Exploring Hilary Mantel's memoir with Jillian Hess
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Exploring Hilary Mantel's memoir with Jillian Hess
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What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?’
So writes Hilary Mantel in her extraordinary memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. First published in 2003, it offers a snapshot of the great writer before the Wolf Hall era: a literary, if not commercial, success, and a fragile soul with a dark, scuttling imagination.
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Please note, this is an automated transcript and as a result
there may be errorsKatherine May: [00:00:00] Hi everyone, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. Um, welcome to October's True Stories book club, which, uh, I am very, very excited to say that we are not only joined by Gillian Hess tonight of the brilliant Noted sub stack, um, but we also are talking about Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, which I think a few of you have read already Um, one of my absolute favourite memoirs and it has been such a pleasure to reread it, particularly seeing as when I first read it, it was before she became a literary megastar.
Katherine May: I read it when it first came out, um, and Now, it reads very differently. Now, I am going to bring Gillian to the stage. [00:01:00] Here we go. I call it a stage, that sounds really grand. I'm just noticing that I look like I'm in really good autumnal colours here. I'm quite impressed with the thematic. Hi, Gillian. Hello,
Jillian Hess: hello.
Katherine May: Thank you. Sorry, carry on.
Jillian Hess: Nice to join you on stage.
Katherine May: Yes, up on stage. Um, thank you so much for being here. It's just lovely to have company. But, um, you wrote a wonderful piece when, um, Hilary Mantel died. And I think Given how much this is about the act of writing, I just thought you were the perfect person to, to join us in this, really, and to, to think about how this book is constructed.
Katherine May: Like, there's so much in, in there about what it takes to write a book, which I think we will go for in a minute. Now, I am going to make sure the chat is open because Yeah, I think we should be okay, because sometimes [00:02:00] that gets turned off, and, oh yeah, here we go, everyone and everyone, right. Lovely people who are here, say hello, sorry if you couldn't before, um, and tell us where you are, and also tell us whether you have already read the book, or whether you're sampling tonight to see whether you think it's worth it, or, um, or whatever suits you.
Katherine May: Um, Also, there is at the bottom of your page a questions box, um, somewhere. Yes, a Q& A box. Sorry, there we go. I'm never going to get the hang of this new Zoom. Um, so if you've got a question that you'd like us to try and tackle, given that we are not Hilary, but you might want to ask our opinion on things, who knows, um, any time during the course of the webinar, um, please Do use that question and answer box rather than the chat, because the chat can start to move really fast at certain points, and we miss stuff.
Katherine May: Um, the q and a box will pin it for our [00:03:00] attention, and we will get to any questions at the end. Um, providing their RAI it is a little bit of a more weird scenario to ask questions when the actual author isn't here, but, um, but maybe we have thoughts. So, Jillian, um, tell me your overall impressions of the book.
Katherine May: First of all, just just to introduce. a little bit about this, this fantastic memoir. Tell us your, your kind of headline impressions.
Jillian Hess: Headline impressions. First and foremost, it is so clear that Hilary Mantel loves writing, and that she loves words, and just the way that she uses language. I mean, it just, rereading it, it felt, it felt like a master's course, and just how to construct a sentence, and how to play with verbs, and metaphor, and.
Jillian Hess: I mean, just such a joy to bathe in the writing of someone who loves it so, so clearly. Um, [00:04:00] but then also to be let into her very private life, her very private feelings and reactions to, um, her childhood and then her diagnosis and her illness, um, and, you know, this, this sense of, she's so conscious of how private it is.
Jillian Hess: And what a strange thing it is to be writing about it for this audience that, you know, she doesn't, she doesn't know who we are, but it's, it always, it always strikes me as such a strange thing how you feel such an intimate connection with an author who knows nothing of your existence. Uh, and, and that's, that's, um, but to feel that, I've been in her mind just briefly and been granted this, this access to the way she thinks about her life and her body and the world that she inhabited is [00:05:00] such a, such a gift.
Katherine May: Yeah, yeah, and actually like one of the, one of the things that really struck me as I was reading this because, you know, as I, as I just said, I read it before, when it came out, which was years before Wolf Hall, and it's almost like she knew that was going to happen from reading this book, you know, there's this sense that she knows that she is one of the greats already, and she's creating this account of herself, how she became there, how she got, how she became that, sorry, how she got there, um, and also what, how she thinks about writing, how she does it.
Katherine May: And it, in retrospect, it seems to me, to be extraordinarily assured to write in that way. Before you've really hit the big time, you know, she was, she was a sort of, you know, literary, relatively obscure literary [00:06:00] writer at the time. Um, but there's almost this sense that she could see the pathway, even now.
Katherine May: And, and she's setting up this, this sort of mythology of the self already. It's really, there's almost an uncanniness to that, I think, somehow, for
Jillian Hess: me. But how, how does she know? How does she know that she's going to be Well Like that confidence, just always is just so I mean, clearly she was right.
Katherine May: Absolutely. I mean, maybe it's just unusual in a woman, um, to, to feel so certain that she is a gifted writer and that she will, but even, you know, there's like this incredible dramatic irony when she's writing about a place of greater safety and how, well, it gets published, but no one really cares about it.
Katherine May: Here is one of our great historical novelists telling us that she wrote a great historical novel and nobody cared about it, but she [00:07:00] knows it's important nevertheless, like there's something. Yeah, there's something very witchy about all of it, honestly, let alone the ghosts, before we even start on the ghosts.
Jillian Hess: Right, that she has this premonition of like, this knowledge of how things will turn out.
Katherine May: Yeah, hard to say, but I, I found that quite extraordinary. Um, let's, let's start by talking about the reason I chose this for Halloween, which is, you know, giving up the ghost is not entirely metaphorical language here, you know, and quite surprisingly for a literary author who, you know, was writing essays in the London Review of Books all the time and definitely seen as part of that very intellectual set.
