Giving up the Ghost: A memoir

By Hilary Mantel

From the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’, a wry, shocking and beautiful memoir of childhood, ghosts, hauntings, illness and family.

At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o'clock and she is getting the cabbage on. 'Hello, Our Ilary,' she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn't stretch to the 'H'.

Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's wry, shocking and uniquely unusual five-part autobiography of childhood, ghosts, illness and family.

It opens in 1995 with 'A Second Home', in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, a death which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of childhood. ‘Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' begins in typical, gripping Mantel fashion: 'Two of my relatives have died by fire.' Set during the 1950s, it takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating with the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelit ceremony of her mother's 'churching'. In 'The Secret Garden' Mantel moves to a haunted house and mysteriously gains a stepfather. When she is almost eleven, her family flee the gossips and the ghosts, and resolve to start a new life. 'Smile' is an account of teenage perplexity, in a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Convent school provides a certain sanctuary, with tacit assistance from the fearsome 'Top Nun.' In the final section, the author tells how, through medical misunderstandings and neglect, she came to be childless, and how the ghosts of the unborn, like chances missed or pages unturned, have come to haunt her life as a writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Dec 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9780007354917

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.

Reviews for Giving up the Ghost

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Published twenty years ago, this is Hilary Mantel's memoir of her struggle, since adolescence, with physical illness and the utter failure of the medical establishment to treat her with professionalism, informed care, understanding or effective measures. It's a horror story, really, and the fact that she could carry on living, let alone writing brilliantly, through years of pain, undiagnosed symptoms and misogynistic treatment is something of a miracle. A head shaker and a heart breaker.

[osbaldistone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of our finest writers today turns her talents inward, sharing with captivating prose the path she took to get here. The rare 'page-turner' memoir.Os.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mantel's memoir focuses on three main aspects of her life: her dysfunctional family, her relationship to Catholicism, and her ongoing health issues. She, her parents, and her two younger brothers lived with her maternal grandparents during her early years; she was particularly close to her grandfather. Later, her parents moved into a home of their own, and her mother's lover moved in; Hilary and her father shared a room. There is some hint of sexual abuse, but it is rather obscure. At one point she says that everyone expects this to be mentioned in a memoir, and she relates a "vision" she once had of a child lying in her grandfather's garden until the ground covers her and the grass grows over her and she disappears. Maybe if you've had this experience, you know what she is hinting at, but it was all rather cryptic to me. Perhaps it's a memory that she was trying to bury, but I'm not sure.Like a lot of Catholics, Hilary shifts between deep faith and resentment or guilt. Most of the nuns at her school were cruel. She relates one story of a nun hitting her so hard that her head turned around the wrong way. One nun in particular kept telling her that she would amount to nothing and was astonished when Hilary passed exams and was able to attend university. Her mother had pushed to get her into a better school, but other girls who knew her also attended, and they spread the stories about Hilary's "sinful" mother, leaving her rejected. But at other times, she seems to have found comfort in prayer, and she admits that reading prayers had an effect on her writing style.The greatest amount of time is spent detailing her sad battles with ill health. She was afflicted with pains in her legs and abdomen and excessive menstrual bleeding. After seeing the university clinician, she was sent to a psychiatrist who determined that her complaints were psychosomatic; all they ever tested her for before putting her on a series of mind-muddling drugs was anemia. It was the 1960s, and she was encouraged to give up law school as the focus on "details" was supposedly affecting her mental state. Years later, she read about endometriosis and felt sure this was what she suffered from; finally, she found a doctor who agreed. But by then, at age 27, she had to undergo a hysterectomy and had several inches of her bowel removed as well. Although she had never particularly wanted children, nor did her husband, she lamented the loss of choice. Because of her youth, the doctors kept her on hormones to delay menopause, but this fed remaining endometrial cells that had wandered to other parts of her body, leading to renewed and continuing pains.It's quite amazing that during this time, Mantel began to research and write her French Revolution novel, A Place of Greater Safety. Despite a difficult life, she managed to develop into a wonderful, Booker Award-winning writer. (Wolf Hall is my favorite historical novel of all time.) Rather than this being a first-rate memoir, I got the sense that Mantel needed to get her past out of her system by writing Giving Up the Ghost. I can only recommend it to fans who want to know more about her life and the endurance that brought her to where she is today.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This brief but moving memoir is difficult to write about, because one starts thinking Mantel is writing about her experiences with the supernatural, but its concluding pages are very personal. It took courage to write this, and considerable effort .

