Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
So I’m a little late to the game on this one, but the NY Times recently included it in its list of the 50 best memoirs of the last 50 years. I’m a huge admirer of Mantel, so I instantly reserved it through my public library system. The library clerk and I marveled at the elegant, tiny hardcover edition that arrived, and I marveled at the content.
Extraordinary. Mesmerizing. This woman’s mind is so intense, her brain must be packed to the rafters with synapses. Memories, observations, connections, visions, flashes of an acid wit, all pour out of her, and with a vividness, honesty, and truth that I came up gasping: “How does she DO that?” I don’t often feel I should go back to page one and start over, but as an aspiring writer myself, Mantel makes me want to.
I also admire her for adhering to what I think is wise advice to those who write memoirs: you have the right and the power to tell your own story, but other people’s stories belong to them to tell. Her confusing and often difficult childhood necessarily includes her family members, and the relationships were fraught, but Mantel tells us how it felt and looked to her, and passes no judgment on those around her. I am a child of divorce, and I’ve never read a better evocation of how that feels – to know, and not know, to feel but not understand what was happening among the adults in the household. Her illness experience is excruciating, battering her body and mind, gutting her sense of her self and sanity.
Interestingly, she uses a trope that Sarah Smersh uses in her memoir, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, addressing thoughts to a daughter she never had and never would have – one of the “ghosts” alluded to in the title. Smersh’s efforts too often tipped into pathos; Mantel’s never do, and are that much more powerful.
I’ve just learned that the third volume of Mantel’s brilliant Thomas Cromwell trilogy, “The Mirror and the Light,” is due to be released in March 2020. I for one can’t wait, and am that much more grateful that I’ve gotten better acquainted with its astonishing author through this memoir.
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