Katherine May: Um, she, writes about her life as where ghosts are kind of seamlessly knitted into the fabric. [00:08:00] How did you read those ghosts? Like, how did, what did they, what did they say to you if they spoke?
Jillian Hess: Um, I mean, there's something I come from, from my PhD is in romantic literature, which is sort of the birth of, of, uh, gothic literature and, um, There is something that seemed so gothic, so romantic in terms of the romantic period in these ghosts of just sort of the, the bleeding between death and life, bleeding between history, the past and the future and the present and how they're all sort of intermingled.
Jillian Hess: Um, and then the just uncanny, the familiarity of these ghosts, but also, um, the sort of shocking ness of, I mean, they seem so commonplace for her, but it's also incredibly shocking. Um, and it, it's hard, of course, it's hard not to think about this and [00:09:00] in terms of her, her history as a, as a, as a historical novelist, which, um, is a way of living with ghosts, of inhabiting times past and historical figures who've been dead for hundreds of years and having them talk through you.
Jillian Hess: Um, through her writing. So there's something that that felt so appropriate for a historical novelist of her stature to be communing with ghosts. Um, and there's something about the historical novel that's also just incredibly interesting. Gothic, in that it does feel, they're haunted. They're, they're filled with these ghosts, but, um, that become incredibly real as we're reading them, as we're reading the, the novels.
Jillian Hess: Um, so, but I think, you know, something that, that you had pointed out when we were talking earlier is just how these ghosts are, [00:10:00] are so vague.
Katherine May: Yeah, yeah, there's, there's, As a reader, like I, I wanted them to materialise a bit more, you know. I, I felt like there were, I couldn't, I couldn't tell, you know, it's hard to know, isn't it, whether there was a deliberate ambiguity there, you know, whether there was this sort of sense of scuttling in the peripheral vision, which is such a, The trope of the, particularly the Victorian ghost story.
Katherine May: Cause she does read like a little kind of missing Bronte. Doesn't she? She's like, there she is in the sort of north of England, incredibly precocious and, and yeah, this. Enduring this world that bleeds between the real and the very other. Um, but I, yeah, I didn't know whether there was a sort of deliberate attempt to make the ghosts very subtle and very, underplayed, [00:11:00] um, or whether there was a sort of, a kind of a lack of confidence there almost in whether, whether it was legitimate to really make these material, you know, I, I wondered what it must be like in the sort of masculine world of early, early, you know, century publishing, to go in and, and not only write about your uterus extensively, but also to talk about seeing ghosts, which is this kind of very, I think, kind of quite feminized experience, you know, and she went on to write about that in Beyond Black, the kind of connection between women's bodies and the seeing of phantoms and a mediumship.
Katherine May: Um, I'd love to know what everybody else felt. I, perhaps I just wanted something more, Yeah, perhaps I want something of the ghosts that ghosts don't give, which is proof of
Jillian Hess: existence. Right, that the ghosts are ghostly.[00:12:00]
Katherine May: I'm trying to find a quote that I picked out, so sorry, do carry on, I'll try and find it.
Jillian Hess: But it also, I mean, she plants these seeds of, that she's, she's withholding from us when she says once you've gotten in the habit of keeping secrets, it's a hard habit to give up. Um, And so then in the reader's mind, of course, you're wondering, well, what is she withholding?
Jillian Hess: She's clearly withholding from us. They're clearly secrets. Yeah,
Katherine May: this kind of spooky little girl. I pulled out a quote that, um, of a moment of an encounter with a ghost that I thought I might read out for anyone that hasn't read the book yet because I think this is the most material moment when we get this kind of full description of a ghost.
Katherine May: Um, I'm seven and I'm in the yard at Boscroft. I'm playing near the house near the back door. Something makes me look up, some shift of the light. I don't know. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, [00:13:00] in the long garden. It is, let us say, I love that let us say incidentally, Um, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds and bracken.
Katherine May: I can't see anything, not exactly see, except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl like flies, but it is not flies. There is nothing to see, there is nothing to smell, there is nothing to hear, but its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave.
Katherine May: I can sense at the periphery the limit of all my senses, the dimension of the creature, and It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it invisibly. I am cold and riddled with, and rinsed with nausea. Sorry, that's my favourite line, I screwed up. I'm cold and rinsed by nausea.
Katherine May: Love it. Um, the air [00:14:00] stirs, sorry, I cannot move, I'm shaking as it's moving. Pinned to the moment, I cannot wrench my gaze away. I'm looking into a space occupied by nothing. I could go on but there's this dance going on in that passage where on one hand she's saying there's something there but there's nothing there.
Katherine May: There's in no sensual meaning of the phrase something being there is anything there. She goes out of her way to say there's nothing to see, there's nothing to smell, there's nothing to hear. Like, it's It's quite frustrating.
Jillian Hess: Yes, I felt like something really important just happened, and I don't really know what it is.
Jillian Hess: I had to read that section multiple times to see because I thought, well, I must be missing something. But no, it's just not there.
Katherine May: It made me feel like an incompetent reader. I was like, in any other book, this would be a major. moment, like this [00:15:00] would be a major revelation, a major kind of advancing of the plot, and instead what we have is this strange absence.
Katherine May: She's toying with us, I think, um, but maybe she's expressing also this sense that she was uncanny rather than the world that she was in, almost that she was the kind of this, like, it's almost like her sensing reaches out into the world world, the world coming into her sensing. Um, it's, She's saying it's me.
Katherine May: I'm the problem, it's me. To quote Taylor Swift. To quote a Taylor Swift record that I've never heard. The
Jillian Hess: greatest poet. The greatest poet of our time.
Katherine May: Yeah. I mean, I find that really fascinating. And, yeah, sorry, go on. It
Jillian Hess: just, it makes me wonder, I mean, so much of our reality is just [00:16:00] filtered through our own perception.
