Hilary Mantel
At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o’clock and she is getting the cabbage on. ‘Hello, Our Ilary,’ she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn’t stretch to the ‘H’. Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel’s wry, shocking and uniquely unusual five-part autobiography of childhood, ghosts, illness and family. It opens in 1995 with ‘A Second Home’, in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, a death which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of childhood. ‘Now Geoffrey Don’t Torment Her’ begins in typical, gripping Mantel fashion: ‘Two of my relatives have died by fire.’ Set during the 1950s, it takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating with the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelit ceremony of her mother’s ‘churching’. In ‘The Secret Garden’ Mantel moves to a haunted house and mysteriously gains a stepfather. When she is almost eleven, her family flee the gossips and the ghosts, and resolve to start a new life. ‘Smile’ is an account of teenage perplexity, in a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Convent school provides a certain sanctuary, with tacit assistance from the fearsome ‘Top Nun.’ In the final section, the author tells how, through medical misunderstandings and neglect, she came to be childless, and how the ghosts of the unborn, like chances missed or pages unturned, have come to haunt her life as a writer.
Reviews of Giving up the Ghost
-
‘Like Lorna Sage’s BAD BLOOD, GIVING UP THE GHOST is a story of childhood that is also a piece of history. Hilary Mantel’s self-portrait is a masterpiece of wit, but it conjures up a time and a place and an epoch of female experience with razor-edged sobriety. That past, so thoroughly vanished, is made to live again here – disclosed, cannily and heartbreakingly, as once it too yielded up its author’s mind.’ Rachel Cusk
‘What a remarkable writer she is. She is piercingly, even laceratingly observant, and every remembered detail has the sharpness of a good photograph. And yet for all its brilliance of detail and its black comedy the memoir is heavy with atmophere. It’s a very startling and daring memoir; the more I read it the more unsettling it becomes.’ Helen Dunmore
‘I was riveted. It’s raw, it’s distressing and it’s full of piercing insights into a first-rate novelist’s mind.’ Margaret Forster
A stunning evocation of an ill-fitting childhood and a womanhood blighted by medical ineptitude. Hilary Mantel’s frank and beautiful memoir is impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
Clare Boylan
More from Hilary Mantel
-
Matchbook Classics Box Set
Other -
A Place of Greater Safety (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)
Paperback -
The School of English
Other -
Bring Up the Bodies
Paperback -
Wolf Hall
Paperback -
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
Paperback -
Bring up the Bodies
Paperback -
How Shall I Know You?
Other -
Comma
Other -
Third Floor Rising
Other -
Learning to Talk (Fast Fiction)
Other -
Curved is the Line of Beauty
Other -
King Billy is a Gentleman
Other -
Wolf Hall
Other -
Wolf Hall
Other -
Wolf Hall
Other -
Wolf Hall
Hardback -
Beyond Black
Paperback -
Wolf Hall
Hardback -
Beyond Black
Hardback -
Giving up the Ghost
Hardback -
The Giant, Ou2019Brien
Hardback -
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
Other -
Other
-
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
Other -
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
Hardback -
Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies: RSC Stage Adaptation – Revised Edition
Other -
Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies: RSC Stage Adaptation – Revised Edition
Paperback -
Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant Ou2019Brien
Other -
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
Other -
Bring up the Bodies
Hardback -
Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies: Two-Book Edition
Other -
Wolf Hall
Hardback -
The Giant, Ou2019Brien
Paperback -
Bring Up the Bodies
Other -
Every Day Is Mother’s Day
Paperback -
Vacant Possession
Paperback -
Learning to Talk
Paperback -
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
Paperback -
Wolf Hall: Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Paperback -
Wolf Hall: Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Other -
Bring Up the Bodies
Hardback -
A Place of Greater Safety
Paperback -
Beyond Black
Paperback -
Giving up the Ghost
Paperback -
The Giant, Ou2019Brien
Paperback -
A Change of Climate
Paperback -
An Experiment in Love
Paperback -
Fludd
Paperback -
Every Day Is Motheru2019s Day
Other -
Vacant Possession
Other -
Learning to Talk: Short stories
Other -
Beyond Black
Ebook -
The Giant, Ou2019Brien
Other -
A Place of Greater Safety
Ebook -
An Experiment in Love
Other -
Fludd
Other -
A Change of Climate
Other -
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
Other -
Wolf Hall
Other -
Wolf Hall
Other -
Wolf Hall
Ebook -
Bring up the Bodies
Other -
Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary
Other -
Bring Up the Bodies
Paperback -
Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies: RSC Stage Adaptation
Other -
Hilary Mantel Collection: Six of Her Best Novels
Other -
Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies: RSC Stage Adaptation
Paperback -
Bring up the Bodies
Other -
Hilary Mantel Collection
Other