Giving up the ghost : a memoir /
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Author / Creator: | Mantel, Hilary, 1952- |
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Edition: | 1st American ed. |
Imprint: | New York : Henry Holt, 2003. |
Description: | 223 p. ; 22 cm. |
Language: | English |
Subject: | Mantel, Hilary, -- 1952- Mantel, Hilary, -- 1952- Novelists, English -- 20th century -- Biography. Chronic pain -- Patients -- Great Britain -- Biography. Families. Chronic pain -- Patients. Novelists, English. Great Britain. Biography. |
Format: | Print Book |
URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/4921954 |
Summary: | 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.<br> <br> Hilary Mantel was born to write about the paradoxes that shimmer at the edges of our perception. Dazzling, wry, and visceral, Giving Up the Ghost is a deeply compelling book that will bring new converts to Mantel's dark genius.<br> |
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Item Description: | "A John Macrae book." |
Physical Description: | 223 p. ; 22 cm. |
ISBN: | 0805074724 |