Jillian Hess: And how much of the ghosts How much of that is, is within us, within her? Um, and part of it, I think, I think it's um, I don't know, I've just been feeling this very literally as I, as I get older, I have more floaters in my eye and I'm starting
Katherine May: to see them. Yeah, they happen. Although I have to tell you mine stopped when I left academia, academia, if that helps you at all.
Jillian Hess: I think I have many, many decades until retirement. I'm living with my floater ghost for a while, but it just feels like that's a very physiological, very literal explanation of how what we're seeing is filtered through something very internal. But, um, the same thing with these, with the idea of ghosts, I mean, whether or not they exist outside of us is a question, um, of her debate, I suppose, but in a certain sense, [00:17:00] they're in us.
Jillian Hess: I mean, we're the ones seeing them. We're the ones experiencing them. And so there is this like, this like intermeshing of the internal and external world that is so ghostly that she herself can become sort of this amorphous, buzzing, um, ghostly presence. Um, and so throughout it all, it just, you know, how much of this is.
Jillian Hess: of thinking about what's going on in her own mind, um, versus, you know, the very potentially very real hauntings that she, she may or may not have experienced. I'm not sure.
Katherine May: No, and I, yeah, I don't, I don't know, I don't know what she's, I don't honestly know what she's telling us about, about it in lots of ways.
Katherine May: Um, let's, let's make the kind of quite obvious segue, I think, to the embodiment in this book, to the, to her experience of living in a body, um, which [00:18:00] there's a, there's a ghost analogy going on there, I think, uh, this disease that isn't, isn't there, depending on who is looking at it and who's experiencing it, this.
Katherine May: What I'd forgotten about the book, for anyone that's not read it, so essentially the, the story there is that she has endometriosis and, and in common with, it seems to me like 98 percent of women that have endometriosis, there's a very long diagnostic journey and, and a lot of gaslighting to, to use a sort of more contemporary like phrase on it.
Katherine May: Um, But there's, what I'd forgotten about the book was the, the way in which she was considered to be mentally ill because of her pain, and because the pain was in her legs, specifically, like that was seen as evidence against her account, that there was nothing that would give her pain in her legs. I say this as someone that always gets menstrual pain in their knees, um, that offended me particularly, [00:19:00] um.
Katherine May: But there's this, and then there's, but then she's, she's literally, you know, she's given anti psychotics, it, it completes, she's, she's ends up in a, in a ward, you know, that it's, that experience was so extreme and I'd, I'd forgotten how much she was othered and turned into this kind of ghost of herself during, during that period of her life.
Jillian Hess: Right. And of just mistrusting women's experiences of our own bodies. Yeah.
Katherine May: There's that sort of speechlessness that comes from it. Yeah.
Jillian Hess: Yeah. And then, I mean, there's just something that feels, I mean, on the one hand, she's experiencing a history of feminism that still feels very present, that still feels very relevant. Although, I do think there's, as you mentioned, there are so many more conversations about women's [00:20:00] health and women's bodies and the ways that our bodies are different.
Jillian Hess: From men's bodies and, um, that all, you know, all these scientific studies that have been done on just men and then applied to everyone, you know, in the, in science, we're starting to understand that that's, that's just not accurate. Um, but, oh, it just feels like, I mean, it just hooks into this whole history of mistrusting women and, um, and sort of conflating women's bodies with psychosis.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Jillian Hess: Right? Yeah. Like hysteria. Particularly
Katherine May: for experiencing pain. There's, I, I wondered again if there is a sense of the gothic. in this, you know, the, you know, there's a moment when she is literally the mad woman in the attic, but she's been transformed into that by, by medical negligence and by the, the sort of incredibly harsh treatment she's given for, not [00:21:00] conforming to how pain should express itself in her body, um, but also it's this, this movement from, like, the way that she describes her experience of being in a body feels consumptive, almost, like the kind of, that kind of very Victorian, um, image of the, the thin, pale, starving, like, Amorphously unwell woman
Katherine May: Mm-Hmm. That, that we, you know, that we more commonly find in, in those gothic novels,
Jillian Hess: right. Right. Until of course she becomes very fat. And then yeah. That's a, an entirely different experience. Yes,
Katherine May: that was, I found that, I found bits of that quite affronting. Um, it, you know, so, so to tell the story a little so that [00:22:00] everyone can keep up, um, it seems from the way the book's written, she goes from being undiagnosed with endometriosis, an incredible pain to being very suddenly given a hysterectomy.
Katherine May: And she says she's kind of slipped. right down her abdomen, you know, there's, her body is kind of sort of destroyed, it feels like, and of, and her, and part of the giving up the ghost idea is, is giving up the idea of ever having children, and she's, there's another haunting that comes from that of these, these named children that she was, you know, Um, but in the wake of that, she's given, I think steroids, um, which make her put on a lot of weight very suddenly.
Katherine May: And she writes about that in quite a politically incorrect way, like quite an uncareful way. Um, But I, it felt so honest and true to me, the way she did [00:23:00] express, you know, there's no politeness coming in here. There's no sense that she ought to couch her feelings in different terms. She's telling you very directly that she was horrified by, because I, you know, I think she was quite small, like in stature as well.
Katherine May: She was horrified by this growth of her body that was so sudden and so uncontrollable and that felt like another, you know, experience of runaway flesh, almost.
Jillian Hess: Very gothic. The body turning into something other that one doesn't necessarily want or something monstrous or seemingly monstrous. Um, and I thought, I thought it was so interesting how she talked about, you know, there's, there's the internal experience, but then there's also how society reacts.
Jillian Hess: And she says something about how, how being fat changed her. Um, not because of what she was doing, but because of the way she was treated.
Katherine May: That she was expected to [00:24:00] be jolly all of a sudden and kind of more, yeah.
