I just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost, a memoir that covers her whole life from childhood to 2003, when the book was published. I didn’t discover Hilary Mantel until this year, when I read the Wolf Hall trilogy, the first volume of which was published in 2009. I was disappointed that the third volume didn’t win the Booker Prize as the first two did, but this isn’t the year for novels about Tudor England to win big literary prizes. I don’t know if Giving Up the Ghost won any prizes, but it’s pretty extraordinary.
Hilary Mantel’s parents split when she was very young, and her beautiful mother “took up,” as the expression goes, with another man. The man, who became Hilary’s stepfather, was hard-edged, masculine in the most old-fashioned sense of the word, and impatient with “little Miss Neverwell,” an unkind doctor’s description of Hilary, who was frail as a child. Her health didn’t improve as she got older, but more on that in a minute.
My parents also divorced when I was very young, and I also had a stepfather who had little patience with my weakness, my fears, my dreamy forgetfulness. It was what it was, and it couldn’t have been easy for him, either. What I remember most about that time, the time between my father and stepfather, was change and upheaval that no one bothered to explain to us children, because it wasn’t our business. We didn’t go to my grandparents’ house on holidays anymore; we went to my stepfather’s house and spent the day with his brothers and sisters. All of a sudden, people who were once my neighbors were now my aunts and uncles. I had to check in with them when I got home from school. I had to do what they said. It didn’t make any sense to me. I was not a defiant or rebellious child, but I did need things to make sense.
Hilary Mantel experienced a similar slight estrangement from her grandparents when the family moved to a nearby village to escape the censure of neighbors (her mother and stepfather were not married). Her family was different from mine and working-class poverty in the early 1960 in the north of England was much harsher than working-class poverty in 1970s Philadelphia (we had heat and indoor plumbing). But she suffered the same confusion and disorientation at the sudden change in routine, the sudden end of the easy back and forth between her house and her grandparents’ house, the shift from daily contact with her mother’s family to occasional visits, planned and formal. Like all children in these situations, the young Hilary Mantel could not understand why these relationships are not permanent, why things change that shouldn't change. But like all children in these situations, she understood perfectly that she had no say. A child has no say.
*****
When she was seven, Hilary wandered into a corner of her back garden, and saw a demon. Her account of this event is vivid, terrifying, and entirely believable. I believe it. She was convinced for some time after that she had committed a terrible sin by failing to avert her eyes in time, by seeing what “no human person was meant to see.” And she seems to accept that punishment for this sin would be entirely deserved and justified.
For a few pages, I thought that the rest of the book might be about the aftermath of the demonic encounter. But then, Hilary’s body was taken over by a different type of demon, agonizing pain that was finally diagnosed as endometriosis, but not until she suffered years of medical indifference, misdiagnosis, over-medication, weight gain, hair loss, and finally the loss of her ovaries and uterus. And that still wasn’t enough, because endometriosis can return even when the responsible organ is gone.
I’m very lucky that I have never suffered ill health. I mean, I have been sick here and there, and injured here and there, but ill health of the chronic, relentless, no-one-understands and no-one-believes-it-anyway variety is a form of misery that I have been lucky enough to escape. Depression and anxiety are both forms of chronic illness, of course, but I know that that’s what I have. I always have known. And sometimes I seek help and most of the time I don’t. But I never have to wonder what is wrong with me.
Hilary Mantel is in her late 60s, so she was a young woman in the late 1960s through early 1980s. At that time, young women were easily and carelessly dismissed as hysterical, flighty, attention-seeking, unstable, self-dramatizing...and I guess that still happens. But young women today are far less likely to put up with what Hilary Mantel endured. They’re much less likely to allow a doctor to tell them that their real pain is not real, that it’s imagined, that it’s caused by hysteria or an overactive imagination.
*****
Eventually, Hilary recovered and was restored to health, but only partially. She had been naturally and enviably thin for her whole life until the endometriosis and medications and hormonal disruption brought on by the hysterectomy and oophorectomy caused her to gain a great deal of weight very quickly.
I gain and lose the same 15 pounds over and over again. Thanks to the damn ‘rona, the 15 lost pounds have found me again, and they brought five friends. 20 pounds is not a small amount of weight. If you put 20 pounds worth of stuff in a tote bag and carry it around all day, you’ll be tired. I have personal experience with this, so trust me. But 20 pounds is also not enough weight that I look drastically different than I did six months ago. Some of my clothes are too tight now. I see the difference when I catch a side glimpse of myself in the mirror. But even though it’s not that much, I can feel it. My arms make contact with my midsection differently than when I’m thinner. My stomach is in the way when I lie on my side. It’s awkward.
It’s really more than just a few pounds, though. Getting older is very hard. In addition to the weight gain, my hair is not right, and I can’t make it right, and I can’t decide what, if anything, to do about it. I had an appointment to get it cut today, and the stylist just had to cancel. This is really just as well, because it’s never a good idea to schedule a haircut when no part of you feels right or comfortable, because the haircut will make things worse and not better. And what does my hair have to do with this anyway? Wasn’t this a book review?
*****
I never did figure out what ghost Hilary was giving up--maybe it was the demon, or her stepfather, or her once-healthy body. Maybe all three. But I’m giving up a few of my own, however reluctantly. I feel invisible. I feel alienated from myself, like my body is something I need to escape from, but it might be time to adjust and accept that this is what I look like now, and this is how I feel, and a person in her 50s can’t ever be a person in her 40s again. Invisible is not the worst thing to be, anyway. It can even be a superpower.
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