Hilary Mantel’s biography on her publisher’s website says it all:

“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 worldwide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote 17 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 70 in 2022.”

As George Costanza said about his own biography, “If you boil everything I’ve done down to one page, it looks decent.” And yes, this simple paragraph does look decent. Dame Hilary was no slacker.

"Don’t be daunted by the size of this book. It is rife with short, perfect pieces about a myriad of topics. A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF is a real gem."

Looking at the Wolf Hall trilogy alone would express the remarkable creativity and literary genius of this writer. However, on the occasion of the first anniversary of her passing, the publication of this collection reminds us that before, during and after Wolf Hall, Mantel was writing like a maniac about everything under the sun, including her own life.

A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF brings together another 400 pages of Mantel’s awe-inspiring and often laugh-inducing writing, this time a collection of criticism and essays. Did you know that she was a film critic? That she wrote about many other writers, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul? That she thought carefully and considerably about her place in England and its place in the world? That she wrote, perhaps most distinctively, about Princess Diana as a mythic figure in popular culture?

Writes Mantel, “For some people, being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse.” She then goes on to discuss how, looking back, Diana --- once deemed as being “candid” and “uninhibited” in that fateful solo interview on the BBC --- “never…appeared so self-conscious and recalcitrant.” Who else would have been able to speak like that about the People’s Princess? Only another British icon would be allowed to do so, and Dame Hilary did.

Check out Mantel’s review of Goodfellas or Wings of Desire. She was more than a movie critic, though. She was like a helpful professor, guiding the general reading public into a film extravaganza, seeing the vast layers beneath the initial 24 frames-per-second showing. It is here where Mantel’s way with words and her love of popular culture as deep culture springs from the pages. She lets readers see her as both a fan and a critic, and then moves them forward on a journey that she felt was a fun one. Going to the movies had to hit differently with Mantel as the color commentator.

Once a writer becomes known for one specific thing --- a genre, a very particular way with words, and, especially in Mantel’s case, a combination of history and literature between two hard covers --- it is difficult to see beyond their vaunted place at the time of their death. But this collection allows us to see some of the work she did while she was laboring intensely on her epic trilogy. We get a little touch of what it was like to be a woman in England in the 20th and 21st centuries, looking at the modern world while researching the world that yielded her greatest influences. It is a heady mix that is highly entertaining.

Don’t be daunted by the size of this book. It is rife with short, perfect pieces about a myriad of topics. A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF is a real gem.