Jillian Hess: Yeah, right, that, you know, we can, we can, we think we have control over our identities and how we want to identify and then you walk into the world and the world has other ideas about who you are, who you should be based on how you look.
Jillian Hess: Um, and that was something I think that she described so beautifully.
Katherine May: Yeah, I, I admire it more now than I ever did before, I think, in that there seems to be something in there about aging. Although she's doing it, it ages her. She's 27, I think, when she has her hysterectomy. Um, and This, this laying on of weight immediately ages her and turns her into someone that ought to be taking on fat as an identity.
Katherine May: I think she feels that, that, you know, thinness could be perceived as neutral, but fatness can't go without comment. [00:25:00]
Jillian Hess: Um,
Katherine May: that was very interesting to me. I think that's very astute, actually. Um, even though her previous thinness was clearly very effortful and was very trained into her and was part of a feminine identity that was about building a very particular kind of body.
Katherine May: It's so interesting to see that reversal of, of the cause and effect, I suppose. Yeah.
Jillian Hess: Right. And that alien nation from one's own body that started for her so young. Yeah. She writes about how, how she was so hungry growing up because of her mother's. Her mother's diet, dieting, um, the lack of food in the house for that reason.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Jillian Hess: Yeah. I mean,
Katherine May: I, and I, I, I imagine. Most women, young women will recognize that actually this, this sort of training and [00:26:00] dieting that we receive from our mothers. Um, the very specific foods, the very specific quantities of those foods. Um, the sense that self denial is ordinary and morally correct. And
Jillian Hess: feminine.
Jillian Hess: And feminine, yeah. Yeah. It's heartbreaking the way that she just starts to disassociate from her own body and distance herself from her own body from such a young age. And part of it is that she's sure that, you know, I think at age four or five, she's sure that she's going to become a boy at some point, that she wants to become a boy.
Jillian Hess: Oh my gosh. And I, and, and, I mean, I just, I remember those feelings so well when I was younger also, as well as just the betrayal of reaching puberty. And all of a sudden being thrown into young womanhood and not being ready for it, not wanting it. [00:27:00] She writes about that in such a visceral, visceral way that was so recognizable
Katherine May: to me.
Katherine May: It's, the whole thing, the whole book is deeply visceral. It's like a, it's so intensely felt. And actually, I mean, let's think, let's move on to that childhood phase because her uh, Her sort of imagining or portrayal of her childhood self is so deeply remembered. Like the level of detail here is quite breathtaking.
Katherine May: And you get the sense of this sort of eternal being who, who was always at the level of adult consciousness. Like, is that, do we, do we believe in that as readers? Or do we feel like adult Hillary is kind of inhabiting this, [00:28:00] this young body? I, yeah. What, what was your impression of that?
Jillian Hess: I mean, how, how could, I mean, it's all memory, right?
Jillian Hess: So how, how could the adult Hillary not inhabit these memories, right? Because we can't access those childhood memories without The language that we have now, the experiences that we have now. And I think she, she admits something like that, that it's like being in a dark room that she knows, she kind of knows the perimeter of, of her childhood, but.
Jillian Hess: The specificity is missing.
Katherine May: Yeah, which, but the specificity is not missing in the writing.
Jillian Hess: Which feels like an admission, maybe, that this is, this is adult Hillary.
Katherine May: Yeah, it's another, it's another way in which she's toying with us. I mean, she clearly was a very, very bright child and clearly, um, clearly had this, this sort of, [00:29:00] I don't know, guiding sense of how life ought to be and this, and was absolutely affronted by school and the sheer indignity of it.
Katherine May: I loved that. I loved, I loved the, you know, the sort of world of school and the horrible other children, because she's pretty unforgiving of children as a, you know, as a general rule. They're pretty terrible. Like I, yeah, she, this, this kind of quite prim, very clever. very offended by everyday life, young girl, gives us this quite acerbic portrait of, of how, of young children and how they behave and what their moral system is.
Jillian Hess: Which also feels very, just feels very Dickensian, very 19th century, of just the horrors of school. [00:30:00] Which also, I mean, feels very real. And there's something about being a child where you, you don't, you don't have control over your life in the way that you do as an adult and you're forced into situations and things don't quite make sense.
Jillian Hess: that will maybe make sense later. I mean there's something really horrific about a lot of aspects of childhood really.
Katherine May: Katherine Yeah, absolutely, and that, that, that powerlessness and the lack of agency and, and, and yeah, that, that childhood sense of being able to, To see where things are going wrong, but not being able to influence them.
Katherine May: I loved the bit where the teacher strikes her and she goes, Oh, fisticuffs.
Katherine May: I, what a kid, what a kid. Honestly, I'm interested to actually ask the people that are here. Um, I know we, I know like there's always a lot of neurodivergent people in my audience. I wondered how many of you read [00:31:00] autism or neurodivergence into into young Hilary, because I certainly did. I think that, that heightened sensory world, that, um, that feeling of the world chafing against her, but also that very strong internal monologue, um, begins to appear to me to be quite powerful.
Katherine May: sort of a benchmark of, of young children's, young autistic children's in particular experience. This sense that the strong voice is there before it can be expressed out loud. And that, yeah, and of course the sort of social, Challenges of her getting up, getting with, on with other children, just, yeah, there was, there was a lot in there that I think would be read quite differently if it was published now, perhaps, perhaps.
Katherine May: Um, yeah, yeah. You're getting
Jillian Hess: a lot of 100 percent in the chat. Yeah, I mean,
Katherine May: you know, [00:32:00] these things that, you know, it's always really complicated because you, You don't want to like posthumously diagnose people, and you don't want to take away people's agency to self identify. And I'm not having read a lot of Mantel's work.
Katherine May: I'm not sure she would be all that happy with those labels, actually. Um, but that's, But I can feel lineage in that experience, for sure. That's interesting, you think that the historical novels hint at neurodivergence, Rebecca. I'd be fascinated to hear you unpicking that a bit further, that's interesting.
