Giving Up the Ghost is the shocking and beautiful memoir, from the author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light
‘Giving up the Ghost’ is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel’s uniquely unusual five-part autobiography.
Opening in 1995 with ‘A Second Home’, Mantel describes the death of her stepfather which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of her childhood. In ‘Now Geoffrey Don’t Torment Her’ Mantel takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating in the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelight ceremony of her mother’s ‘churching’. In ‘Smile’, an account of teenage perplexity, Mantel describes a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Finally, at the memoir’s conclusion, Mantel explains how through a series of 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.
My reading experience:
“Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her final novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize. She was the film reviewer for The Spectator, 1986-90, and went on to write extensively for the New York Review of Books, Guardian and the London Review of Books. Born in 1952, Hilary died in 2022.”
Giving up the ghost was published in 2010.
It’s been years since I read any kind of autobiography, and anyway I feel this kind of book, a memoir, is its own genre, and I’m glad of that. I was drawn to this book after reading a piece of a quote from the book on social media. It only took less than 280 words. The quote of course was hacked from a larger paragraph in the book about reaching mid life and from that dizzy height, being able to see all of the ghosts of what might have been. I’m part of a whole western generation out there that call these “sliding doors” after the movie in 1998.
This book is a treasure, as you may imagine, of beautifully crafted prose. It is not ‘I did this and then I did that.’ it brings to life those ghostly images of a past lived and life imagined. It is replete with those reflections that demand a pause.
What a unique and dazzling woman she was. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a recipient of the most excellent Order of the British Empire, Dame Hilary Mantel was a prolific and award winning author.
Note: A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel was published in 2023.
I highly recommend Giving up the ghost by Hilary Mantel; a memoir.
Appletree Books 