2025/128: A Memoir of my Former Self — Hilary Mantel

You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart. [loc. 5001]

A selection of Mantel's short non-fiction, ranging from book reviews (originally published in the New York Review of Books) and film reviews (originally published in the Spectator), through articles about writing and reading, to a delightful review of perfumes and a piece about stationery. ('...comrades, the hard-spined notebook is death to free thought. Pocket-size or desk-size, it drives the narrative in one direction, one only, and its relentless linearity oppresses you, so you seal off your narrative options early.' [loc. 5349]... I, with my plethora of discbound notebooks, wholeheartedly agree.) 

Also, of course, quite a bit about the Tudors: a variety of pieces written during the long gestation, writing and publication of the trilogy beginning with Wolf Hall. This volume also contains the full text of her 2017 Reith Lectures, exploring the art, craft, possibilities and constraints of historical fiction: I confess I found her voice a little grating when I listened to the Lectures, but it's much mellower in my head as I read!

Mantel the reviewer takes no prisoners. She is acerbic, informed and precise. I'm not familiar with everything she reviewed, but appreciated her admiration of Annie Proulx's 'inarticulate characters' and her critique of Wild at Heart ('not a film you should recommend to the vicar'). More interesting for me were her thoughts about writing, and about reading. She hypothesises that she internalised saintly Cousin Helen, from What Katy Did, and delayed seeking medical advice because of Cousin Helen's dictums about never complaining, never showing your pain, making a virtue of immobility... I am certain that an impressionable child (as I was) can be damaged by their reaction to a book, however innocuous the book might seem to others.

Many of these essays are available online, but it's nice to have them collected, to dip into from time to time. I intend to reread some pieces at times when the writing-well seems empty, or poisoned, or inaccessible. "You have to keep shocking your psyche, or nothing happens in your writing – nothing charged, nothing enduring. It’s imaginary encounters with death that generate life on the page..." and later, "bad art and good art feel remarkably the same, while they’re in process".