A Memoir of My Former Self : A Life in Writing

THE FINAL BOOK FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST WRITERS

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. Ink is a generative fluid, she explains. If you dont mean your words to breed consequences, dont write at all.A Memoir of My Former Selfcollects the finest of this writing over four decades.

Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. 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 novelsrevolutionary 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 fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is her legendary essay Royal Bodies, on our endless fascination with the current royal family.

From her unusual childhood to her all-consuming interest in Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall trilogy,A Memoir of My Former Selfreveals the shape of Hilary Mantels life in her own luminous words, through messages from people I used to be. Filled with her singular wit and wisdom, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.