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240 pages, Paperback
First published May 5, 2003
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.
"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."
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."
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.