Katherine May: Um, yeah, so, and that leads me to think about her mother, the image of her mother.
Jillian Hess: Um,
Katherine May: another kind of ghost, I think, Okay. This presence, I'm thinking about the moment when the mother comes into school and we see her finally in contrast to other women, [00:33:00] and perhaps slightly more educated women, and she speaks to the head teacher and she's supposed to go in and get Hillary out of doing P.
Katherine May: E. but what she ends up doing is asking if they should cut all her hair off, like she, she rolls over incredibly quickly, um, and we, and we have these hints at her mother's Other life. Uh, I, I don't know. I don't know, there's a, there's a role that I felt like she served in the book there, to contrast Hilary's kind of very cerebral nature with the, the kind of slightly more, sort of, maybe slightly flighty femininity of her mother.
Katherine May: Again, not, not overstated, I'd say.
Jillian Hess: Are there different ways that there are
Katherine May: to be a woman? Yeah, yeah, definitely. There's, she just Are there
Jillian Hess: different ways that are modeled for us?
Katherine May: Yeah,
Jillian Hess: perhaps. Yeah. Yeah,
Katherine May: I [00:34:00] think so. And this, this sense of like where she's growing up in this northern town where the women are practical and sturdy and then, you know, um, and there is her mother who obviously is seeking something else.
Katherine May: Um, and who then, you know, leaves her father behind and, and there's a, uh, there's a moment where she says that her father just became a ghost. That was the end. That was the, that was the end of ever seeing him. Um, mm-Hmm. . But then her mother seems to have a bit part in her life as well. It's not just her father, like her mother kind of vanishes.
Katherine May: As Hilary's life goes on, she, there's a, there's a lack of attachment there, I would say, interestingly.
Jillian Hess: It's hard
Katherine May: to pick. I mean,
Jillian Hess: there's something, [00:35:00] I just think there's something so profound about the mother daughter relationship. I think for most of us, it's like, This figure that offers an example of what a woman could be or what one could be when one grows up, but also a very limiting image, um, in some, in some instances.
Jillian Hess: And it just, it makes me think of that. There's this wonderful line, um, where she says something like, like in middle age, she realized that her, her life is being written by others, including herself, her childhood self. But there's something about, about the people that she is surrounded with as a child that are sort of, that are writing the script as it were for her.
Jillian Hess: Um, and there, the mother becomes this, this, this, I mean, in some ways I'm like, I bet the mother has a different, has a different take on, on all of this.
Katherine May: You always want to ask that
Jillian Hess: question, don't you? Right. Right. But I mean, in [00:36:00] some ways, I mean, now Hillary is, is, is writing her mother into, into a particular existence, is writing her mother's character in a way that probably her mother wouldn't have agreed with.
Katherine May: No, but one would presume not. Actually Jenny's pointed out in the chat that her brothers don't even get names either. I
Jillian Hess: know!
Katherine May: Big main character energy coming from Hilary there. Mm
Jillian Hess: hmm. Mm hmm. It's easy to put it.
Katherine May: But yeah, there is, there is this sense of Yeah, as I said at the beginning, this sense that this is a story of becoming, you know, this is almost like Great Expectations in Hillary form, you know, this It's, I think, I like teleological, you know, it seems to all point towards an ending.
Katherine May: Um, there is no, there's never any sense that she's not going to become what she [00:37:00] becomes. Even though, as I say, even though it's before she truly became the Hilary Mantel, we're now all excited to talk about, rather than a quite an obscure literary novelist who,
Jillian Hess: you
Katherine May: know, a few of us would would have made me remembered.
Katherine May: Um,
Jillian Hess: it just, it makes me think of the opening lines of another Dickens novel of David Copperfield. If I am to be the hero of my own life, these pages will tell something like that, that, you know, she's like this little, this little upstart. Who's, you know, sort of outgrown the life that she, the world she finds herself in and
Katherine May: Yeah, yeah, she's, and of course that is, those characters are Dickens himself, aren't they?
Katherine May: You know, Pitt and David Copperfield are, um, are a representation of Dickens as this, this kid who became something that he should not have become given his, you know, His background and, and sort of treatment and yeah, maybe, maybe those [00:38:00] parallels are more explicit than, than I realized, actually. Maybe she is like a little, little Dickensian boy who pulls himself up through the levels of society and, and orients himself within this kind of disorienting world.
Jillian Hess: Maybe she does, she does say, like, I am Jane Eyre. That, you know, female writers read Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is the
Katherine May: least of it, honestly. Oh, that is neat! She's also like Kathy, and you know, she's She's all of them. Absolutely all of them. Talk to me about her language, because um, you were admiring her semicolons, I believe.
Jillian Hess: Oh, gosh. I mean, semicolons are just, It's my favorite punctuation mark, but I try not to use it because if I, I allowed myself to use the swimming phone as much as I wanna say. You'd never stop . I never stop. I know, I know, I know. I mean, it's like this weird writer thing where, where I, I [00:39:00] feel like I fall into these, these like ticks, these like writerly habits that then I, I have to, I have to take some space right now.
Jillian Hess: I'm trying to, I, I need some space from the dash. I'm . I'm just, I love the dash as well. Maybe I'll go back to the semicolon. Yes. But I mean, she, oh, there's just, there's just this way, I mean, this is maybe also of just her, her confidence in herself, where she's just like, well, this is how we're supposed to write, this is how Orwell tells us we're supposed to write, and we should be like a window pane, and we shouldn't be too visible.
Jillian Hess: Um, but forget that. I'm going to write all of these extended metaphors and I'm going to talk about my punctuation as I use it. Like, there's just this, that confidence to just be able to say, well, here is the British literary tradition and here I am. And this is, this is what I think. There's just something so, so bold, so wonderfully bold.
