which is simply, beautifully, astoundingly distilled in the title of the book alone. But inside it, too: each turn of phrase, each extraordinary instance of a perfectly placed semicolon, each dry snatch of witty humour finding its place in an otherwise profoundly sad narrative caught me by the neck. There is so much here of the minutiae and the miasmas of the author’s childhood that I wouldn’t normally have cared for, but the manner in which she entrusts them to the readers made me dwell in them.
A lot of people have said that they’d have liked this book better if it shed more light on Mantel’s writing process, which baffles me—childhood is formative to every writer and ‘Ilary’ (“my family have named me aspirationally, but the aspiration doesn’t stretch to the “H””) was no exception; every chapter explains something about how she came into writing, the anxieties that led her there and those the act generated in her, and why she stayed with it till—as we now know—the end. The fact of Mantel being a writer—by nature, nurture, instinct, or what you will—is one of the principal threads holding this memoir together:
You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectation the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact? I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so far, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being—even if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no one can see till I’m dead. When you have committed enough words to paper you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing you find that’s all you are, a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.I can't help recommending this to every writer I know.
…
Much of what happened to you, in your early life, was constructed inside your head. You were a passive observer, you were the done-to, you were the not-explained-to; you had to listen at doors for information, or sometimes it was what you overheard; but just as often it was disinformation, or half a tale, and much of the time you probably put the wrong construction on what you picked up. How then can you create a narrative of your own life? Janet frame compares the process to finding a bunch of old rags, and trying to make a dress. A party dress, I’d say: something fit to be seen in. Something to go out in and face the world.
…
There is a place, a gap, a hiatus, between the hatching words, flinching and raw, and those that are ready to take their place in the world, words that are ready to stand up and fight.
…
The book of me was indeed being written by other people: by my parents, by the child I once was, and by my own unborn children, stretching their ghost fingers to grab the pen. I began this writing in an attempt to seize the copyright in myself.
July 11, 2013
How interesting -- looking up this book, which is not quite the edition I read it in, or not the same picture anyway, I realised how many different books there are with this title. Anyway, this is the only Giving Up the Ghost I have read.
And it's good.
It's also the only Hilary Mantel I've read, though I'm aware of her stature as a historical novelist, and I've listened to her on the radio and read articles by her in newspapers.
This memoir is personal. Very. The early pages are slightly fragmentary -- real bits of blurry memory, zoning in and out of different incidents.
Somewhere in the middle I suddenly found I was completely compelled by the narrative and could not put the book down. The author is, I have no doubt, an extraordinary person -- hugely unlucky in her health and the treatment she did (and didn't) receive -- hugely lucky in the gift for writing. As for her solid determination and character, the stubborn hard work that took her where she is today -- she is simply amazing.
This memoir is beautifully written. It is also spooky in places. It has ghosts in it, or things that approximate to the inexplicable and magical. One incident when she is seven is the weirdest thing, and it may be from this point that I started to be transfixed by the narrative:
"I am seven, and I am in the yard at Brosscroft; I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can't see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies, but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense -- at the periphery, the limit of all my senses -- the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking; as if pinned in the moment, I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body."
She never makes the connection explicitly, but it's impossible not to connect this strange Stephen-King-like experience with the start of the endometriosis that later makes her life a nightmare, until it is finally diagnosed (or self-diagnosed) and partially treated.
Much else in this novel fascinated me. Her awareness is not like any other I have shared, and share it I did. To read this memoir is to be inside her mind and way of thinking.
At the end of the edition I read there is an interview and various Hilary Mantel facts. After reading about her migraines and the odd feelings and sensations she sometimes has on her left side, I was not surprised to discover who her favourite author is: Oliver Sacks. He is also one of mine.
At times she stops to comment on her own writing: "Do you know what worries me most about this memoir? That I'm always the smart one. Always the one with the last word. Always the one with the heartless quip, the derisive bon mot."
She is smart. But she's also tender, sensitive and truthful. She won my heart completely.
And it's good.
It's also the only Hilary Mantel I've read, though I'm aware of her stature as a historical novelist, and I've listened to her on the radio and read articles by her in newspapers.
This memoir is personal. Very. The early pages are slightly fragmentary -- real bits of blurry memory, zoning in and out of different incidents.
Somewhere in the middle I suddenly found I was completely compelled by the narrative and could not put the book down. The author is, I have no doubt, an extraordinary person -- hugely unlucky in her health and the treatment she did (and didn't) receive -- hugely lucky in the gift for writing. As for her solid determination and character, the stubborn hard work that took her where she is today -- she is simply amazing.
