Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir

By Hilary Mantel

Book Overview

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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312423624
• ISBN13: 9780312423629
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating glimpse into the life of a great contemporary writer

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.

A Brilliant Memoir

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.

Only one?

Only one review for this???? This is the first of hers I've read, but she's wonderful! Small (no denigration there), but wonderful. The details, the juxtapositions, the starkness, the pain, the wonder...

Another great book

This is a hard book to comment on, as it is both excellent and incomplete. As all memoirs- to an extent- probably feel somewhat unfinished, "Giving Up the Ghost," is particularly hard to reflect on with any sense of conclusion. Whether this adds to or detracts from the book's strength changes from day to day after reading it, but the work, and its content, does keep you thinking for a long time afterwards. It seems that, with the exception of "A Place of Greater Safety," this is a quality shared by her earlier fictional works and, here, her non-fiction. In a few cases, as in "An Experiment in Love," the ending feels abrupt rather than simply inconclusive. This is preceded by a good 200-odd pages of bulldozer honesty, however, and the force of the revelations are only never quite relieved. Her shorter books read most of the way through as if you are being pushed blindly towards a cliff, and are only pushed off in the last few pages. The final paragraphs, then, which seam up an ending, feel like the thoughts you are having on the way down. In theory, the novel would be incomplete, but while they don't feel settled, you never exactly complain that you haven't reached the bottom yet. "Ghost" is more gradual, even measured. Her insights are both condemning and self-questioning, and the most beautiful writing finds itself where she returns to previous conclusions and reevaluates them. I am probably stupidly young to be applying a critical view to the majority of the book's described experience, but Mantel creates a familiarity with her characters, and herself, that is at once both painful and comforting in its imperfection. Any perceived fault in her writing is never in character development or settling you into their place, but in adhering to the arc defined as "fiction making sense". She seems to stick to a disarming incoherence, which follows and develops with each novel. If her shorter works feel incomplete in themselves, there is continuity between them as a whole. There are great truths, but nothing didactic upon which to hang an definitely instructive ending. This is true in "Ghost," where she gives an honest experience that cannot be constructed into a moral, so there is none made of it. What we do want at the end, though, is a connection between the experiences she presents us with. In "A Place of Greater Safety," the length allowed for a thorough examination of the incongruities within and between characters, which gives a shape to the irresolution. I recommend buying "Ghost", simply because it is a great book, but I found myself here again wishing Mantel's work had been longer.