LEARNING TO TALK

Reflections on an enigmatic childhood.

In seven deftly crafted stories that she calls “autoscopic” rather than autobiographical, two-time Man Booker Prize winner Mantel takes a “distant, elevated perspective” on her life growing up in the English Midlands region. Organized chronologically, most of the stories are narrated by a woman evolving an increasingly astute perception of her own reality and the truths obscured by family myths and lies. “All the tales arose out of questions I asked myself about my early years,” Mantel writes in her preface. “I cannot say that by sliding my life into a fictional form I was solving puzzles—but at least I was pushing the pieces about.” They read, then, as lightly fictionalized memoir. In fact, the last story, “Giving Up the Ghost,” acknowledges the author's memoir of the same title, published in 2003. Mantel’s family situation was peculiar: When she was about 7, her mother moved her lover into the house that she shared with her husband. For the next four years, Mantel lived with two fathers, aware of gossip about her mother’s scandalous behavior. Finally, her father left. In “Curved Is the Line of Beauty,” the lover is called Jack, with “sunburned skin and muscles beneath his shirt. He was your definition of a man, if a man was what caused alarm and shattered the peace.” Growing up was hardly peaceful: In “Learning To Talk” (“true save one or two real-life details”), the 13-year-old narrator is sent for elocution lessons, her provincial accent seen as a liability: “People were not supposed to worry about their accents, but they did worry, and tried to adapt their voices—otherwise they found themselves treated with a conscious cheeriness, as if they were bereaved or slightly deformed.” Mantel’s narrators are melancholy or resentful, misunderstood or ignored, vulnerable and cynical. “Mercy,” one observes, “was a theory that I had not seen in operation.”

Sharp, unsentimental tales from a writer haunted by her past.