Hilary Mantel has died, at age 70. Revisit a 2012 Profile of the author of “Wolf Hall,” who said the Man Booker Prize-winning novel unscrolled before her: “I knew from the first paragraph that this was going to be the best thing I’d ever done.”
It turned out that she had a knack for writing books so different that they could have been written by different people. She decided to follow “Every Day” with a sequel, “Vacant Possession,” but the sequel, although it involved most of the same major characters, was in some ways nearly as different from the earlier book as that had been from her first.
She was a tiny, thin, pale girl with long pale hair and large pale eyes. Her teeth jutted to a point in the middle of her mouth, as though her jaw were triangular. Her nose was a curved beak. “Out of this timorous-looking person came this really loud voice,” Gerald says. “It was a shock.” They started having drinks in pubs, talking about politics. It soon became clear that they would be spending their lives together, and they talked about what those lives would be like.
Back in England, when she was still at university, she had started feeling pains in her legs. She began vomiting, often. Then she had terrible pain in her middle. She went to see a doctor, and because she was so thin he tested her for anemia, but she wasn’t anemic, so he decided the pain must be psychological. He prescribed antidepressants. She was indeed depressed, since she wasn’t speaking to her family at the time, so she took them. When those didn’t work, he sent her to a psychiatrist.
In England, she saw various doctors. “I went into St. George’s Hospital,” she says, “and ten days later I came out minus ovaries, womb, bits of bowel, bits of bladder. Minus a future, as far as having children was concerned.” It wasn’t that she felt such a strong urge to have children—she had been married for seven years and hadn’t tried to get pregnant. She was good for more than breeding, she thought. But she’d always assumed that she’d have the chance to change her mind.
The only good thing about Saudi Arabia was that it gave her the material for a fourth novel, “Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.” The bafflement and fright that Gerald had felt in his first few days there she felt, too, and that sense only grew worse. They lived in an unappealing company flat, which she rarely left. Being a woman, she was forbidden to drive, and there was nowhere close enough to walk to.
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