From the Publisher
A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature.”
—Margaret Atwood
“Mantel was a queen of literature. . . . Her reign was long, varied, and uncontested.”
—Maggie O'Farrell
“One of the very greatest of our writers; poetic and profound prose with an incomparable feel for the texture of history.”
—Simon Schama
“Mantel bristled with intelligence, looked at everything, saw everything. . . . With the uneasy energy of her early life, [she] made rigorous and unsettling work about history, the body, and the unknowable.”
—Anne Enright
"The works collected in A Memoir of My Former Self are sharp and shapely, models of economy and density of thought... If you are a Mantel completist or if you have never heard of her, this book is an utter delight."
—Vogue
"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."
—The Washington Post
NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile
This collection of 70 of Mantel's writings is divided into five parts, each with a reflective, animating quality. Lydia Leonard narrates the first part, her tone intimate and conversational whether she's describing Mantel's theft of a book in her youth, her life in Saudi Arabia, the grace of Marie Antoinette, or Princess Diana's complicated image. Jane Wymark delivers the fourth part, five lectures that show Mantel's passion for and understanding of writing. Six more actors and writers deliver the breadth and depth of brisk and witty movie reviews, along with in-depth essays about Jane Austen, Annie Proulx, and others. Multiple narrators finish with 20 more thought-provoking pieces. Throughout, short sentences give pause, descriptions invite, and all make listeners appreciate and miss the genius of the late Mantel. S.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-09-07
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 theSpectator, 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.
