Hilary Mantel is one of my favourite novelists. Although it's often best not to know much about writers you admire, I'…Hilary Mantel is one of my favourite novelists. Although it's often best not to know much about writers you admire, I'm an incurable sticky beak, so I had to read (or rather listen to) her memoir. Mantel is just a few years older than I am and I now know that we've had a number of similar life experiences. Not literary-award winning life experiences (obviously), but personal experiences that mark your life forever. So as I listened to the audiobook and reviewed my own life in the course of learning about Mantel's, I felt a kind of kinship with this brilliant, prickly, odd woman, who so often put into words what I only dimly sense. This, for example:You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines. A memoir is an interesting literary phenomenon. It's not a biography, it's not an affidavit. In writing a memoir, Mantel was under no obligation to tell all. She could choose what to disclose and what to conceal. It appears that Mantel chose to conceal quite a bit, which on one level is frustrating, but is also completely understandable. This was Mantel's story to tell, Mantel's opportunity to exorcise some demons, Mantel's …