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.
We must be grateful that she has left us this collection of pieces, thoughtfully compiled by Pearson into five thematic sections corresponding to different aspects of Mantel’s writing life, and illustrated with personal photographs ... The pieces that feel timeless here are those that illuminate the unique alchemy of reading and writing that sparked her own work ... Yet her worldview – expansive, tolerant of complexity, outward-looking – is watermarked throughout this collection.
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 ... Her long essays on female writers show Mantel at her best ... It’s on being a writer that Mantel is funniest.
Some themes recur. She turns a cold eye on religion, but is always open to the uncanny, to the supernatural, to ghosts ... The range of subjects is magnificent ... It’s probably a book people will dip into rather than read straight though (though reading it all is well worth doing) but that’s fine: open at any page for treasures and gold.
Dazzling ... 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.