Jillian Hess: But also, I [00:40:00] mean, I just, the way that she uses verbs, I just, oh, it's just, gosh, I just, Yeah. I just, I just want to like, I mean, obviously I've written down so many of her sentences, but I just want to go back and figure out how she pieced them together. Um, and at some point her notes are at the Huntington in, um, in Pasadena in California.
Jillian Hess: I just found out. And so at some point I'm going to go back there. Yes. And I'm so curious. I would just love to see her line edits and the way that, the way that she thinks about constructing a sentence, cause it's clear that it's just like, Such a great joy for her. It's
Katherine May: such an act of love. She writes, I mean, she just uses very, very active verbs, doesn't she?
Katherine May: But she, she makes really unusual verb choices. There's this just lovely sense of idiosyncrasy in the, in the choices of like her [00:41:00] really active language.
Jillian Hess: Um,
Katherine May: I think, I think we English writers love a semicolon. Like I'm always having mine stripped out by my US editor.
Jillian Hess: But not your UK editor?
Katherine May: No. No, in fact, my UK is to reinstate some of my semicolons and some commas, because I think we're more comory. I think we, I think we, there's a, there's a real sense that we like to really kind of encapsulate the text to make, to really lay on the rhythm. I don't think we like to leave that open to interpretation.
Katherine May: I
Jillian Hess: think I'm a British writer then. I feel like, I love my commas. Debra just brought up in the, in the chat, this brings up something that, that we've been talking about, um, in the noted chat about the differences in the UK edition. Yes. Giving up the ghost and the difference. And [00:42:00] because there were all these, Sections that I was writing out in my US edition, um, and it wasn't the same.
Jillian Hess: And,
Katherine May: well, what does yours, let that see, let's compare the, the covers. Look,
Jillian Hess: giving up the ghosts.
Katherine May: Oh, I love that cover. Yeah. What year was that first published? I'm really curious to know. 2000.
Jillian Hess: So I looked it up, it's 2005. So it was only one year. Yeah.
Katherine May: After the UK
Jillian Hess: version. Interesting. Um, and all of, all of these sentences that I was writing out and posting to the chat, uh, readers with the UK version, they didn't have those sentences.
Jillian Hess: So,
Katherine May: so it must be, it must be very different than if, if just on a sentence by sentence level you're, even the key sentences, the jump out sentences have been changed. That's quite big.
Jillian Hess: Or it's that my taste is so very American that I picked out the parts that, that the American editors wanted to be in there and the UK editors didn't.
Jillian Hess: So fascinating. Yeah, I would, I would just, I would love, so in our, we, we [00:43:00] corresponded about this and you were telling me that Wintering is different.
Katherine May: Yeah, it is. Um, so, I mean I'll try and cut a long story short, but Wintering was. It was published in the UK, like, eight months before it was published in the US.
Katherine May: Um, and when So, uh, so my manuscripts in the UK have been finalised before the US editor even saw it. Um, and she, she's, she's just a really, I think one of, one of the, one of the key differences is that, I've got gross generalisation, I'm trying to be polite here, but UK publishing does not make a lot of time for editorial work on a manuscript, um, and so if you get one good editorial pass you'll be, you're lucky and not all books are getting that, and there's now like quite a common practice for writers to hire an external editor if they want to be edited, um, and so the, in [00:44:00] the US it seems in general there is much more time given to, to editing and to really working with the text and perfecting it.
Katherine May: Um, I think in addition to that, we are like in the UK, our interest in memoir is less mature than in the US, and we're still a little wary of it as a, I'm not, but as a, as a like publishing community, there's a wariness around memoir. When they're published, they tend to be published by journalists, and they tend to have some kind of journalistic or reporting element to sort of justify their existence, almost.
Katherine May: And so the reason I'm going through all of that is because, um, whereas my UK editor's comments were things like, you need to interview someone here, this can't just be from your experience, or, um, You need to, you need to really justify why you're doing this because it's, you know, [00:45:00] we've got to understand how you've got the right to write about that.
Katherine May: The U. S. editor, and I much prefer this version, would be like, why, her favorite, phrase that she throws at me all the time is stop the throat clearing and just get on with it. And what she means by that is all the stuff that we're, we're asked to do in the UK of like, oh, I'm doing this because, but I, you know, like, I don't want to offend anyone.
Katherine May: And I just want to make sure that everyone understands that this isn't a mental, you know, she's like, out all of that goes. Um, And that included the journalists, the more journalistic stuff, I'm not a journalist anyway, but the places where I'd interviewed people. Um, she's like, why are you doing this? It's nothing to do with it.
Katherine May: And so, um, By the time she'd finished with my book, it was a much stronger book, as far as I was concerned. And I took her manuscript back to my UK editor and said, I don't know if this time, but I think, I think this is much better. Um, and they mostly agreed, but kept [00:46:00] some stuff in that had been cut out. So, yeah.
Katherine May: That
Jillian Hess: is so fascinating.
Katherine May: Mmm. I
Jillian Hess: mean, it's just, it's so cultural. And it makes sense to me that, that America would be, I would be such a fan of the memoir. It's like,
Katherine May: It's really, yeah, it's really, there's a real respect for it. Individualism. No, no, in a good way though. There's real respect for the memoir in America that we do not have on a general level.
Katherine May: Um, and I, and, and whole, and, and on top of that, different labels on different shelves in Barnes Noble and Waterstones, you
Jillian Hess: know.
Katherine May: We, you know, yeah.
Jillian Hess: So where is, is wintering, um,
Katherine May: categorized in the UK? I find it in mind, body, spirit in the UK, where it doesn't really fit. So that would be, that's generally like, um, sort of.
Katherine May: Self help, kind of yoga, like [00:47:00] yoga, that kind of, that kind of area, um, like Deepak Chopra kind of stuff. Um, I don't know what shelf it's on in the U. S. actually, I, do you, you'd have, I think you'd have a memoir section, wouldn't you? Ah,
Jillian Hess: I'm not sure.
