Giving up the Ghost

Giving up the Ghost is a 2003 autobiographical memoir by novelist Hilary Mantel. Incorporating elements of fantasy, it explores themes of childhood, ghosts (both real and imagined), sickness, and family. Mantel uses the metaphor of the ghost to help explain the living memories she keeps lodged in her life, whether intentionally or due to trauma, and gives them names in order to help rationalize and control their roles and emotional influence.

Mantel begins the story by explaining that there are ghosts everywhere in her life. She states that at times, she has realized she keeps house for them: she loads up the fridge, and makes sure they have enough guest towels. She introduces some of them by name. There is Jack, who is her stepfather, who she knows is around when he makes a strange stirring sound on the stairs of her weekend house in Norfolk, Virginia. There is Catriona, her unborn daughter, who is an Irish-looking girl with broad shoulders and an affinity for the material goods of the living world: money, curtain-making, house work, and driving. Mantel maintains that mostly, these ghosts are common in all people’s lives, though they are not easy to identify at first. She argues that ghosts represent the pieces of ourselves that we deny getting to know; our unexplored experience to which we might not return. For example, every time a human is born male, the phenomenon generates a complementary female ghost. For each lover, career, or hometown, there are uncountable others left behind as ghosts.

Mantel states that these ghosts of the lives she can never lead prevent her from accepting a version of herself that feels whole, or completely her own. She recalls that her parents made a model for her life before she was born and capable of choosing one for herself. Then, the nuns at the Convent of the Nativity tried to indoctrinate her, letting more ghosts multiply as she strived to fulfill the model of a good Catholic girl. Later on in life, as Mantel went between different doctors to attempt to figure out the source of her existential pain, she was given even more labels to fulfill: neurotic, depressed, and hysterical. These trips led to a hysterectomy that alienated her from her own body. The project of Giving up the Ghost, she reveals, is to begin anew at her current age of 50 to articulate who she actually is.



Mantel states that the hardest task will be to reckon with memory. Over the past decade of her life, she observes that memoirs as a project have become overly fashionable, indulgent and self-confident, rejecting or omitting the truth of the human struggle at any memoir’s core. She states that the way a memory is retrieved actually is critical to understanding its deeper truth as a site of emotion. She notes that most of our emotional truth is nearly permanently obfuscated by the conditioning we undergo to cooperate in a society, but asserts that we can arrive at emotional truth gradually through introspection.

Following her own advice, Mantel explicates the emotional textures of her life in working-class Derbyshire in the 50’s. She recalls paint the color of oxblood, cheap candy sold in boxes called Weekend, and a piano, owned by her family, with the middle C key broken at the edge from years of heavy use. Narrating this sense memory, she arrives at the observation that recalling particular emotions tells us not only about how common objects and aesthetic forms have changed over time, but also how the emotions were intelligent reactions to these changes.
Mantel next compares childhood to a state of war, a safe haven under constant siege. The attackers are the ordinary figures of life, especially teachers, that try to access and transform the child’s inner world. She remembers corporal punishment as an acute example of the power of adult figures to intrude on the mind of a child. In school, even when she was head girl, she held onto her autonomy by refusing to adhere to the dress code that called for navy pants.

Mantel also investigates her past from the perspective of biology. Having been impacted by endometriosis before birth, she takes a medley of medications to stave off its effects, but wonders whether it has impacted her brain and personality. She laments that the body is too much of a true machine to actually be plastic enough to remake itself like myth and narrative pretend. She also sees its effect on her body, and is aware of public judgments about her uncontrollable overweightness.



Mantel concludes her memoir by asking herself where the little girl that she once was remains when she looks in the mirror. She feels the ghost of her former self pass softly through her dreams, but feels that the mind of her childhood self is inaccessible. Cogent and highly self-conscious, Giving up the Ghost is itself Mantel’s task to find and exorcise some of her ghosts and reclaim the narrative she always wanted.