A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson. Henry Holt, 419 pp., $40.00
If it is true, as Saint Augustine says, that the dead aren’t absent but merely invisible, then somewhere round about, as I write about her and you read about her, Hilary Mantel is present. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she is present not only if Augustine’s statement is true but if I believe it, or if you do. Mantel believed it: she quotes it twice in her 2017 BBC Reith Lectures on the art of historical fiction, which are included among the essays and reviews that make up A Memoir of My Former Self. Elsewhere she says, apropos Princess Diana, “For some people, being dead is only a relative condition.” And I want to believe it too. I imagine her raised eyebrow, her incredulous laugh, as she looks over my shoulder at the computer screen.
I met her only twice: the first time when she was awarded an honorary degree by the University of London and I was asked to give the oration in her honor. The pomposity of the proceedings was beyond parody, and as we bowed and scraped, wearing our silly hats and gowns (royalty was present, in the form of Princess Anne, chancellor of the university), Mantel managed simultaneously to project genuine warmth and gratitude, and enormous skepticism. Not long afterward I went with a friend to the opening run of the adaptation of Wolf Hall in the West End, and as we sidled into our seats, there she was, sitting with her husband, Gerald McEwen, directly behind us. We whooped and giggled like teenagers meeting by accident in an unfamiliar setting (What? You here?) as she raised an eyebrow at her own royal entertainment. Mantel died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of seventy in September 2022, a week before a planned move to Kinsale in Ireland—not far from my own patch. I would have liked to have got to know her better, but maybe, as Augustine suggests, I still can.
Born in 1952 in the small town of Glossop in the north