Katherine May: I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, Sorry, you've probably not studied the shelves as much as I have.
Katherine May: I have
Jillian Hess: not, no, no, I mean, I was just in the strand and I'm, I'm trying to remember if there's a memoir shelf. I'm, I'm, I'm, I don't know, maybe some of the listeners will know.
Katherine May: I only found, I did find Wintering in the Strand. It was in the very basement. I'm trying to think what shelf it was. I went, I was determined, I'd never seen it on a shelf anywhere.
Katherine May: And I was like three years late. Ah, and it's
Jillian Hess: in the Strand.
Katherine May: I went through the whole of the Strand, because I was like, it's got to be in here, it's massive.
Jillian Hess: That must have been exciting. Oh, I feel like, I feel like I've seen, more recently, I've seen wintering like on the centre tables of the Strand. Yeah.[00:48:00]
Jillian Hess: I'll take a picture
Katherine May: for you. I was in the summer. I was in the mid summer and so it wasn't really during the season to be looking for
Jillian Hess: it. The basement is my favourite section of the Strand. I mean, it has psychology and philosophy. And
Katherine May: a coffee bar. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, so sorry to go back to Halloween Mountain, not in my book at all.
Katherine May: Um, it's. It's complicated and really common for, um, for there to be two quite separate. edits, uh, between the U. S. and U. K.
Jillian Hess: I find that so, I mean, now, I mean, it's obviously so, it's so obvious, of course, there would be differences, because, yeah, different cultures, but, and then I wonder, well, what about other countries?
Jillian Hess: Is, you know,
Katherine May: Well, I've got a bit of an insight into that as well. So when, um, because obviously when your book's translated you, unless you're a polyglot, you, you really don't have much of a sense. Um, I, I've had a good look at the French version, you know, but even then [00:49:00] without doing like a line by line comparison, it's hard to remember.
Katherine May: Um, but the Japanese Translator wrote me this long long letter Explaining all the things she was going to cut out of my book and they were in it for everything It was like I just don't think Japanese people understand this And after I'd looked at it for a while, I thought I can't imagine what book is left Like I've just got I've no idea what Japanese wintering must have been like but it did not resemble the book I wrote.
Katherine May: And you just have to say, you have to say yes, essentially. Like you can't, what are you going to do?
Jillian Hess: What about the India version? Is there, is there, um, an
Katherine May: English? There's no, it gets published in English language in India. Um, there is an Iranian version. Um, Iran, sorry, I'm taking over this in my book. I'm
Jillian Hess: just so curious.
Katherine May: The Iranian version is hilarious because Iran does not have A copyright law. [00:50:00] And so they can just publish a book. Um, and so we got a letter from the Iranian publisher saying, Aren't we nice? We're going to ask first, but you can't stop us. So yeah, so then that, that got published. Um, and then, and then a rival publisher also published it because they can, just as many people as they like, can just take the text and put it out there.
Jillian Hess: It's weird. Yeah, there's this illusion that we're just like getting this un, we're getting Gantel's unmediated voice and there are all these editorial decisions that are, did not come from her. It's really interesting,
Katherine May: I mean editing is such a craft and a, you know, A good editor will just do so much for a book in a, in a really subtle way, you know, without ever rewriting it.
Katherine May: Although, I mean, there's another, there's another whole area to talk about another time where a lot of editors are now feeling that the process is so rushed and there's so much, [00:51:00] um, you know, commissioned work from influencers who aren't writers or from celebrities who aren't writers, etc, etc. that, uh, you know, the editors are often writing substantial parts of books.
Katherine May: And I've got a good friend who's an editor who, there was one book that she wrote, she had to rewrite so substantially because the author had lost interest in the process, that she began to get anxious that if there was any legal challenge over this, that she would be liable. So yeah, there are, The study of editing is really fascinating, sorry.
Jillian Hess: It really, really, really is. All the behind the scenes decisions.
Katherine May: But, you know, like a great editor, a relationship with a great editor is one of the best creative relationships of your life, honestly. You know, my US editor at Riverhead, Jindalyn Martin, is an extraordinary editor. She's, and she will go back through three or [00:52:00] four passes.
Katherine May: And we are both, we're really similar. We're born about 10 days apart and between, neither of us are ever satisfied. And we will bat this thing back and forwards for weeks and months and we will both love it.
Jillian Hess: That actually sounds amazing.
Katherine May: I don't know
Jillian Hess: how anyone is ever satisfied with their writing. It just, it feels like such a living thing that it could always, it could always be different.
Jillian Hess: It could always be better. It
Katherine May: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's, and actually, it's so lovely to have that conversation with another sentient person after like a year of staring at your screen typing and wrestling with your own soul like it's being edited like it's one of the sort of hallmarks of new writers is that they're often so anxious about the idea of being edited and they often see it as an affront and it's like run towards it with open arms it's [00:53:00] such A great, great, great thing.
Katherine May: If it's a good answer. Yeah. It's
Jillian Hess: a gift for anyone to care enough about your writing. Yeah. To want to help you make it better.
Katherine May: Absolutely. To drag you through that process when maybe sometimes you're a bit resistant and a bit grouchy. I'm sure none of that happens to Hilary Mantel, though.
Jillian Hess: Oh. I mean, but the amount of time that she spent working on her, on her books.
Jillian Hess: Yeah. Clearly, she. I would be surprised if she didn't have our attitude about anything. Yeah,
Katherine May: but I, that's where I get, I mean, giving up the ghost, I would say is, probably 60, 000 words, 50, 60, 000 words long, I'm guessing, probably 50, 55. Um, when you think about how fat her, her, um, novels are, her historical novels are, I, like, my books are really short because I [00:54:00] exercise sentence by sentence obsessive precision, and that, and that takes ages.
