"In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. ... [This memoir] collects the finest of this writing over four decades. ... She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping 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 ... about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia"--
Mantel...left behind a literary legacy that also includes a wide range of her right-handed writing. A Memoir of My Former Self gathers together the best of it. Spanning four decades, and comprising work that originally appeared in various outlets, this bravura collection of articles, essays, reviews and talks showcases the inquiring mind, fierce intelligence and shrewd way with words of a dexterous — and indeed, ambidextrous — prose stylist ... Mantel impresses with her sharp wit, informed opinions and keen observations.
A continuous delight ... Adds more depth and color to Mantel’s life story ... Owing to a generous body of work, it’s likely her presence will be felt for a long time to come. The queen is dead; long live Hilary Mantel.
There are essays on politics, America, cricket and Biggles, a superb one on procrastination and several I could have coped without ... There is so much more I want to know. If her fascination with anorexia, which she wrote about again and again, crept up from her own experience, her body forever her battleground. About her husband, gentle geologist Gerald, whom she met at 16 and married at 20, divorced at 28 and remarried at 30. Their story is a novel in itself. Mantel was obsessed by ghosts — inevitably, she has become one. How do we summon her back? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? A really good biography. I wonder who will write it.
