Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114984 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 252 pages

Edwina Currie, Mail on Sunday Books of the Year 2003
'I loved Hilary Mantel's autobiography. Mantel has a sharp eye for the ridiculous and an elegant, direct style.'

Susan Sontag, TLS Books of the Year 2003
'No book this year has give me more pleasure than Hilary Mantel's astonishing, ravishing memoir, Giving up the Ghost.'

Michael Holroyd, Guardian Books of the Year 2003
'A brilliant and disturbing memoir that conveys the anxieties of childhood with vivid splinters of memory.'

Customer Reviews

fascinating and moving
I have a particular interest in this story because, weirdly, I also have hypothyroidism and endometriosis, and wanted to find out more about this commonly misdiagnosed illness. But I'm also a huge fan of Mantel's highly varied fiction, and was curious to find out where it came from.
In one sense this is a familiar tale about a girl from the Northern mill-town who escapes poverty and hopelessness through a good education at grammar school. Many other British women authors, from Margaret Drabble to Margaret Forster have told it. Mantel's childhood, her apprehension of the Devil (she was raised a Catholic)her fatherlessness and confusion are described in all their black comedy and raw pain. However, the story goes off in an unexpected direction because of Mantel's illness, which colours her time in Africa and Saudi Arabia, her marriage and inevitably her choice of career. Some people are going to like it simply because of its frank account of what it feels like to go from being a size 10 to a size 20 (Yes: it sucks) and as one anxiously waiting to see if the effects can be reversed I'd like more on that... But what it also does is make you very angry on behalf of someone who, despite her formidable intelligence, was advised to become a librarian not a lawyer, and who was medicated as psychologically disturbed when she had a physical illness which rendered her infertile. It made me admire her work even more, knowing the conditions in which it must have been composed.

Still waiting ......
I read this book waiting for something to happen but nothing did. Sounds an average childhood for a kid these days. I felt I had a more interesting childhood! Maybe I'll write a book myself one day. I thought the bit about the endometriosis was moving as many people have this condition and it is often misdiagnosed.

Prize-winning autobiography: Mind 'book of the year' 2004
A victim of both medical disinterest and just-not-good-enough parenting, Hilary Mantel has attempted to exorcise the ghosts of her harrowing childhood in true Cixousian fashion by 'writing her self into being'. Like the journey from childlike innocence to worldly wisdom, her story takes some time to unfold. Patiently, I allowed her to set the scene. Quite suddenly, I realised I could not put the book down as I plunged headlong into the wonder of her story.
Dragged in by the pathos, humour and sheer pull of Mantel's style, I sank deeper and deeper as she re-claimed her experiences on every page. Time and time again I became enthralled by her compelling life story, only to be suddenly whisked off without notice to my own 'house of childhood'. This book is so amazingly accessible, full of Joycean epiphanies that, via seemingly ordinary moments, transport the reader to the very whatness of a situation.
Towards the end of the book, Mantel emerges from her esoteric childhood still possessed by the demons of her formative years. Her child-borne worthlessness and religiously instilled compliance had caused her to suffer excruciating abdominal pain, until radical surgery became her only life-saving option. Bereft of choices and feeling powerless to resist, her diseased innards were taken away - together with any hopes she had of becoming a mother.
At the age of 30 years, a new ghost began to stir within her. Robbed of the child she desperately needed to induce her own re-birth, she has chosen to re-write her life in what has materialised as this prize-winning autobiography. She has done so in captivating fashion.