New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost , is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied. Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me.” In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children. Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to “write herself into being”―one novel after another. This wry and visceral memoir will certainly bring new converts to Mantel’s dark genius. “Mesmerizing.”― The New York Times “Dazzlingly written...a highly unorthodox account of what is essentially unsayable about the inward uncharted life.” ―Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books “The matter is bitter, but Mantel's angular wit is as unquenchable as her anger; the reading experience is reliably exhilarating because of the sheer excellence of the writing.” ― New York Times Book Review “Blazing insights [and] poetic discourses that rattle the soul...Mantel doesn't simply hit close to home, she knocks at our closets and opens our doors.” ― The Boston Globe “Mantel's talents are stronger than her misfortunes...[this book comes] from the mind of a fine author, whose body has imposed its own terrible penances.” ― The Washington Post “ Giving Up the Ghost combines the urgency and observation that steer a memoir into the heart of a reader's own experience. I have been touched and also enthralled by this fine book.” ―Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries and Unless “A stunning evocation of an ill-fitting childhood and a womanhood blighted by medical ineptitude. Hilary Mantel's frank and beautiful memoir is impossible to put down and impossible to forget.” ―Clare Boylan, author of Beloved Stranger Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies , which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light , debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost , and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022. Giving Up the Ghost A Memoir By Hilary Mantel Picador Copyright © 2004 Hilary Mantel All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312423629 Giving up the Ghost A Second Home I t is a Saturday, late July 2000; we are in Reepham, Norfolk, at Owl Cottage. There's something we have to do today, but we are trying to postpone it. We need to go across the road to see Mr. Ewing; we need to ask for a valuation, and see what they think of our chances of selling. Ewing's is the local firm, and it was they who sold us the house, seven years ago. As the morning wears on we move around each other silently, avoiding conversation. The decision's made. There's no more to discuss.About eleven o'clock, I see a flickering on the staircase. The air is still; then it moves. I raise my head. The air is still again. I know it is my stepfather's ghost coming down. Or, to put it in a way acceptable to most people, I "know" it is my stepfather's ghost.I am not perturbed. I am used to "seeing" things that aren't there. Or--to put it in a way more acceptable to me--I am used to seeing things that "aren't there." It was in this house that I last saw my stepfather, Jack, in the early months of 1995: alive, in his garments of human flesh. Many times since then I have acknowledged him on the stairs.It may be, of course, that the flicker against the banister was nothing more than the warning of a migraine attack. It's at the left-hand side of my body that visions manifest; it's my left eye that is peeled. I don't know whether, at such vulnerable times, I see more than is there; or if things are there that normally I don't see.Over the years the premonitionary symptoms of migraine headaches have become more than the dangerous puzzle that they were earlier in my life, and more than a warning to take the drugs that might ward off a full-blown attack. They have become a psychic adornment or flourish, an art form, a secret talent I have never managed to make money from. Sometimes they take the form of the visual disturbances that are common to many sufferer