a book
Giving Up the Ghost
Hilary Mantel · 2004 · 240 pages
New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied.
Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
“The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me.”
In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children.
Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to “write herself into being”—one novel after another. This wry and visceral memoir will certainly bring new converts to Mantel’s dark genius.
“Mesmerizing.”—The New York Times
recommended by 4 people
sourced from public statements
Lena Dunham
“A true Goddess. Her book Giving Up The Ghost is the most searing portrait of living in a female body that can be read. Her work is eternal.”↗
Rafia Zakaria
“@MargieOrford I know I am so awfully sad about it. Her book Giving up the Ghost is what inspired me to start writing about personal things.”↗
Emerald Fennell
“Hilary Mantel is one of those impossible, once-in-a-lifetime visionaries. She seems as if she’s descended from William Blake, or from a medieval ascetic. Her horror writing is peerless, and there is nothing quite so harrowingly visceral as her memoir.”↗