A Memoir of My Former Self

September 1, 2023
A collection of the late author's essays coheres as a memoir. A gathering of more than 70 essays, talks, and reviews by award-winning British author Mantel (1952-2022), edited by Pearson, offers insights into the life and work of a prolific novelist. The pieces, previously published in venues such as the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and theSpectator, include reflections on movies (When Harry Met Sally, for one), books (a comparison of biographies of Jane Austen), social and cultural commentary (irreverent assessments of Diana and Kate Middleton), Mantel's inspiration as a writer, and her serious, debilitating health struggles. In 1980, she discloses, after years of misdiagnoses, she underwent surgery for endometriosis, which involved a hysterectomy and removal of part of her bladder and intestines. Still in her 20s, she became infertile and post-menopausal. Some pieces are slyly funny, such as the title essay, which reports her experience with a hypnotist who sent her careening into a past life. Throughout, Mantel offers insights into the enterprise of writing. "My concern as a writer," she reveals, "is with memory, personal and collective: with the restless dead asserting their claims." Her Reith Lectures, broadcast on BBC radio in 2017, are likely to seem freshest to readers familiar with her published pieces. In these talks, she considers the challenges of historical fiction and the "violent curiosity" that propelled her to investigate the French Revolution and Tudor England. "History," she writes, "is not the past--it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past." Mining historical sources, she aims to imagine "the interior drama" of characters whose minds can never fully be known. The novelist, she asserts, "works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dream, where politics meets psychology, where private and public meet." Shrewd, humane, and deeply engaging pieces.

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Starred review from September 25, 2023
In this dazzling posthumous collection of previously published and original writings, novelist Mantel (1952–2022; Wolf Hall) submits herself to the “constant state of self-questioning” she deems characteristic of any worthwhile history or fiction. Divided into five sections and dated with timestamps spanning from 1987 to 2018, these pieces see Mantel interrogating her primary genre (“The task of historical fiction is to take the past out of the archive and relocate it in the body”); casting a sharp critical eye on films from RoboCop to When Harry Met Sally (“People sometimes like to have their intimate dilemmas presented to them in terms that are slick and witty and bittersweet instead of just bitter”); analyzing the works of women authors (“Everything in work attests to a long practice of keen observation, a hoarding of images and facts”); detailing transformative moments from her own life (“This is the day I met my stepfather. I am four now. My head is slightly too big for my body. The inside of it is bulging with knowledge”); and providing a window into her writing process, through which she attempted to achieve a “relationship with language that is clean, unflawed.” Mantel’s idiosyncratic and magisterial voice comes through on every page, carrying readers across an astonishing array of subject matter with ease. This is a treasure.

Starred review from September 1, 2023

This may be the last collection from the pen of unsurpassable historical-fiction writer Mantel ("Wolf Hall" trilogy; A Place of Greater Safety), who died in 2022 at the age of 70. It complements her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, and 2020's Mantel Pieces, which brought together criticism from the London Review of Books. The essays in this volume are the leftover pieces of a great writer who was a perceptive, often sharp-tongued, but immensely human commentator on things literary, historical, and personal. Not all are great pieces. Many are short, even abbreviated. (She learned early that reviews shouldn't exceed 800 words, so hers never did.) But even the shortest casts light on the mindset of this, alas now gone, historicist who could imagine herself into the inner life of creatures she'd never met better than any other writer today. Mantel was always looking out to see what the other person was thinking and feeling, even if it was her own behavior that she was dissecting. Readers will find most interesting the several essays on writing historical fiction and writing Wolf Hall. VERDICT Warm, human, unfailingly engaging, this lovely collection should appeal widely. As usual, she writes like a dream.--David Keymer

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