A Memoir of My Former Self
A Life in Writing
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
THE FINAL BOOK FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST WRITERS
In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.
Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels—revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is her legendary essay “Royal Bodies,” on our endless fascination with the current royal family.
From her unusual childhood to her all-consuming interest in Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel’s life in her own luminous words, through “messages from people I used to be.” Filled with her singular wit and wisdom, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