[elsyd_19 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is truly a Gem! As a person who can remember my own past from an age before I could talk, I could totally relate to the child, Hilary. Also, having raised a precocious child, I could so see parallels. What a difficult life Hilary Mantel has endured, and what a gift she has given the world with her books!

[linda.lappin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There is no self-pity in this memoir, which is poignant, unexpectedly funny at times. If anything there is too much self-control, and even minute traces of self-loathing. In handling the sections of her childhood, she shapes the story to the child’s half understandings. The male figures, father, step-father, brothers, husband, are at best presences. Yet every sentence, every phrase in this book is breathtaking, artfully crafted, subtly shaped. We almost forget the message given at the beginning. If you want to be a writer “ Rise in the quiet hours of the night, prick your fingertips, and use the blood for ink.” But what we have read has been written in blood, product of pain, sacrifice, self-control, distance from oneself and from one’s own ghosts. A real achievement.

[sanddune_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This short memoir by Hilary Mantel focuses on two main aspects of her life: her somewhat difficult childhood and her long periods of (misdiagnosed) ill-health. Of the two, it was the first that I found most interesting. Growing up as a young child in a Irish Catholic home in England she seems to have had a poor but loving early childhood, surrounded by parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles. But as she was about to start secondary school her life changed for ever: after a period of a somewhat curious ménage a trois, her mother left her father to live with another man, taking the young Hilary and her two brothers with her. Hilary never saw her father again. At this stage I desperately wanted to know more about the background of this separation, but as these recollections are very much told from the point of view of the child observing them those details are never forthcoming. And with a new and difficult step-father, and a place at a convent school while the child of a woman who had left her husband to live with another man, Hilary's teenage years become much more difficult.What I found a more challenging part of the book was the story of Hilary Mantel's battle with ill-health, which left her infertile by her late twenties. While this is a horrendous story of misdiagnosis by doctor after doctor, I found that I got more and more frustrated with Hilary herself: I just couldn't understand why either she or her husband or parent didn't make more fuss, when it was clear that she wasn't getting the treatment she required. Why didn't you argue, I kept wanting to say to her. Why don't you insist on a second opinion? And it's clear that Hilary Mantel does not completely understand her attitude either:'There are several possible explanations, on several levels. One is that, in the time and place where I grew up, expectations of health were low, especially for women. The proper attitude to doctors was humble gratitude; you cleaned the house before they arrived. The deeper explanation is that I always felt that I deserved very little, that I would probably not be happy in life, and that the safest thing was to lie down and die'Overall, an interesting read, although the recollections are interspersed at times with a number of supernatural elements (the ghost of the title being a case in point) which rather left me cold. But recommended nonetheless.

[piemouth · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The back of this book is unhelpful; it makes it seem as though the whole thing is about her infertility. That's part of the story, but it's not even most of it. Most of it is about growing up Catholic, going to schools taught by nuns, growing up in a family, trying to make sense of life from a child's perspective. The mysteries of adults and the struggle to unravel them. How it is when Father is displaced by another man who is unkind, and how the neighbors know and try to shame your mother. Later she talks about health problems that dogged her most of her life, and she was ill served by doctors and modern medicine. She was diagnosed as a young woman as having psychiatric problems and given drugs that altered her vision and her memory, and finally got her self off of them and away from doctors. Later her illnesses and the drugs she had to take made her body change shape and she is eloquent about how strange that was. For me that was the most moving part of the book. How being fat changes you, changes the way people look at you. Besides this she remakes her life again and again, and mentions those changes in the most casual way, which puts me in awe of her. She begins the book as a child and as a young woman with no agency, no certainty, and ends it as someone who seems to understand herself and the world well and to have taken charge of her life. It's good to see.

[bhowell_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read almost half of this book in a used book store so had to buy it. I found it fascinating and finished it that evening. Ms. Mantel's powerful intellect sustained her through a difficult childhood and an adulthood blighted by ill health.