Katherine May: Um, I, I wonder what it's like to write a book of that length and, and keep the same control, like I, you know, I always say my books are short because I'm obsessed at sentence level, but she clearly is obsessed at sentence level too.
Jillian Hess: But she's also obsessed with history, and she's done so much research that, I mean, as, as someone who has done a lot of historical research, you want to put all of it in because it's all so interesting, uh, and I'm sure that There's no way that she put all the research into her novels, but, um, I mean, I think I, I heard a lecture with her talk about how she was criticized for including too much about wallpaper in one of the Will Paul novels.
Jillian Hess: I haven't cared for
Katherine May: the wallpaper in the Will Paul novels.
Jillian Hess: Yes, and she said there's not enough about wallpaper in these novels.[00:55:00]
Jillian Hess: But I think, I think there's also, oh, there's such a difference in writing about oneself versus writing about the research that one has done. And having been immersed in this time period and you want to share it all and there's so much that is just so rich. I don't know if I. I personally hate writing about myself, so when I, when I do, it's always, I edit it down to like the smallest
Katherine May: amount
Jillian Hess: possible.
Katherine May: I'm always trying to avoid it, and it always seems to come out, but I, but I do, I, I would, I would love, if she was still alive, I would love to have asked her how much she did research for the milieu that this book is set in, because it feels to me like she's done amazing quality historical research and integrated it into her own experience.
Katherine May: That would be my guess, but she might just remember very well. Like that's, that's also entirely possible.
Jillian Hess: Well, if I get to see her notes and her, and, [00:56:00] and the Huntington includes notes from this, this book, I will let you know. I'm so, I'm just, yeah, I'm so curious.
Katherine May: Yeah. Oh, well. I'm looking forward to the post in like six months time.
Katherine May: or the sequence of posts of Hillary's notes. That will be
Jillian Hess: I've, yes. I have to go to California though.
Katherine May: Oh,
Jillian Hess: well that sounds great. California's not. I know, I know. I know. I have so many friends that I've been needing to visit, and there's so many notes there that I would really love. to see. So, so maybe, yeah, yeah.
Jillian Hess: Well,
Katherine May: I, in fact, well, just before we go, we should, should tell everyone what you do, because you write a subset called Noted, which is about, it explores the notes that, that mostly writers and some artists, I think, as well, take. What an extraordinary project to work on.
Jillian Hess: Thank you. I've been, I've been obsessed with note taking my whole life, and it's been the focus of my academic work, and then Noted is, is my way of kind of breaking out [00:57:00] of the confines of academia and I'm able to now write about any author or artist or politician or scientist that I want and it doesn't have to be in the romantic period.
Jillian Hess: And so, you know, so I could research someone like Hillary Clinton. It is, it is, you know, cause academic research, understandably, I mean, it's, it has to be so rigorous and so specific that, you know, you can't, you can't have such a broad, Such a pleasure. Yeah, um, but for, for a more popular publication like Noted, it's, it's, oh my gosh, it's so fun.
Jillian Hess: Oh, how lovely. Yes, I wish this experience on every academic, just being able to say, I'm interested in this, it is not my field, but I'm going to read about it, and
Katherine May: it's a lot of fun. Open the pages and set them free! Yeah! Fly, academics, fly.
Jillian Hess: Yes, yes, yes. Well, a lot of academics have flown to Substack, so there are quite a lot of us here.
Jillian Hess: Yeah,
Katherine May: [00:58:00] wise, wise people.
Jillian Hess: Yes, yes. Well,
Katherine May: you will never get your hands on my notes, and if you did, you wouldn't be able to read them, so it would be completely pointless.
Jillian Hess: I would be able to read them. I think I read them.
Katherine May: I can't read them. Actually, perhaps I'll get you to read them back to me sometimes, because honestly, I've been going through them as I'm editing.
Katherine May: What was that? What?
Katherine May: Jillian, But I appreciate
Jillian Hess: that. I will, I will never ask for your notes.
Katherine May: You never know. I might, I might relax one day and like sell them. Let
Jillian Hess: me know. Yes. I mean, you might, you might get a printed edition of your notes.
Katherine May: It would just be a lot of shopping lists, honestly, and me moaning
Jillian Hess: about how
Katherine May: tired and cross I am.
Jillian Hess: You and Coleridge, you know,
Katherine May: you're in good company. Thank you so much. This has just been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for everyone who's here live. Thank you everyone listening later. Um, what a great show. What a book. What a
Jillian Hess: book. [00:59:00] Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. This was so much fun.
Katherine May: Um, and, and yeah, good night, everyone.
Katherine May: And I, I really, I really, really hope that, uh, that this revives a fantastic, a fantastic memoir, a classic of its form, just, just a tiny bit. All right. Good night, everyone. Thank you. And I'll see you really soon. Bye.
Show Notes
What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?’
So writes Hilary Mantel in her extraordinary memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. First published in 2003, it offers a snapshot of the great writer before the Wolf Hall era: a literary, if not commercial, success, and a fragile soul with a dark, scuttling imagination.
Katherine was joined by Jillian Hess of the brilliant Noted Substack to explore this wonderful book. They discussed the way that Mantel captures her childhood and family, her relationship to her body and the endometriosis that assailed it, the way she talks about writing, and - of course, given that it’s Halloween week - those ambiguous ghosts.
Katherine's book, Enchantment, is available now: US/CAN and UK
Links from the episode:
Jillian's Substack, Noted
Hilary Mantel’s book, Giving Up The Ghost
Join Katherine's Substack for a free reading guide, video recordings and transcripts
Find show notes and transcripts for every episode by visiting Katherine's website.
Follow Katherine on Instagram
Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Substack where you can join these conversations live!
To keep up to date with How We Live Now, follow Katherine on Instagram and Substack
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Enchantment - Available Now
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
