Giving up the Ghost: A memoir

As she approaches midlife, Mantel applies her beautiful prose and expansive vocabulary to a somewhat meandering memoir. The English author of eight novels.
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Ghost stories

Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. In her memoir, Giving up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel obliquely tackles a subject much debated in psychoanalytical circles of a century ago and revisited by feminist literary critics from onward: To what degree is female ambition and achievement in the arts or any field, for that matter a compensation for an unfertile womb, and in what way is artistic creativity in women related to mental instability and even madness?

In our post-feminist era such suggestions sound outrageous, reactionary. We are accustomed to thinking that we can and will have it all. But slip back fifty, then one hundred years or more and examine the lives of great women writers and poets.

Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel

Virginia Woolf insisted that without leisure time, education, private income, and a space to write, a woman could not produce literature, hence the demands of motherhood and marriage might be a serious obstacle. Emily Dickinson, a spinster, withdrew from the world, Charlotte Bronte died of a pregnancy related illness with her unborn first child, Elizabeth Bishop was gay, Sylvia Plath found both marriage and motherhood devastating.

Mantel reminds us that in her formative years, a time not so long ago, women were expected to stay home and to become homemakers, and though England already had a long tradition of penwomen, it was no easy journey to become a writer. This memoir is about how a poor, "neverwell" child of Irish origins, from a disadvantaged family became one of the world's most celebrated novelists, twice winning the Man Booker prize, an unprecedented feat.

The latter would be the one to rescue Hilary and her family, giving them the dignity of a real home and a new name. At school this pale, phlegmatic child was at times picked on, grudgingly admired, avoided. As she fashions her story, she gives us echoes of other stories we know and love.

Giving up the Ghost: A memoir

The rage that bubbles within her at school recalls Jane Eyre's and indeed she claims, Jane Eyre is the story of all women writers. Her descriptions of the strange visions that sometimes inhabit her psyche echo moments of Turn of the Screw, in which she is both the governess and the malignant child, other moments, such as the eerie revelation of evil she glimpses in the yard might have been drawn from Stephen King filtered through Mary Butts. Ever since her childhood, she has been subject to visions, "seeing things" that "aren't there," she confesses, well aware that the inclusion in quotes somehow makes these ghostly presences more explainable or more acceptable to contemporary minds.

Like Henry James, she never lets us know her own explanation for the ghosts she regularly sees: She suggests all these possibilities, tying in hormonal issues as a further explanation. The heart of Mantel's memoir focuses just on these issues, and the debilitating condition with which she battled for years, undergoing an early hysterectomy.

The surgery turned out to be useless, as replacement estrogen worsened her symptoms and led to uncontrollable weight gain. The medical establishment had no remedy but was convinced she was the problem, not her disease. For many years she was given pain killers, antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs. Struggling to come to grips with herself, her pain, her changing and changed body, she starts writing again, but her doctors do not approve. Why not she asks. The chilling reply is simply "because.

But luckily for us, Mantel kept at it, six years later published and was paid for her first story. At one point, she realized that she was unconsciously waiting for children who would never come. Empty bedrooms, an overfilled pantry, presses packed with sheets for too many beds were the telltale signs. Once she brought her mourning to the light, the unborn ghosts of her womb became novels. 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. Giving up the Ghost is a tour de force and a tribute to an amazingly strong woman.

Mantel manages to craft together the pieces of her history without becoming either maudlin or relapsing into uncontrollable fury. Given that she was an immensely gifted child and then young woman and that she was humiliated and butchered by unforgivable medical treatment in Britain, the fact that she maintained her sanity and came through it all to write beautifully crafted books is amazing. She has my complete admiration.

One person found this helpful. This is one of the best memoirs I've read and I'm a devourer of the genre.

I was driven to this work by reading the two novels in the Cromwell series. Giving up the Ghost reveals the sensitive, fine mind and genius writer behind these books. Mantel's portrait of post was England is so subtle and deft, moving, enraging and somehow offering a kind of equilibrium, even peace, in the retrospective.

Mantel did it so tough as a youngster and as an adult it got even tougher. The onset of boyhood has been postponed, so far. But patience is a virtue with me. I insist that we stand before a mirror, all three. They are to pick me up and hold me between them, my fat arms across their shoulders, my hands gripping them tight. I know, now, that this tableau, this charade, must have caused them a dull, deep pain.

