A Memoir of My Former Self

"In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. ... [This memoir] collects the finest of this writing over four decades. ... She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels--revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes ... about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia"--