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angelamichelle's review against another edition
5.0
Wow, she can write.
I can’t get over her description of having endometriosis in the 1970s: how long she was undiagnosed, how many people poo-poohed her symptoms.
I can’t get over her description of having endometriosis in the 1970s: how long she was undiagnosed, how many people poo-poohed her symptoms.
juliabingel's review against another edition
I picked this up weeks ago and never picked it up again. I am sure that I'll go back and read it sometime in the near future, but it wasn't something that I felt excited to pick up and continue/couldn't even put down and while I'm at school that's a necessity
erboe501's review against another edition
5.0
Hilary Mantel is one of the most beautiful writers living (or dead, I'd wager). This gave me some insight into her Cromwell series, and has made me eager to read her other novels. But this is also very worth reading if you've never picked up Mantel's books. Topics of a misfit childhood, chronic pain, infertility, mental health, post-war England, the supernatural are all covered and should reach a wide audience.
I was fascinated by how Mantel ascribes many of her behaviors and ways of thinking to her Catholic upbringing. Her preoccupation with death; her assumption that pain is inevitable. The Protestant-Catholic divide in her home village was stark, but not as violent as in Northern England. It was a fact of life that Protestants were entirely different and separate from her that she completely took in stride as a kid.
Mantel considers herself to have been a child out of step with childhood. She characterizes herself as at once very mature for a kid, above childish questions and with very real worries, and also rather naive and consumed with her own thoughts, often ignoring the outside world. Her relationship with her grandfather was endearing.
I'd been under the impression that this memoir was about Mantel's troubles with fertility. I don't know what gave me that impression. Her childhood takes up half the book, so that she reaches maturity and an endometriosis diagnosis when we're most of the way through the book. I suppose you could read the entire book about her childhood as foreshadowing of her later infertility. I don't want to say there is "more to" this book than an infertility story, as if that story is not enough (because it is, and Mantel's chapters on that journey could stand alone and impact a lot of people). But the memoir is not defined by the removal of Mantel's womb. This episode is part of a larger narrative about medical malpractice, doctors ignoring Mantel's pain for decades, drugs that do more harm than good. I was horrified with how the medical community treated Mantel in the 60s-70s. A complete lack of communication and patient input. The way Mantel writes about the ghost of the daughter she half-imagined but never had is heartbreaking.
Another thread running throughout the memoir is, of course, the subject of ghosts. Mantel's closing paragraph drawing her ghostly family around her is one of the most visceral scenes I've read. I could place myself there with her ghosts easier than with many novels' allegedly "real" people. I'm not entirely sure what to make of the memoir's title. Because Mantel doesn't really give up her ghosts. Throughout her growing up and passing from one home to another leaves some ghosts behind. And at the end she leaves the lodgings where some ghosts reside. Residences play an important role in her demarcating her past. But I don't get the feeling that she'll abandon that family. Perhaps, through memoir writing and making her history public, she is giving or lifting up her past and her ghosts to the world to notice.
At the mention of ghosts, this is not a supernatural book in the sense that Mantel's ghosts would stand up to a Ghostbuster raid. They are at once explained and accepted since her childhood as natural phenomena, but not explained at length in a way that suggests Mantel felt she needed to justify that ghosts are "real." They are a part of her reality and history, period. The daughter she never had the result of her surgery; the Devil she met the loss of her childhood innocence.
This is a really complex memoir, one I imagine I'll return to again later in life.
I was fascinated by how Mantel ascribes many of her behaviors and ways of thinking to her Catholic upbringing. Her preoccupation with death; her assumption that pain is inevitable. The Protestant-Catholic divide in her home village was stark, but not as violent as in Northern England. It was a fact of life that Protestants were entirely different and separate from her that she completely took in stride as a kid.
Mantel considers herself to have been a child out of step with childhood. She characterizes herself as at once very mature for a kid, above childish questions and with very real worries, and also rather naive and consumed with her own thoughts, often ignoring the outside world. Her relationship with her grandfather was endearing.
I'd been under the impression that this memoir was about Mantel's troubles with fertility. I don't know what gave me that impression. Her childhood takes up half the book, so that she reaches maturity and an endometriosis diagnosis when we're most of the way through the book. I suppose you could read the entire book about her childhood as foreshadowing of her later infertility. I don't want to say there is "more to" this book than an infertility story, as if that story is not enough (because it is, and Mantel's chapters on that journey could stand alone and impact a lot of people). But the memoir is not defined by the removal of Mantel's womb. This episode is part of a larger narrative about medical malpractice, doctors ignoring Mantel's pain for decades, drugs that do more harm than good. I was horrified with how the medical community treated Mantel in the 60s-70s. A complete lack of communication and patient input. The way Mantel writes about the ghost of the daughter she half-imagined but never had is heartbreaking.
Another thread running throughout the memoir is, of course, the subject of ghosts. Mantel's closing paragraph drawing her ghostly family around her is one of the most visceral scenes I've read. I could place myself there with her ghosts easier than with many novels' allegedly "real" people. I'm not entirely sure what to make of the memoir's title. Because Mantel doesn't really give up her ghosts. Throughout her growing up and passing from one home to another leaves some ghosts behind. And at the end she leaves the lodgings where some ghosts reside. Residences play an important role in her demarcating her past. But I don't get the feeling that she'll abandon that family. Perhaps, through memoir writing and making her history public, she is giving or lifting up her past and her ghosts to the world to notice.
At the mention of ghosts, this is not a supernatural book in the sense that Mantel's ghosts would stand up to a Ghostbuster raid. They are at once explained and accepted since her childhood as natural phenomena, but not explained at length in a way that suggests Mantel felt she needed to justify that ghosts are "real." They are a part of her reality and history, period. The daughter she never had the result of her surgery; the Devil she met the loss of her childhood innocence.
This is a really complex memoir, one I imagine I'll return to again later in life.
shellydennison's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.25
I read this in one sitting - it's as well written as you'd expect but unflinching and tough in places.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Infertility, Chronic illness, Mental illness, and Sexism
Minor: Abortion