Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir - Hardcover

Mantel, Hilary

3.94

4,249 ratings by Goodreads

9780805074727: Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805074724 ISBN 13: 9780805074727

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 2003

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An award-winning author and reviewer describes her tomboy childhood, challenging Catholic school education, broken family life, marriage, struggle with chronic illness which rendered her unable to have children, and literary career. 25,000 first printing.

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Review:

'She is by turns facetious, matter-of-fact, visionary and comical but always totally riveting.' Daily Telegraph

'Simply astonishing - clear and true.' Guardian

'An extraordinary story, sometimes comic, often grim, but most importantly it is a story of survival.' Spectator

'A masterpiece of wit...[the] past, so thoroughly vanished, is made to live again here.' Rachel Cusk

‘What a remarkable writer she is. She is piercingly, even laceratingly observant ... a very startling and daring memoir; the more I read it the more unsettling it becomes.’ Helen Dunmore

‘I was riveted. It’s raw, it’s distressing and it’s full of piercing insights into a first-rate novelist’s mind.’ Margaret Forster

‘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

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.

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