Giving up the Ghost : A Memoir

Giving up the Ghost : A Memoir
ISBN: 9780007142729
Publication Date: 1 May 2004

From one of Britain′s finest authors at work today, a wry, shocking and beautifully written memoir of childhood, ghosts (real and metaphorical), illness and family.

At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o'clock and she is getting the cabbage on. 'Hello, Our Ilary,' she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn't stretch to the 'H'.

Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel′s wry, shocking and uniquely unusual five-part autobiography of childhood, ghosts, illness and family.

It opens in 1995 with A Second Home, in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, a death which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of childhood.

Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her begins in typical, gripping Mantel fashion: 'Two of my relatives have died by fire.' Set during the 1950s, it takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating with the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelit ceremony of her mother's 'churching'.

In The Secret Garden Mantel moves to a haunted house and mysteriously gains a stepfather. When she is almost eleven, her family flee the gossips and the ghosts, and resolve to start a new life.

Smile is an account of teenage perplexity, in a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Convent school provides a certain sanctuary, with tacit assistance from the fearsome 'Top Nun'.

In the final section, the author tells how, thro...