We do it time and time again, I insist on it and I am good at insisting. Standing on the pier at Blackpool, I look down at the inky waves swirling. Again, the noise of nature, deeply conversational, too quick to catch; again the rushing movement, blue, deep, and far below. I look up at my mother and father. They are standing close together, talking over my head. A thought comes to me, so swift and strange that it feels like the first thought that I have ever had. It strikes with piercing intensity, like a needle in the eye. The thought is this: I, me, and only me.

That my father will throw me down on the rocks, down into the sea. That perhaps he will not do it, but some impulse in his heart thinks he ought.


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For what am I, but a disposable, replaceable child? And without me they would have a chance in life. The next thing is that I am in bed with a fever raging. My lungs are full to bursting. The water boils, frets, spumes. I am limp in the power of the current that tugs beneath the waves.

Giving Up the Ghost A Memoir John MacRae Books

To open my eyes I have to force off my eyelids the weight of water. I am trying to die and I am trying to live. I open my eyes and see my mother looking down at me. She is sitting swivelled towards me, her anxious face peering down. For a minute or two I swim up from under the water: I think, how beautiful she is: Her face frames a question. It is never spoken. My mother has brought her own bed-linen, from home, and below my hot cheek, chafing it, is a butterfly: I see it, recognise it, put out my hot fingers to fumble at its edges.

If I am with this butterfly, I am not lost but found. I am too hot, too sick. I feel myself taken by the current, tugged away. I am changed now. Not in that fever but in one of the series, one of those that follow it, my weight of hair is cut off. I lose my baby fat. For another twenty-five years I will be frail. At 29 I am cast as a ghost in a play: I will be solid, set, grounded, grotesque: All of us can change. All of us can change for the better, at any point. I believe this, but what is certainly true is that we can become foreign to ourselves, suddenly, by way of an illness, accident, misadventure or hormonal caprice.

I am four, and my mother tells me this story about myself: At the age of five I mourn for it, constructing in my mind the ghost of a black plait that trails over my right shoulder. Once, I say to myself, I was a Red Indian. I have a feathered headdress and a teepee, bought for me in Manchester: People step around me. I take my meals in the teepee, and believe my hands are brown, as they wield the spoon. But already it feels like a game, whereas in some previous time, in another life, I believe I had a right to this kit. I know that there is no truth in this belief.

But it has created in me a complex emotion; what I feel, for the first time, is nostalgia. Davy Crockett is all the go. I get a fur hat with a tail. We sing a stupid song that says Davy, Davy Crockett, is king of the wild frontier. We sing he killed a bear when he was only three.

Somehow I doubt it. Where are the knights of the Round Table? In abeyance, while I get to grips with how the West was won. Now another thing occurs. I make a fuss! It is related to my role in life. When exactly do I become a boy? My mother and father have been to Manchester, without me. We have brought you a present. Well, it is a cottage set. It is taken out, extracted from a long cardboard box which has a cellophane window to show its contents. I am puzzled at first — what is the use of it or where is the amusement to be derived?

Then they say, we have bought your cousin Christopher a shooting range! I open my mouth and bawl. The shooting range consisted of a metal bar, which you placed on the carpet. On this bar swung four crude animal shapes made of moulded plastic, painted in primary colours. You were supplied with a tiny rifle, which shot out a cork. You had to lie on your belly, very close, if you were going to hit the animals; you knew you had hit them if you made them swing on their bar. That was all there was to it. I found the thing tame.

Them, because they thought I was too mature for the shooting range; and it was true, I was. They must have bought it for someone else. A dozen sets of crockery are smashed, but the cottage survives. Its tiny windowpanes accrete a rim of grime. And grimly, night after night, she studs the grips into my hair, trying to impart a curl. In time my shorn hair grows again: My bullet-like presence, my solidity, has vanished. Ambiguity has thinned my bones, made me light and washed me out, made me speechless and made me blonde.

I realise — and carry the dull knowledge inside me, heavy in my chest — that I am never going to be a boy now. I sense that things have slid too far, from some ideal starting point. I went to school, taking my knights — small, grey, plastic knights, in a bag. They were for a rainy day. My mother said this would be all right. One had simply never seen so many children. It took me a few days to establish their complete ignorance.

Evelyn I had got trained, to a degree, but no one here knew anything of the arts of war. They simply looked blank. Suppose a camel came in, and they had to command him? They went around with their mouths hanging open, and their noses running, with silver trails from nostril to top lip: When they came back after dinnertime, they stood in their places and looked at the blackboard. The children moaned in chorus: After a few days of this, I thought it would be a mercy if I varied the performance by clapping my hands and singing it, to a syncopated rhythm: I kept my bounce for a week or two, my cheerful pre-school resilience; I was a small, pale girl, post-Blackpool, but I had a head stuffed full of chivalric epigrams, and the self-confidence that comes from a thorough knowledge of horsemanship and swordplay.

