The grand-sounding title and subtitle of this book, published a year after Hilary Mantel’s death, make it out to be a sort of autobiography. In fact it’s a bran tub, an odds-and-sods collection of Mantel’s journalism from 1987 to 2017, mostly shorter and less formal than the essays collected in Mantel Pieces.
No, it is not a memoir, but a writer leaves an impression of themselves on every page, in both the events they recount and the ideas they return to, and the autobiographical material – arranged by Mantel’s longtime editor Nicholas Pearson – extends themes from her 2003 memoir Giving Up the Ghost, including her childhood and her ill-health and infertility. Of the women in her family she writes, “Our story stops with me”.
The luxury of a retrospective for the reader is seeing trends that the writer themselves may have been unaware of. “If I were to be granted a coat of arms,” she writes, “my motto would be ‘It’s not that simple,’” and we repeatedly see Mantel testing and circling ideas, developing her thoughts over time. In a 2007 piece, she is mildly derisive of how Britain mourned Diana, Princess of Wales, “with teddy bears and doggerel verse and flowers rotting in cellophane”. Ten years later, she sees the “rotting flowers” and “padded hearts” as “the struggle for self-expression of individuals who were spiritually and imaginatively deprived”.
Indeed, her 2017 essay on the fall and posthumous rise of Diana is a triumph of intellect and compassion, every bit the equal of Mantel’s notorious (that is, loudly discussed by people who hadn’t read it) 2013 London Review of Books lecture on Kate Middleton. And it addresses three of Mantel’s recurring themes: how the dead live on, the application of power and the position of women in society. Men in history make their own mistakes; women have mistakes thrust upon them.
It’s no surprise that making the dead live should be an interest of Mantel’s: she spent her last 15 years resurrecting them in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy (and in Beyond Black before that). In the first of her 2017 Reith Lectures, she quotes St Augustine: “The dead are invisible, they are not absent.” History is all very well, “but if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art”. We ask the historian “tell me what it means” – but we ask the novelist “tell me what else it means”.
Her long essays on female writers show Mantel at her best. She encapsulates the contradictions of Rebecca West (“It’s her vices, as much as her virtues, that make her letters so compelling”), and doesn’t mince her words on Elizabeth Jane Howard. “The real reason [her] books are underestimated – let’s be blunt – is that they are by a woman.”
Indeed she excels at writing about writing generally, and is unsparing in defence of her trade, against both non-readers – “show me a man – it’s usually a man – who ‘doesn’t see the point of fiction’ and I’ll show you a pompous, inflexible, self-absorbed bore” – and female writers “who want to write about women in the past but can’t resist retrospectively empowering them. Which is false.” One Reith Lecture constitutes a punch-the-air manifesto for fiction. “Leave the reader hungry,” she writes. “You are looking for the one detail that lights up the page: one line, to perturb or challenge the reader, make him feel acknowledged, and yet estranged.”
And it’s on being a writer that Mantel is funniest: making films means “endless meetings with screeching optimists; they make such a change from publishers, who are always depressed”. On the all-consuming experience of writing a novel: “There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.”
A Memoir of My Former Self – a guide to the mind of one of the great English novelists of the last half-century – has been trumpeted by its publishers as “the final book from Hilary Mantel”. Well, we’ll see about that. In one piece here, she makes a passing reference to diaries that she once kept. The Diaries of Hilary Mantel! But this will do for now.
• A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel is published by John Murray (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
