GIVING UP THE GHOST: A memoir

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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. 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. 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.

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!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. I believe she will leave in the night, abandon us. My father puts the baby to bed; this hour, when he is upstairs, seems like the time she would go. I think that, although it will almost kill me, I can bear it if I know the moment she goes: if I hear the front door bang. 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. 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.

From the author herself: life is not long enough for all the intelligent variations on all the narratives of fear.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. Again, we have “he gave up his spirit” in death, a clear indication of a personal choice by Jesus to die exactly then, revealing his power over death even while living in a human body. 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. Luke 23 begins with Pilate’s questioning of Jesus. When Pilate realizes this is both a religious matter dealing with the local kingship of Judah, he sends Jesus to Herod. The boom in British memoir writing means, inevitably, that precedents have been established, problems flagged, conversations set in play. Mantel is smart to these concerns, aware of the intellectual tangles and the technical difficulties involved in inserting herself in an already crowded genre. She muses on the temptation to use charm to make herself lovely and works hard at the problem of how to inhabit the mind of a child as well as an older self without lurching clumsily between the two. She is wise, too, to the expectations of the genre, balking at those points when her life does not quite fit the template (there is an incident, when she is seven, of almost unwritable awfulness, but it has nothing to do with the sexual abuse that Mantel assumes we will, as practised readers, be expecting). Still, none of this knowingness gets in the way of the writing, which is simply astonishing - clear and true. In Giving Up the Ghost Mantel has finally booted out all those shadowy presences that have jostled her all her life, and written the one character whom she feared she never could - herself.