A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF

A collection of the late author’s essays coheres as a memoir.

A gathering of more than 70 essays, talks, and reviews by award-winning British author Mantel (1952-2022), edited by Pearson, offers insights into the life and work of a prolific novelist. The pieces, previously published in venues such as the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and the Spectator, include reflections on movies (When Harry Met Sally, for one), books (a comparison of biographies of Jane Austen), social and cultural commentary (irreverent assessments of Diana and Kate Middleton), Mantel’s inspiration as a writer, and her serious, debilitating health struggles. In 1980, she discloses, after years of misdiagnoses, she underwent surgery for endometriosis, which involved a hysterectomy and removal of part of her bladder and intestines. Still in her 20s, she became infertile and post-menopausal. Some pieces are slyly funny, such as the title essay, which reports her experience with a hypnotist who sent her careening into a past life. Throughout, Mantel offers insights into the enterprise of writing. “My concern as a writer,” she reveals, “is with memory, personal and collective: with the restless dead asserting their claims.” Her Reith Lectures, broadcast on BBC radio in 2017, are likely to seem freshest to readers familiar with her published pieces. In these talks, she considers the challenges of historical fiction and the “violent curiosity” that propelled her to investigate the French Revolution and Tudor England. “History,” she writes, “is not the past—it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past.” Mining historical sources, she aims to imagine “the interior drama” of characters whose minds can never fully be known. The novelist, she asserts, “works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dream, where politics meets psychology, where private and public meet.”

Shrewd, humane, and deeply engaging pieces.