Book Review: A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF by Hilary Mantel

A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"George Orwell (there’s a man who might interest you) said that every life, viewed from the inside, is a series of defeats. I would amplify that, say it is a series of enforced compromises, slippages from our own standard: shabby little sins."

Few authors are able to completely submerge readers into the Past. Mantel did so with her Wolf Hall trilogy and that unbelievable first book of hers on the French Revolution.

She lived to see her books reach Classic status, and proves with this last one (a collection of essays on different topics) that a great writer is not bound by small things like genre.

From academic ones describing her process and respect for history, to reflections on the nature of royalty and our fascination with it, to book reviews and movie reviews... she CAN write it all. And sustain the reader's attention all throughout. In these little pieces are "the great of the truths written on the bodies of the small."

Similar tomes had me skipping an essay here, focusing on a specific essay there. But one doesn't do that with Mantel. For with her gifted pen, no topic is too banal. All feed into the great theme of the past (ghosts in a secular sense) co-existing with us, the living.

She isn't perfect. The self confidence of the British intellectual will out, with statements like the one she wrote on Saudi Arabia: "When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must sometimes pay it the compliment of hating it." Or her point about a movie: "All in all, it provides a stimulating evening for those who can jettison the “cultural baggage”; and a pure delight for those of us who have never had any culture at all."

But then she also writes delightful funny phrases like "How nice, then, to go to Waterstones and not to have to disinfect yourself when you get home," comparing the luxury of a bookstore selling brand new books versus bookshops selling old books.

If the woman wasn't perfect, the writer nearly was. Such passion in her phrases, coming from a life filled with pain. Her beautiful books were her children, and they will live on in glorious testament to their mother for all time.

"The point about our human nature is that we must go to work on it... The pen is in our hands. A happy ending is ours to write."

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