Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Hilary Mantel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 2003

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel is a fierce, self-possessed child, schooling herself in "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay" and convinced that she will become a boy at age four. Catholic school comes as a rude distraction from her rich inner life. At home, where fathers and stepfathers come and go at strange, overlapping intervals, the keeping of secrets becomes a way of life. Her late teens bring her to law school in London and then to Sheffield; a lover and then a husband. She acquires a persistent pain-which also shifts and travels-that over the next decade will subject her to destructive drugs, patronizing psychiatry, and, finally, at age twenty-seven, to an ineffective and irrevocable surgery. There will be no children; instead she has "a ghost of possibility, a paper baby, a person who slipped between the lines." Hormone treatments alter her body beyond recognition. And in the middle of it all, she begins one novel, and then another.

Hilary Mantel was born to write about the paradoxes that shimmer at the edges of our perception. Dazzling, wry, and visceral, Giving Up the Ghost is a deeply compelling book that will bring new converts to Mantel's dark genius.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As she approaches midlife, Mantel applies her beautiful prose and expansive vocabulary to a somewhat meandering memoir. The English author of eight novels (The Giant, O'Brien; Eight Months on Ghazzah Street; etc.) is "writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself... between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are." Among the book's themes are ghosts and illness, both of which Mantel has much experience with. She expends many pages on her earliest years, and then on medical treatments in her 20s, but skips other decades almost entirely as she brings readers up to the present. At age seven she senses a horrifying creature in the garden, which as a Catholic she concludes is the devil; later, houses she lives in have "minor poltergeists." The first and foremost ghost, though, is the baby she will never have. By 20, Mantel is in constant pain from endometriosis, and at 27, after years of misdiagnosis and botched treatment, she has an operation that ends her fertility. Her pains come back, she has thyroid problems and drug treatments cause her body to balloon; she describes these ordeals with remarkably wry detachment. Fans of Mantel's critically acclaimed novels may enjoy the memoir as insight into her world. Often, though, all the fine detail that in another work would flesh out a plot-such as embroidery silk "the scarlet shade of the tip of butterflies' wings"-has nowhere to go.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

This bleak memoir by a prolific British novelist recounts her upbringing in the North of England in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Mantel's domineering stepfather has contempt for her intellectual aspirations and for her constant nausea and migraines. When, at college, she takes her symptoms to a doctor, he prescribes antidepressants and sends her on to a psychiatrist, who, in turn, suggests that she give up her studies to work for her mother selling dresses. Finally, at twenty-seven, she is diagnosed with severe endometriosis. Her uterus is removed, and hormone replacements cause extreme weight gain. For most of her life, she has struggled with emaciation, but strangers increasingly assume she is pregnant, now an impossibility. While Mantel's prose shimmers with suppressed anger, the reader might have preferred a story more plainly shaped, and one that gave some sense of the growth of her remarkable imagination.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (October 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805074724
• ISBN-13: 978-0805074727
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,439,195 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hilary Mantel is the author of nine previous novels, including A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she reviews for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. She lives in England.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Memoir, February 24, 2006

By 

Blue Moon - See all my reviews

This review is from: Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (Hardcover)

This is a book to be read and re-read; Hilary Mantel's prose is so spare and sharp that at first glance it conceals the depths that unlie her descriptions of events and people throughout her life. The "ghost" takes many forms; her reactions to them become her life. Although she has led a life of hardships and pain, she tells of times of pleasure and inserts wry and very amusing lines as counterpoints to dark and dramatic moments. Women in particular will understand much of what Mantel has been through both physically and emotionally as she wrestles with disease and doctors. I recommend this highly to anyone who has read and enjoyed Mantel's novels.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating glimpse into the life of a great contemporary writer, September 1, 2007

By 

Penny (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Giving Up the Ghost : A Memoir (John MacRae Books) (Paperback)

I love the way Hilary Mantel writes. Her imagery and descriptions are so true, so evocative, sometimes I need to put on a sweater or snuggle deeper into the duvet just to cope. She strings me out and keeps me roped in. I have no other way of expressing just how fine her writing feels to me. When I'm reading her work, I feel that she has tapped into the great reservoir--the man-made basin brimming with pain and suffering, dreams and devils. This book is haunting and grim--yet one identifies so strongly with the author, risk and all.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flailing at Memories, March 16, 2010

By 

Kenneth R. Mabry (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Giving Up the Ghost : A Memoir (John MacRae Books) (Paperback)

Mantel's memoir seems to prove her own point when, just a few pages in, she writes, "I hardly know how to write about myself. Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done." Much later in the book, she adds, "Writing about your past is like blundering through your house with the lights fused, a hand flailing for points of reference."

Indeed, Mantel is tentative about what to say about her life and how to say it which raises the question of what she was hoping to accomplish with this effort.

Aside from a few self-reflective comments, I found the first three-fourths of the book, covering her growing up years in England in the 1950's-60's and other biographical stories, to be rather tedious. I almost gave up.

Not until her illness manifests--misdiagnosed as a psychiatric illness--did I find her story compelling. At this point forward, I could grasp what she wanted to expose in this writing: the anger and regret from turning herself over to medical authorities, her Catholic faith's encouragement to deny pain, her sorrow over not having a child, and her conviction that she deserved very little in life. Those themes are encompassing enough for a worthy memoir.

Mantel may be much more accomplished as a fiction writer. I have not read any of her fiction. For this memoir, I wish she could have focused much earlier on the imperative elements of her story.