This memoir is beautifully written. It is also spooky in places. It has ghosts in it, or things that approximate to the inexplicable and magical. One incident when she is seven is the weirdest thing, and it may be from this point that I started to be transfixed by the narrative:
"I am seven, and I am in the yard at Brosscroft; I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can't see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies, but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense -- at the periphery, the limit of all my senses -- the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking; as if pinned in the moment, I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body."
She never makes the connection explicitly, but it's impossible not to connect this strange Stephen-King-like experience with the start of the endometriosis that later makes her life a nightmare, until it is finally diagnosed (or self-diagnosed) and partially treated.
Much else in this novel fascinated me. Her awareness is not like any other I have shared, and share it I did. To read this memoir is to be inside her mind and way of thinking.
At the end of the edition I read there is an interview and various Hilary Mantel facts. After reading about her migraines and the odd feelings and sensations she sometimes has on her left side, I was not surprised to discover who her favourite author is: Oliver Sacks. He is also one of mine.
At times she stops to comment on her own writing: "Do you know what worries me most about this memoir? That I'm always the smart one. Always the one with the last word. Always the one with the heartless quip, the derisive bon mot."
She is smart. But she's also tender, sensitive and truthful. She won my heart completely.
June 24, 2015
Deutscher Titel: Von Geist und Geistern
Hilary Mantel ist eine der wohl einflussreichsten Schriftstellerinnen unserer Zeit. Als einzige Frau hat sie mit ihren bisher erschienenen Romanen um Thomas Cromwell, “Wolf Hall” (Wölfe) und “Bring up the Bodies” (Falken) den Man Booker Prize gewonnen.
Für mich ist sie eine Lieblingsautorin, wegen ihrer wunderbaren Sprache, die mich leicht ins Schwärmen geraten lässt. Natürlich gefällt es mir auch gut, dass sie meistens auf historische Themen setzt.
“Giving up the Ghost” ist eine ungewöhnliche Autobiografie einer ungewöhnlichen Frau, die viel mitgemacht hat. Dabei hat sie sich aber ihren Humor bewahrt, der hier viel häufiger aufblitzt, als ich es erwartet hätte. Es ist eine Biografie, die sprachlich genauso großartig ist wie Mantels Romane, in meiner Ausgabe kleben einige Post-its mit Lieblingsstellen. Philosophisch mutet das Erzählte an, von Geistern ist die Rede, doch davon sollte sich niemand abschrecken lassen, das Buch ist keine esoterisch angehauchte Biografie.
Nach dem ersten Kapitel, einer Art Einführung, begleiten wir Hilary Mantel zurück in ihre Kindheit, die geprägt war von der Trennung der Mutter vom Vater und dem schwierigem Verhältnis zum Stiefvater, außerdem bereits früh von Krankheit.
In diesem Teil des Buchs berichtet Mantel eindrücklich aus der Sicht des Kindes, das sie war, eine ungewöhnliche, erfrischende Herangehensweise. Mit dem Erwachsenwerden wird es langsam offensichtlich, dass die heftigen Schmerzen keine Wachstumsschmerzen mehr sein können. Eine lange Krankheitsgeschichte beginnt, trotzdem schafft es die aus einfachen Verhältnissen stammende Hilary auf eine gute Schule und an die Universität. Sie verliebt sich, heiratet, zieht später mit dem Mann nach Südafrika. Ihr Leben ist nun immer mehr geprägt von der Krankheit, die kein Arzt benennen kann. Wie so häufig, wird sie auf die Psyche geschoben. Es ist wirklich furchtbar, welche Odysee Mantel hinter sich hat, bis die Diagnose Endometriose feststeht, gespickt von Fehldiagnosen und Fehlmedikation, aus heutiger Sicht schier unglaublich. Hilary Mantel wird dabei jedoch niemals weinerlich, sie erzählt wie bereits erwähnt mit viel Humor und Sarkasmus.
Am Ende des Buches wird deutlich, dass Hilary zu sich gefunden und ihren Frieden mit den Geistern gemacht hat.
Ich habe diese Autobiografie sehr gerne gelesen und kann sie wärmstens empfehlen, nicht nur für bestehende, sondern auch für zukünftige Fans. Eine tolle Frau!
Hilary Mantel ist eine der wohl einflussreichsten Schriftstellerinnen unserer Zeit. Als einzige Frau hat sie mit ihren bisher erschienenen Romanen um Thomas Cromwell, “Wolf Hall” (Wölfe) und “Bring up the Bodies” (Falken) den Man Booker Prize gewonnen.
Für mich ist sie eine Lieblingsautorin, wegen ihrer wunderbaren Sprache, die mich leicht ins Schwärmen geraten lässt. Natürlich gefällt es mir auch gut, dass sie meistens auf historische Themen setzt.