I knew, also, so many people who were old, so many people who were dead: I belonged to their company and lineage, not to this, and I began to want to rejoin them, without the interruptions now imposed. Sometimes Dad-dy put in an appearance, and if my memory serves he was balding and tweedy. It was dull stuff, all of it, and as my head was already full of words, whole sagas which I knew by heart, I was not convinced that it was necessary. Before I was entrusted with paper I was given chalk and a slate, but the slate was so old and thick and shiny that the letters slipped off as I tried to chalk them.

At the end of the morning I could only show letters up to D. Mrs Simpson expressed surprise and disappointment. I was given plasticine to work the letters in. Instead of making them flat on the table I wanted to make them stand up, so by the time the bell rang I was, once again, only up to D. I was giving a fair impression of a child who was slow and stupid. I was both too old and too young for the place I had arrived at. My best days were behind me. One of my difficulties was that I had not understood school was compulsory. To me, it was getting in the way of the vital assistance I gave my grandad, and wasting hours of my time every day.

But then it was broken to me that you had to go. Not to go, my mother said, was against the law. She supposed, said my mother, we would be summonsed. I said, is that like sued? It sounded to me like the long, stinking hiss emitted when a tap was turned on the gas cooker, before the match was applied. So there was no choice about going to St Charles, I learned.

And somehow I confused its compulsory nature with its permanent nature. One day, I thought, my mother would fail to collect me. I would be left at school and have to live there. My grandad would want to get me but a grandad is not in charge; he never comes to school. Even if my mother was on her way for me, she would be prevented by some accident, some stroke of fate. Thinking of this, my eyes began to leak tears which blurred my vision. Sometimes I yelled out with exasperation and fear of abandonment.

Mrs Simpson took off her tiny gold watch, and showed it to me. When the big hand, she said, and when the little hand, your mother will be here. The big girls and boys, who were already five, were allowed to bring me up and show it to me. I thought I should be abandoned for ever, in the Palace of Silly Questions.

Do you want me to hit you with this ruler? At the close of each afternoon, games were given out — paper, paints, crayons — and the most favoured child of the day was called forward to the washbasin, which stood in the corner of the classroom. I got home and my handkerchief was damp.

My voice was faint. Of thirty minutes in the company of said ducks? And that this was supposed to be a prize, a favour, an honour that made the children fume with envy, the unseen children at your back? Never turn your back on the enemy: Worse, how could my mother think, how could she ever imagine, that I would use the school lavatories?

A near-approach had been enough for me, to those stinking closets under the shadow of a high wall, the ground running from the pipes that burst every winter, the wood of their doors rotting as if a giant rat had gnawed them from the ground up. We had an outside one at home, shared with No.

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So did she not know everything, my mother? I thought that was the set-up, between mother and child. I assumed that these arrangements were reciprocal. I understood my mother to understand me. I learned bladder control; which is good for women, useful in later life. The second thing I learned was that I had got everything terribly wrong. They are two-storey, with pebbledash on the outside. They are a novelty, and novelty is suspect; few people in Hadfield have thought of living without stairs. There are council houses at the upper end of the settlement, built for people from Manchester who had been displaced by the war.

I guess the council houses have superior sanitation — indoor lavatories, hot water, baths perhaps — and the Hadfield people are always anxious to sneer at anyone who they think might be going soft. My mother lights up with indignation when she speaks of the new flats, and her incandescent hair glows around her head.

No curtain rails between the lot of them. I take Evelyn down to the end of the yard. We put our hands on our hips. We stare furiously over the wall. Evelyn tires of the game.

She wants to play ballet school. I stay on, shouting. I wonder if, really, my mother would like one of the flats. But no Catholics can get them; that is generally known. A few weeks on, a little girl comes to our yard and says she is from the flats and wants to play. Her name is Heather. She is pretty and respectable, but what sort of name is that? A little boy comes. He is weedy and small. He begs to play with us. How can we refuse him, Evelyn asks passionately; his age is six and three-quarters!

Caroline Moore reviews Giving Up The Ghost by Hilary Mantel

His age does not impress me. He runs after me and cries, and says if he can play with us he will do anything, we can hide and he will permanently seek. He will give us a penny if he can play with us: The more he raises the sum the more disdainful I appear. In the end I turn my back and walk away. Two women are standing on their back doorsteps and marvel at my hard sectarian heart.

