I just have to say it, brilliant, brilliant Hilary Mantel interview on last night's Culture Show did you all watch it if you could ??
Perfectly pitched extracts from a selection of the books and read by Hilary Mantel interspersed with her life history accompanied by contemporaneous film footage alongside intimate and enlightening conversation.
'Trust your reader, cut each page you write by a third...'
'As soon as we learn history we should learn to be suspicious...'
' I don't ever want my readers to feel settled...I want to disconcert them...'
Talking about her transformation from pencil thin to
'..the blossoming sofa-like creature you see before you'
as she explained her weight gain through drug treatment for endometriosis and it's impact on her self image.
How the pain of a surgically-induced early menopause (at the age of twenty-seven) and subsequent childlessness was partly addressed by 'writing them into being.'
' Day to day life is boring, bland, niceness, routine, security, safety...' because her mind is so full of exciting things, and a person can only have so much of that if they want to write.
'The Man Booker prize is the ultimate recognition. once won a writer can be the writer they always meant to be...'
And now Hilary Mantel, currently writing the sequel to Wolf Hall, The Mirror and the Light, has very sensibly moved to Devon, to Budleigh Salterton, fulfilling a lifetime's wish to live by the sea, and learn from it, a place where she wants to find peace and hear her heart beating.
I could hear mine beating at the end of this incredibly moving and sincere interview, and hats off to interviewer James Runcie for his quietly sensitive, revealing and above all unobtrusive questioning.
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