“Giving up the Ghost” ist eine ungewöhnliche Autobiografie einer ungewöhnlichen Frau, die viel mitgemacht hat. Dabei hat sie sich aber ihren Humor bewahrt, der hier viel häufiger aufblitzt, als ich es erwartet hätte. Es ist eine Biografie, die sprachlich genauso großartig ist wie Mantels Romane, in meiner Ausgabe kleben einige Post-its mit Lieblingsstellen. Philosophisch mutet das Erzählte an, von Geistern ist die Rede, doch davon sollte sich niemand abschrecken lassen, das Buch ist keine esoterisch angehauchte Biografie.
Nach dem ersten Kapitel, einer Art Einführung, begleiten wir Hilary Mantel zurück in ihre Kindheit, die geprägt war von der Trennung der Mutter vom Vater und dem schwierigem Verhältnis zum Stiefvater, außerdem bereits früh von Krankheit.
In diesem Teil des Buchs berichtet Mantel eindrücklich aus der Sicht des Kindes, das sie war, eine ungewöhnliche, erfrischende Herangehensweise. Mit dem Erwachsenwerden wird es langsam offensichtlich, dass die heftigen Schmerzen keine Wachstumsschmerzen mehr sein können. Eine lange Krankheitsgeschichte beginnt, trotzdem schafft es die aus einfachen Verhältnissen stammende Hilary auf eine gute Schule und an die Universität. Sie verliebt sich, heiratet, zieht später mit dem Mann nach Südafrika. Ihr Leben ist nun immer mehr geprägt von der Krankheit, die kein Arzt benennen kann. Wie so häufig, wird sie auf die Psyche geschoben. Es ist wirklich furchtbar, welche Odysee Mantel hinter sich hat, bis die Diagnose Endometriose feststeht, gespickt von Fehldiagnosen und Fehlmedikation, aus heutiger Sicht schier unglaublich. Hilary Mantel wird dabei jedoch niemals weinerlich, sie erzählt wie bereits erwähnt mit viel Humor und Sarkasmus.
Am Ende des Buches wird deutlich, dass Hilary zu sich gefunden und ihren Frieden mit den Geistern gemacht hat.
Ich habe diese Autobiografie sehr gerne gelesen und kann sie wärmstens empfehlen, nicht nur für bestehende, sondern auch für zukünftige Fans. Eine tolle Frau!
July 14, 2020
2.5 stars
Extremely unpopular opinion coming your way.
First off, the writing is exquisite, it flows like butter and the chapter Show Your Workings which deals with Mantel's diagnosis of endometriosis was heart-wrenching, especially the way in which it discusses women's physical illnesses understood to be a concoctation of the mind, rather than actual, physical sickness.
Having said that, the rest of the book made absolutely no impression on me. It was extremely self-indulgent, with so many description of houses that just made me go, okay you lived here, now you're moving/selling it off, so what do I do with that information? Hilary as a writer also seemed completely inaccessible to me. Agreed, memoirs don't have to revolve around a writer's writing life. But does it really have to revolve around an excruciatingly unnecessary detail of her school life where a nun caught her admiring herself in the mirror?
What I essentially want to say is that what a writer thinks has been essential to their life may not necessarily make for interesting subject matter. I would have perhaps enjoyed listening to these tales as verbal anecdotes, but to read a book about someone's drab little life with no sunshine in Ireland/England is just plain boring and annoying.
Mantel focuses a lot on the idea of owning up and writing your narrative in the way you want, and I have the utmost respect for it. I, however, have very little interest in writers as public figures, and I find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that just because a famous writer wrote a memoir, I have to pretend to be interested in the subject matter of it, when I in fact find it quite boring.
I also feel like Mantel at some moments was trying to play with humour, especially dark humour, but it fell flat for me most of the time.
Having said all of that, if you do find memoirs interesting, this is a beautifully written book, just something not for me.
Extremely unpopular opinion coming your way.
First off, the writing is exquisite, it flows like butter and the chapter Show Your Workings which deals with Mantel's diagnosis of endometriosis was heart-wrenching, especially the way in which it discusses women's physical illnesses understood to be a concoctation of the mind, rather than actual, physical sickness.
Having said that, the rest of the book made absolutely no impression on me. It was extremely self-indulgent, with so many description of houses that just made me go, okay you lived here, now you're moving/selling it off, so what do I do with that information? Hilary as a writer also seemed completely inaccessible to me. Agreed, memoirs don't have to revolve around a writer's writing life. But does it really have to revolve around an excruciatingly unnecessary detail of her school life where a nun caught her admiring herself in the mirror?
What I essentially want to say is that what a writer thinks has been essential to their life may not necessarily make for interesting subject matter. I would have perhaps enjoyed listening to these tales as verbal anecdotes, but to read a book about someone's drab little life with no sunshine in Ireland/England is just plain boring and annoying.
