Giving Up the Ghost : A Memoir (John MacRae Books)

This book is a very slow read. Amazing vocabulary, phenomenal memory! The book itself is small, about the size of the books from Elizabethan times. About 31/2” by 6”. I carried in my pocketbook to appointments. Can’t zip through it, but it was an interesting upbringing, to say the least…

In her memoir, Giving up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel obliquely tackles a subject much debated in psychoanalytical circles of a century ago and revisited by feminist literary critics from 1968 onward: To what degree is female ambition and achievement in the arts ( or any field, for that matter) a compensation for an unfertile womb, and in what way is artistic creativity in women related to mental instability and even madness? In our post-feminist era such suggestions sound outrageous, reactionary. We are accustomed to thinking that we can and will have it all. But slip back fifty, then one hundred years or more and examine the lives of great women writers and poets. Virginia Woolf insisted that without leisure time, education, private income, and a space to write, a woman could not produce literature, hence the demands of motherhood and marriage might be a serious obstacle. Emily Dickinson, a spinster, withdrew from the world, Charlotte Bronte died of a pregnancy related illness with her unborn first child, Elizabeth Bishop was gay, Sylvia Plath found both marriage and motherhood devastating. Mantel reminds us that in her formative years, a time not so long ago, women were expected to stay home and to become homemakers, and though England already had a long tradition of penwomen, it was no easy journey to become a writer.This memoir is about how a poor, "neverwell" child of Irish origins, from a disadvantaged family became one of the world's most celebrated novelists, twice winning the Man Booker prize, an unprecedented feat. Home was drab lodgings without a bathtub, with few books, where her mother maintained an unusual ménage living, for a time, with both her husband and lover. The latter would be the one to rescue Hilary and her family, giving them the dignity of a real home and a new name. At school this pale, phlegmatic child was at times picked on, grudgingly admired, avoided. As she fashions her story, she gives us echoes of other stories we know and love. The rage that bubbles within her at school recalls Jane Eyre's ( and indeed she claims, Jane Eyre is the story of all women writers). Her descriptions of the strange visions that sometimes inhabit her psyche echo moments of Turn of the Screw, in which she is both the governess and the malignant child, other moments, such as the eerie revelation of evil she glimpses in the yard might have been drawn from Stephen King filtered through Mary Butts.Ever since her childhood, she has been subject to visions, "seeing things" that "aren't there," she confesses, well aware that the inclusion in quotes somehow makes these ghostly presences more explainable or more acceptable to contemporary minds. Like Henry James, she never lets us know her own explanation for the ghosts she regularly sees: are they metaphors, the product of ophthalmic migraines, or projections of her own psyche? She suggests all these possibilities, tying in hormonal issues as a further explanation. The heart of Mantel's memoir focuses just on these issues, and the debilitating condition with which she battled for years, undergoing an early hysterectomy. The surgery turned out to be useless, as replacement estrogen worsened her symptoms and led to uncontrollable weight gain. The medical establishment had no remedy but was convinced she was the problem, not her disease. For many years she was given pain killers, antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs. Struggling to come to grips with herself, her pain, her changing and changed body, she starts writing again, but her doctors do not approve. Why not she asks. The chilling reply is simply "because." This was all happening ten years after Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch. But luckily for us, Mantel kept at it, six years later published and was paid for her first story. At one point, she realized that she was unconsciously waiting for children who would never come. Empty bedrooms, an overfilled pantry, presses packed with sheets for too many beds were the telltale signs. Once she brought her mourning to the light, the unborn ghosts of her womb became novels.There is no self-pity in this memoir, which is poignant, unexpectedly funny at times. If anything there is too much self-control, and even minute traces of self-loathing. In handling the sections of her childhood, she shapes the story to the child's half understandings. The male figures, father, step-father, brothers, husband, are at best presences. Yet every sentence, every phrase in this book is breathtaking, artfully crafted, subtly shaped. We almost forget the message given at the beginning. If you want to be a writer " Rise in the quiet hours of the night, prick your fingertips, and use the blood for ink." But what we have read has been written in blood, product of pain, sacrifice, self-control, distance from oneself and from one's own ghosts. A real achievement.

Comes this mishmash. Very confused writing, non-directional historical anecdotes. The real meat of this book comes very near the end, which I wouldn’t have found had I given up. She needs a biographer to write this. And is the British health system as poor as is described here? Based on this I wouldn’t bring a sick cat to one of these medicos.Don’t waste your time.

I love Hilary Mantel's writing, but not this novelty book format. The hardcover book is a TINY size, but you won't know that in advance of ordering unless you click deeper into the description: 3 1/4 x 5 3/4 x 3/4 inches. I subtracted two stars only for the inconvenient format, which wasn't described up front.

Hilary Mantel’s autobiography is a joy to read, wonderfully written, funny and sad. I cannot recommend it highly enough. She wrote this with such wry wisdom and disarming honesty that I found myself wishing I had known her.

I loved the honest and often painful prose of this memoir. It didn't judge behaviours of those living in times past but it was easy to recognize (hopefully) progress we've made. Ms Mantel writes in such a beautiful, fluid, unique style that I found it a difficult book to put down. I wanted to slide back into her story as soon as I could. I've never read a memoir written this way. I loved it.

Her experiences, her times, her womanhood,understood thru her intelligent and sensitive lens.A life well lived and explained with the right words.

The boom in British memoir writing means, inevitably, that precedents have been established, problems flagged, conversations set in play. Hilary 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.

Great writing and laugh out loud observations.

Hilary Mantel's writing is always so beautifully done. Having some things in common - age and a convent education- she perfectly expressed events and emotions. A wonderful read and a life described in an unsentimental and poetic way.

A gripping memoir

Hilary Mantel é uma autora fascinante e sempre instigante. Suas memórias de infância e juventude são recolhidas e narradas de forma terna e, no entanto, brutalmente honesta. E vêm acompanhadas de ponderações e reflexões astutas e pertinentes, que não apenas levam o(a) leitor(a) para dentro da narrativa e da trajetória de vida da autora, mas convidam ao interesse por outra época e um outro universo amplo de temas, lugares, sensibilidades, etc. Uma leitura deliciosa e enriquecedora, sem sombra de dúvida.

You know her best for two Man-Booker prize wins for her engaging and vivid novels with Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII, as their narrator (one more to go, I understand). This is her autobiography, at least of her coming-of-age. It's true that, in her odd life story, full of family secrets, she glosses somewhat over her feelings and big parts of her life, such as school achievement (which must have kept her sane during the rest), are left out entirely--we suddenly discover she graduated top of her class in a sentence or two, Others have commented on the seeming epiphany in the garden and how it too is not explored or echoed elsewhere. Still, this sort of reticence about some events and the overall detached quality convey a sense of personality themselves. A difficult and fascinating beginning to a major novelist which I found, as usual for Mantel, a good read.