Giving Up The Ghost

Synopsis: From one of Britain's finest authors, a wry, shocking and beautifully-written memoir of childhood, ghosts (real and metaphorical), illness and family. 'Giving up the Ghost' is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's uniquely unusual five-part autobiography. Opening in 1995 with 'A Second Home', Mantel describes the death of her stepfather which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of her childhood. In 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' Mantel takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating in the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelight ceremony of her mother's 'churching'. In 'Smile', an account of teenage perplexity, Mantel describes a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Mantel explains how through a series of 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.

Review: I found this whilst looking for Susan Hill's Howards End is on the Landing and was intrigued straight away, I like reading writers memoirs. Hilary was a very individual child. When she was very small she lived with her parents and grandparents and as such got used at a very early age to adult company and conversation. She had a vivid imagination, and was fairly shocked on her first outing at school to discover a class full of what seemed to Hilary to be dim witted children reading impossibly dull books like Dick and Dora. She's outraged especially when she finds out that going to school is compulsory, it's a further disappointment to add to the one that she is only just coming to terms with ... the fact that she isn't going to suddenly turn into a boy.

Hilary gains two brothers and her mum and dad eventually move into a home of their own but this brings with it it's own insecurities, Hilary is beset by worries that her mother will leave her in the night and she lays awake listening for the sounds. Jack suddenly arrives on the scene, Hilary is quite pleased because although she's only six, she has set her heart on marrying somebody and she feels Jack might do. One day Jack doesn't go home after he's had his tea ... Hilarys dad moves to one of the smaller bedrooms and there are whisperings and strange looks on the street. Not long after, Hilarys dad moves out, never to be seen again by her.

Though she didn't enjoy her early years at school, Hilary eventually began to settle and flourish and became 'top girl'. She graduates and proceeds to study law at the London School of Economics and then transfers to Sheffield University to be with the man she loves and is soon to marry. Her life and career seem to be in the ascendancy but unfortunately the ill health that had always dogged her in childhood (as a child she was nicknamed 'Miss Neverwell' by a doctor) continues and she is forced to seek medical help. At first she is prescribed anti-depressants which is understandable as she is depressed, for one thing her health is bad for another she has no money but the side effects of these tablets are soon making her life a misery. She is sent to see a psychiatrist and her tablets are changed several times, she is moved on to some 'major tranquillisers' and told to stop writing (something she had started to do since being freed from her textbooks for a while), but the tablets make her feel almost murderous and the pains continue to stab through her. The side effects of the tablets grow ever more disturbing, in fact, the anti pyschotic drugs have the effect of making you act in a fairly pyschotic way - with terrible visions and frenzies. Hilary was too ill to continue with her studies or to get a proper job and so she got a fairly ordinary untaxing one, moved to another country and began to write a book.

And it's whilst she's abroad, aged 27, that Hilary is eventually diagnosed as having endometriosis and a hysterectomy is performed. The rage that she feels over her many misdiagnosis's and the fact that she will now, even before she has even really thought about it seriously, never be able to have children of her own is painful to read, I have some experience of this myself and it's the first time I've ever read anything that so powerfully and accurately expressed the desolation felt. One of the first things her doctor says to her following the operation is 'Oh well, there's one good thing anyway. Now you won't have to worry about birth prevention.' as she says there are times when you are justified in punching someone in the face .. she didn't .. though goodness knows how. She still suffered from terrible pain though and the treatment for this was hormones, which made her weight balloon alarmingly, her hair fall out and her eyesight blur. It's perhaps in the aftermath of all of this that Hilary Mantel the novelist is born, in a way her novels become the children she will never have.

'Certain things were over for me now. I sensed it would not be easy to shore up my collapsing marriage. When women apes have their wombs removed, and are returned by keepers to the community, their mates sense it, and desert them. It is a fact of base biology; there is little kindness in the animal kingdom, and I had been down there with the animals grunting and bleeding on the porter's trolley. There would be no daughter, no Catriona; not that I could claim I had wanted her too hard; at twenty-seven I hadn't even tried to have a baby. We seemed fine as we were, the two of us. "The children of lovers are orphans," said Robert Louis Stevenson. That would have been a sad fate for her, little Miss Cat. She would never be born now, and we were no longer lovers.'

I didn't learn much about novel writing, but that didn't matter, I thought it was one of the most powerful memoirs I've ever read. She is such a keen and sharp observer and her experiences just live on the page .. outstanding.