Mantel focuses a lot on the idea of owning up and writing your narrative in the way you want, and I have the utmost respect for it. I, however, have very little interest in writers as public figures, and I find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that just because a famous writer wrote a memoir, I have to pretend to be interested in the subject matter of it, when I in fact find it quite boring.
I also feel like Mantel at some moments was trying to play with humour, especially dark humour, but it fell flat for me most of the time.
Having said all of that, if you do find memoirs interesting, this is a beautifully written book, just something not for me.
December 20, 2010
I've had ill health all my life and do I must admit feel sorry for myself from time to time. Well this book served as a very efficient reminder that there is always someone worse off than yourself. What Mantel went through because of apathy, her catholic background and an inefficient healthcare system is just astonishing. I do feel though that regret is the ghost she gives up. Although I was secretly hoping for details of other ghosts, this was a very worthwhile read.
January 19, 2020
La verdad es que no ha sido lo que me esperaba ni por lo que cuenta ni por cómo lo cuenta; es un libro raro y muy opaco.
La primera mitad se centra en la infancia de la autora y se extiende mucho en su forma de ver el mundo y en las diferentes personalidades que le gustaba adoptar. No está mal, pero es que esta parte es la mitad del libro y se antoja excesivamente larga cuando la comparamos con cómo despacha su adolescencia en unas pocas páginas. Los saltos temporales son muy abruptos y desconcertantes y están hechos con el propósito de ocultar cosas a los lectores. Yo entiendo que Hilary Mantel está contando su vida y tiene derecho a evadir lo que le apetezca, pero a mí me ha resultado muy frustrante ver cómo se dejaban tantas cosas sin ninguna explicación clara.
La segunda parte se centra en los problemas de salud, tantos físicos como mentales, que la autora desarrolló a consecuencia de una endometriosis erróneamente diagnosticada en repetidas ocasiones. Si solamente leyéndolo es horrible, no me quiero ni imaginar lo que habrá sido vivirlo todo. De nuevo, en esta parte hay cosas que Mantel pasa por alto deliberadamente y esas omisiones me dejaron con la sensación de estar totalmente perdida en lo que me estaba contando.
A pesar de lo frustrante que me ha resultado en ocasiones, no me arrepiento de haberlo leído y tengo ganas de darle una oportunidad a alguna de las novelas de ficción de Hilary Mantel.
La primera mitad se centra en la infancia de la autora y se extiende mucho en su forma de ver el mundo y en las diferentes personalidades que le gustaba adoptar. No está mal, pero es que esta parte es la mitad del libro y se antoja excesivamente larga cuando la comparamos con cómo despacha su adolescencia en unas pocas páginas. Los saltos temporales son muy abruptos y desconcertantes y están hechos con el propósito de ocultar cosas a los lectores. Yo entiendo que Hilary Mantel está contando su vida y tiene derecho a evadir lo que le apetezca, pero a mí me ha resultado muy frustrante ver cómo se dejaban tantas cosas sin ninguna explicación clara.
La segunda parte se centra en los problemas de salud, tantos físicos como mentales, que la autora desarrolló a consecuencia de una endometriosis erróneamente diagnosticada en repetidas ocasiones. Si solamente leyéndolo es horrible, no me quiero ni imaginar lo que habrá sido vivirlo todo. De nuevo, en esta parte hay cosas que Mantel pasa por alto deliberadamente y esas omisiones me dejaron con la sensación de estar totalmente perdida en lo que me estaba contando.
A pesar de lo frustrante que me ha resultado en ocasiones, no me arrepiento de haberlo leído y tengo ganas de darle una oportunidad a alguna de las novelas de ficción de Hilary Mantel.
September 15, 2011
I haven't quite finished reading this as I picked it up at a friends house and read it continuously all day, while waiting for dinner, sitting on the bus, lying in a London Park. I had to return home before I finished but I was absolutely engrossed. Hilary Mantel has such a distinct and unique style, I have never read anyone like her. It is an interesting autobiography not just for the life described, the intimate personal lives led by real, working class people in Manchester in the 1950's but also because of Mantels strange quirks and odd observations.
She is a very brave writer I think and she talks of this, of not wanting to hide behind cliches or metaphors and yet at the same time not being ashamed of them when they come to her as right. There is a lot of pain behind the writing, as if some of it has really been wrenched from her memory onto the page and there is something so direct about her tone its a real pleasure to read.
She is a very brave writer I think and she talks of this, of not wanting to hide behind cliches or metaphors and yet at the same time not being ashamed of them when they come to her as right. There is a lot of pain behind the writing, as if some of it has really been wrenched from her memory onto the page and there is something so direct about her tone its a real pleasure to read.
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