I say to Evelyn, over my shoulder: You play with him, if you want! Boys are what I have to fight at school. I come home and say: But when the next fight comes, I walk away with a different result. Punch to solar plexus, big boy folds. His head is within range. As you please now, Grandad says: Try a big slap across the chops. Tears spring from the eyes of the big boy. He reels, clutching his waist, away from the railings. Oh Miss, she hit me, she hit me! In only a year I will have to go to Confession and learn to examine my conscience.

What I am experiencing is the beginning of compunction; but is it the awakening of a sense of sin, or is it the beginning of femininity? Do boys have compunction? They have compunction for all the weak and oppressed. Shame is somewhere among my feelings about this incident. Overexcited is bad, fidget is bad; obedient is good. Mr and Mrs Aldous have a television set. It is The Secret Garden. The curtains are pulled, so the black and white picture stands out more; we lie on the rug, chins on our hands, like children in picture books, like illustrations of ourselves. At the end of many weeks I have saved up the entire story.

I go home and announce it to my mother: The Secret Garden , here is that story. It spools out and out of my mouth, narrative, dialogue and commentary. We are in the kitchen, but not the kitchen at Bankbottom. This is Brosscroft, another house entirely. After the business of the flats, my mother says: We go uphill to Brosscroft. So far only one bedroom is habitable. I lie under a tartan rug and my fingers twist and plait its fringe; plait, untwist, plait again: I think about my teepee, my tomahawk, my stocky bay horse who is standing even now, a striped blanket thrown over his back, ready to gallop me over the plains, into the red and dusty West.

Then I think about how, downstairs perhaps even at this moment, my mother is putting on her coat. I believe she will leave in the night, abandon us. My father puts the baby to bed; this hour, when he is upstairs, seems like the time she would go. I think that, although it will almost kill me, I can bear it if I know the moment she goes: So I lie awake, listening, long after my father has crept downstairs, listening by the glow of the nightlight to the sounds of the house.

In the morning I am too tired to get up, but I must go to school or else I will be sued. My arms and legs ache with a singing pain. The doctor says it is growing pains. One day I find I cannot breathe. He calls me Little Miss Neverwell. Jack comes to visit us. He comes for his tea. These teas seem to be separate extra meals, in the big kitchen when the lights are on and the wild gardens fade into a dark bloom.

We cook strange, frivolous dishes: Is Jack coming for his tea, I say? I am looking for someone to marry. I hope Jack might do, though it is a pity he is not my relative. He is just someone we know. Night falls, on this new dispensation; it falls and falls on me. In subsequent weeks I become enraged. Jack and my mother sit in the kitchen. I jump at the kitchen window and make faces at them. They draw the curtains and laugh. I try to crash the back door, but they have bolted it.

This is the worst time in my life: I am back on the pier at Blackpool, with the screaming gulls and the wind, looking down into the boiling sea. Words swirl over my head, words of loathing and contempt. A hand lifts me; it is the hand of the law. I am dropped on the rocks and smashed. We are talked about in the street. Some rules have been broken. A darkness closes about our house. The air becomes jaundiced and clotted, and hangs in gaseous clouds over the rooms.

I see them so thickly that I think I am going to bump my head on them. No one quarrels, no one cries — only me; no words are exchanged; the situation remains unspoken, indefinite. My godmother brings the meat and the loaves, because my mother no longer goes to the butcher or the baker; she makes do with the Brosscroft corner shop, where the proprietor is kind. She no longer goes to Mass on Sunday, or indeed anywhere at all.

In the evening she and Jack occupy the big kitchen, my father the room at the front; but mostly the men seem to time their comings and goings to miss each other. At the weekend Jack goes out and hacks savagely at the undergrowth of the garden. When the weather is wet, he strips off wallpaper and burns away layers of paint. He works in a fury, his sallow muscular body dripping with sweat. But the spirits gather thickly in the half-finished house, falling from their places in the glass-fronted cupboards to the right of the fireplace, waking and stretching from their sooty slumbers behind the demolished range.

They discharge from the burnt walls in puffs, they are scraped into slivers as the old wallpaper peels away, and lie curled on the floors, mocking the bristle brush. Our daily life is hushed, driven into corners. Outside the house, what passes for life goes on. I am seven, I have reached the age of reason. I am great in theology. I had begun practising as a parish priest at five years old.

The doctrine of transubstantiation caused me no headache. I was not surprised to find that a round wafer was the body of Christ.