Giving Up the Ghost - A Memoir

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel is a fierce, self-possessed child, schooling herself in chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay and convinced that she will become a boy at age four. Catholic school comes as a rude distraction from her rich inner life. At home, where fathers and stepfathers come and go at strange, overlapping intervals, the keeping of secrets becomes a way of life. Her late teens bring her to law school in London and then to Sheffield; a lover and then a husband. She acquires a persistent pain - which also shifts and travels - that over the next decade will subject her to destructive drugs, patronizing psychiatry, and, finally, at age twenty-seven, to an ineffective and irrevocable surgery. There will be no children; instead she has a ghost of possibility, a paper baby, a person who slipped between the lines. Hormone treatments alter her body beyond recognition. And in the middle of it all, she begins one novel, and then another....