A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing
(Paperback)
Available Formats
Hardback, Large Print Edition
Published: 21st February 2024
Paperback
Published: 24th October 2023
Paperback
Published: 10th September 2024
Hardback
Published: 13th February 2024
Publishing Details
A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing
By (Author) Hilary Mantel
John Murray Press
John Murray Publishers Ltd
24th October 2023
United Kingdom
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Reportage, journalism or collected columns
Publishing industry and journalism
828.9209
Physical Properties
Paperback
400
Width 152mm, Height 232mm, Spine 32mm
520g
Description
'I breathed in stories, as soon as I breathed in air. Sometimes I think I wasn't born, but I just came out of an ink blot.'
'Mantel's idiosyncratic and magisterial voice comes through on every page, carrying readers across an astonishing array of subject matter with ease. This is a treasure' Publishers Weekly As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Mantel's subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels - revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England - and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V. S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is a selection of her film reviews - from When Harry Met Sally to RoboCop - and, published for the first time, her stunning Reith Lectures, which explore the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life. From her unique childhood to her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall Trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel's life in her own dazzling words, 'messages from people I used to be.' Compelling, often very funny, always luminous, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.'A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature' Margaret AtwoodReviews
A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature -- Margaret Atwood
One of the very greatest of our writers; poetic and profound prose with an incomparable feel for the texture of history -- Simon Schama
Mantel was a queen of literature . . . her reign was long, varied and uncontested -- Maggie OFarrell
Mantel bristled with intelligence, looked at everything, saw everything . . . With the uneasy energy of her early life, Mantel made rigorous and unsettling work about history, the body and the unknowable -- Anne Enright
In this dazzling posthumous collection of previously published and original writings . . . Mantel's idiosyncratic and magisterial voice comes through on every page, carrying readers across an astonishing array of subject matter with ease. This is a treasure * Publishers Weekly *
Author Bio
Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her final novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize. She was the film reviewer for The Spectator, 1986-90, and went on to write extensively for the New York Review of Books, Guardian and the London Review of Books. She died in 2022.
