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

Mantel, Hilary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312423624 ISBN 13: 9780312423629

Publisher: Picador USA, 2004

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world's most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied.

Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

"The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me."

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children.

Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to "write herself into being"--one novel after another. This wry and visceral memoir will certainly bring new converts to Mantel's dark genius.

"Mesmerizing."--The New York Times

About this title

Review:

"Dazzlingly written...a highly unorthodox account of what is essentially unsayable about the inward uncharted life." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

"The matter is bitter, but Mantel's angular wit is as unquenchable as her anger; the reading experience is reliably exhilarating because of the sheer excellence of the writing." --New York Times Book Review

"Blazing insights [and] poetic discourses that rattle the soul...Mantel doesn't simply hit close to home, she knocks at our closets and opens our doors." --The Boston Globe

"Mantel's talents are stronger than her misfortunes...[this book comes] from the mind of a fine author, whose body has imposed its own terrible penances." --The Washington Post

"Giving Up the Ghost combines the urgency and observation that steer a memoir into the heart of a reader's own experience. I have been touched and also enthralled by this fine book." --Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries and Unless

"A stunning evocation of an ill-fitting childhood and a womanhood blighted by medical ineptitude. Hilary Mantel's frank and beautiful memoir is impossible to put down and impossible to forget." --Clare Boylan, author of Beloved Stranger

From the Back Cover:

'At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o’clock and she is getting the cabbage on. ‘Hello, Our Ilary,’ she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn’t stretch to the ‘H’.'

Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's wry, shocking and beautifully written autobiography of childhood, ghosts, illness and family.

It opens in 1995 with 'A Second Home', in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, a death which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of childhood. 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' begins in typical, gripping Mantel fashion: 'Two of my relatives have died by fire.' Set during the 1950s, it takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating with the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelit ceremony of her mother's 'churching'. Mantel then moves to a haunted house and mysteriously gains a stepfather. When she is almost eleven, her family flee the gossips and the ghosts, and resolve to start a new life. Teenage perplexity displaces childhood dreams of Arthurian knights as her home turns into a place where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Convent school provides a certain sanctuary, with tacit assistance from the fearsome ‘Top Nun.’ After making good her escape to university and her own marriage, the author reveals how, through 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0312423624
• ISBN 13: 9780312423629
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 223