A review by anneofgreenplaces
Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir by Hilary Mantel

4.0

As usual, excellent prose and lithe narrative from Hilary Mantel, albeit not entirely gripping. It’s a true memoir (rather than an autobiography), selecting threads from her life and weaving them thematically together around perception, identity, illness, childhood, infertility, feminism, and writing. Interesting to see the threads that also show up in her novel Beyond Black which I recently read—the lurking of phenomena and ghostly memories or absences, the mediocre house they build in Slough and the suburban neighbors with rowdy children underlining the absence of her own, the physical and psychological implications of being fat. Extended insight into the medical neglect of gynecological disease and the experience of chronic illness.