Reading Guide: Giving up the Ghost
Returning to Hilary Mantel's classic memoir for Halloween
Hello,
This month’s Book Club pick is a classic read - Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel, a clear-eyed and visceral memoir of hauntings literal and metaphorical. Now 21 years old, it’s a good moment to revisit it. Given that Hilary is (sadly) no longer with us, we’ll be joined by
of the excellent Noted Substack, who’ll be helping me to consider the great author’s extraordinary legacy.The Book Club will take place on Wednesday 30th October at 6pm UK (please check your local date here - it avoids mistakes!)
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About Giving Up the Ghost
Published in 2003, before prizewinning novels about Thomas Cromwell were troubling our bookshelves, Hilary Mantel published a memoir of becoming. It came shortly after her novel, Beyond Black, the story of a beleaguered psychic medium coming to terms with the ghosts that assail her. This was closer to Mantel’s own experience than anyone imagined. In Giving Up the Ghost, she describes life with a whole cast of spectres.
The metaphorical force of this is, of course, not lost on Mantel. As time goes on, she accumulates more hauntings, the indelible stains of her childhood and then the children she is unable to have due to endometriosis. All of it is dealt with crystalline skill - this is not a book of self pity, nor even grief, but of emotional precision and deft analysis.
What interests me the most now, returning to the book after two decades, is the way that Mantel talks about her own body. The drugs that barely control the endometriosis make her fat, and she describes her discomfort with this in writhing detail. Is it inspriational? No. Politically correct? Probably not? One of the most real portrayals of a woman’s judegement of her own body? Absolutely. As always, Mantel has no interest in offering us a soft landing.
Giving Up the Ghost is a discomfiting read for a whole spectrum of reasons, but it is also a trail of breadcrumbs that show the rise of a great author, written before her most lofty ascent. As it comes of age, this is the perfect time to return to this wonderful book.
Essential links:
Kathryn Hughes’ original review in the Guardian
Weirdos Book Club review Beyond Black, and reflect on some of the problematic parts of Mantel’s earlier work
About Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952.
She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah, and she was film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991. Her novels include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), set in Jeddah; Fludd (1989), set in a mill village in the north of England and winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), an epic account of the events of the French revolution that won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994), the story of a missionary couple whose lives are torn apart by the loss of their child; and An Experiment in Love (1995), about the events in the lives of three schoolfriends from the north of England who arrive at London University in 1970, winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize. The Giant, O'Brien (1998) tells the story of Charles O'Brien who leaves his home in Ireland to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction in London.
In 2003, she published Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir - an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction, taking the reader from early childhood through to the discoveries in adulthood that led her to writing; and Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003). Beyond Black (2005) tells the story of Alison, a Home Counties psychic, and her assistant, Colette. It was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
In 2006, Hilary Mantel was awarded a CBE. Her novel, Wolf Hall (2009), was the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Walter Scott Prize andwas shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award and 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction.
A sequel to Wolf Hall, entitled Bring Up the Bodies, was published in 2012 and won the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Dame Hilary Mantel died on 22 September 2022.