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A review by paracyclops
A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
This book will probably be read by those that love Hilary Mantel's fiction. It's hard for me to form an objective opinion, as every beautifully crafted sentence here seems to cast light on her practice as a novelist. I know her writing only from the extraordinary Cromwell trilogy, and few of the observations she makes in this book, however apparently unrelated, seem irrelevant to the way that those books were made. However, the many and disparate pieces collected here are worth reading even if you've never set eyes on Mantel's fiction.
She thinks about a lot of things, and she thinks about them all interestingly. I don't always agree with her about these things. She's fond of making statements about what novels should be like that exclude vast swathes of entertaining and enjoyable fiction from consideration, but even when I think she's mistaken, she always offers a perspective that challenges me to think very carefully about what I think. And I should note, that even though this dogmatism verges sometimes on intellectual snobbery, she is also appreciative of the virtues of an entertaining mystery, or a ghost story. A selection of her film reviews is included in A memoir of my former self, and in these she is as willing to consider an action movie like Paul Verhoeven's Robocop on its merits, as she is something ostensibly more serious, like Gabriel Axel's Babette's feast.
Also included are the five Reith Lectures she gave in 2017. If, as many readers will be, you're looking for something juicy on the writing of the Cromwell trilogy, then this is the meat. As you would expect, she is extremely interesting on the complex interrelationships between history, historiography, memory, documentation, experience, and historical fiction. But this is not simply a set of intellectual of questions for her—it's something in which she was viscerally and emotionally engaged. She is utterly convinced of the reality of the people on whom her characters are based. She is also rigorously careful to distinguish between those real people, the historical figures that are formed when historians extract their traces from the documentary record, and the fictional characters that people her books. But it is that unshakeable belief in them as people that enables her, in my opinion, to produce such an incredibly compelling account of the experience of being them. It is always one version, and like a professional historian, she is never blind to all the other versions, but what she puts into a narrative is a singular and ineluctable individual.
She also writes movingly of her archival research, of the voices that have spoken to her out of the days that her novels are set in. In 'The Other king' she discusses (movingly) George Cavendish's contemporary life of Thomas Wolsey, which was a major source for her work. She is clear that these people are gone, and cannot be reconstructed in any definitive sense; but she is nevertheless able to paint an extremely vivid picture of the ways that their lives made irreducibly particular impressions on the domain of letters. Cavendish's book is full of the idiosyncracies of its subject, some of which made their way into Mantel's, but tells us perhaps as much about Cavendish as it does about Wolsey. I never knew Mantel, and I never will, but these are her traces, less distanced than those to be found in her fiction, and they have helped me to make a version of her that is as particular, if not as complete, as the real human that wrote these words.
She thinks about a lot of things, and she thinks about them all interestingly. I don't always agree with her about these things. She's fond of making statements about what novels should be like that exclude vast swathes of entertaining and enjoyable fiction from consideration, but even when I think she's mistaken, she always offers a perspective that challenges me to think very carefully about what I think. And I should note, that even though this dogmatism verges sometimes on intellectual snobbery, she is also appreciative of the virtues of an entertaining mystery, or a ghost story. A selection of her film reviews is included in A memoir of my former self, and in these she is as willing to consider an action movie like Paul Verhoeven's Robocop on its merits, as she is something ostensibly more serious, like Gabriel Axel's Babette's feast.
Also included are the five Reith Lectures she gave in 2017. If, as many readers will be, you're looking for something juicy on the writing of the Cromwell trilogy, then this is the meat. As you would expect, she is extremely interesting on the complex interrelationships between history, historiography, memory, documentation, experience, and historical fiction. But this is not simply a set of intellectual of questions for her—it's something in which she was viscerally and emotionally engaged. She is utterly convinced of the reality of the people on whom her characters are based. She is also rigorously careful to distinguish between those real people, the historical figures that are formed when historians extract their traces from the documentary record, and the fictional characters that people her books. But it is that unshakeable belief in them as people that enables her, in my opinion, to produce such an incredibly compelling account of the experience of being them. It is always one version, and like a professional historian, she is never blind to all the other versions, but what she puts into a narrative is a singular and ineluctable individual.
She also writes movingly of her archival research, of the voices that have spoken to her out of the days that her novels are set in. In 'The Other king' she discusses (movingly) George Cavendish's contemporary life of Thomas Wolsey, which was a major source for her work. She is clear that these people are gone, and cannot be reconstructed in any definitive sense; but she is nevertheless able to paint an extremely vivid picture of the ways that their lives made irreducibly particular impressions on the domain of letters. Cavendish's book is full of the idiosyncracies of its subject, some of which made their way into Mantel's, but tells us perhaps as much about Cavendish as it does about Wolsey. I never knew Mantel, and I never will, but these are her traces, less distanced than those to be found in her fiction, and they have helped me to make a version of her that is as particular, if not as complete, as the real human that wrote these words.