Literary Works

REMEMBERING DAME HILARY MANTEL

by Erica-Lynn Huberty

22 Sept. 2024

            On the two year anniversary of the prize-winning author’s untimely death, author and endometriosis advocate Erica-Lynn Huberty reflects on loss, dreams, and connections…

   My friendship with Hilary Mantel began with a prescient dream.  I hesitate to say it, but anyone who knew Hilary will not be surprised.  That Dame Hilary Mantel had an otherworldly quality about her has been mentioned several times since her untimely death on the 22nd of September 2022.

            But before this, I’d done what I never do with busy people I don’t know, which was to send her a gift of a sort.  The gift was a memoir-essay I’d written on my experience with endometriosis, a disease affecting millions of women that is often misdiagnosed to near-fatal consequence.  There are many iterations of the disease, but Hilary and I happened to have the same form:  Stage IV Gastrointestinal, spreading to other major organs.

            I was prompted to write her, sometime around 2009, after reading her memoir Giving Up the Ghost.  At that time, most of her works were not printed and sold here, and I’d frantically begged Dawn Hedberg, the owner of Black Cat Books on Shelter Island, to find me anything Hilary had written, because her recent novel Beyond Black was all that was available.  That novel had been gifted to me by my dear writer friend, Rosie Schaap, on my birthday the year prior, and I had read it twice over.  A nagging awareness of some undercurrent—something deeply familiar present in the text of Beyond Black—had left me a little shaken in a way I couldn’t name.  I wanted to gobble up this obscure British author’s other novels.  But Dawn was only able to find her memoir, and this turned out to be the answer to my quest.  I sat on the floor of the bookstore, reading Giving Up The Ghost in one go. 

            By half-way through the first chapter, the recognition and connection I felt was overwhelming.  Mantel deftly describes mysterious health symptoms and their terrible consequences without naming the cause, and the word endometriosis doesn’t appear until half-way through the book; which is exactly how she and I each experienced this disease (and perhaps how the publisher found it palatable to print).  But I knew, at last, what it was that connected me to her work.

            To recognize something so deeply personal, merely through someone’s wordsmithing, was indescribable.  I felt compelled to send her my own essay, which I did through her literary agency, not thinking she would ever receive it but needing to do it anyway.  Hilary did receive it, and she read it.  And read it again.  She, unlike I, was able to describe what I felt reading her work: “I feel, myself, the better understood,” she wrote me, “You capture it exactly, the stigmatization.”  In her, letter she included her home address and personal email, an extended hand reaching across the Pond.

            Back to the dream.  A year or so later, before attending a preview of Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of “Wolf Hall” in Manhattan, I dreamed that Hilary—who almost never traveled due to her health—appeared on stage in the production in that incongruous manner dreams have.  Next thing I knew, I was standing with her and her husband at the stage door while she questioned me about a novel I was, in real life, writing.  The most impressionable part of the dream was when she took my hands in both of hers in a gesture that my long-gone great-aunt and grandmother had.

            On the actual day of the performance, I sat in the first-row mezzanine at the Winter Garden Theatre with a friend and my son (he was keen to see the RSC perform, after participating in several Shakespeare residencies).  As the lights dimmed, I turned and saw we were sitting two empty seats away from Hilary and her husband, geologist Gerald McEwen.  During intermission I approached her tentatively, saying, “You don’t really know me but…”

            Her face lit up as she immediately remembered my essay.  “Erica, how wonderful to see you,” she said.  Then, exactly as in my dream, she clasped both my hands in hers, pulling me to sit next to her.  She said, “How is the novel going?  Tell me.”  I’ve rarely felt such preternatural déjà vu.

            Hilary’s hands were beautiful:  with skin like silk, nails perfectly manicured, and gemstone rings balanced on delicate digits.  Photos never did her justice, and the British press (generally horrid) loved to insinuate her “unflattering” frocks and overall “strangeness.”  In reality, she had enormous, gorgeous pale blue eyes, a lovely smile, smooth, young skin, and an air of genuine warmth.  Her appearance in photos may have been dimmed by ill-health but it was mainly, I think, due to the camera’s poor ability to capture her ethereal quality, one that belied her razor-sharp intellect.

            Hilary Mantel had for years written daringly about her life-long battle with endometriosis and her unconventional childhood, and these were the two planes we bonded on, as well as our love of pets, and of History in all its uncomfortable complexity. 

            After our meeting at “Wolf Hall” we regularly corresponded.  The play had been nominated for several Tony Awards, and she was back and forth to New York a few more times as her health had improved.  Her Cromwell Trilogy was wildly successful:  two Booker prizes, a BBC/PBS miniseries, the release of new, short stories and many essays.  The eccentric little lady writing about ghosts, psychics, Catholicism, female troubles, and one very real Irish giant, had finally been catapulted into hard-earned fame and fortune.  There was no reason on earth, in other words, that she should have kept up our connection and forged a friendship. 

            Certainly, there was no reason she should have agreed to read that novel of mine she’d inquired about.  But read it she did, giving me pages of notes on it, in addition to praising a new piece I’d written.  It was an essay in the New York Times about a dog my family adopted who, horribly, killed one of our beloved cats.  The essay was catapulted onto the Times’ Most Read list.  It also came with a certain notoriety I hadn’t before experienced, including thousands of some of the strangest, heartfelt, and menacing comments I’ve ever received.  Hilary did not hesitate to support and advise me in this new and uncomfortable situation.  “I am not surprised by the huge response to ‘The Wrong Dog,’” she said, before relating a nearly identical and heartbreaking incident she had experienced with her own dog and cat—both of whom she had loved dearly.

            And this, perhaps, was the thing about Hilary that garnered her such a devoted readership and critical esteem, but also made some critics uncomfortable:  she did not shy away from trauma, nor from its uneasy nuances.  She didn’t go in for black-and-white thinking, yet she often called-out good and evil when she recognized it for what it was.  This seemed a contradiction, certainly to her critics.  For, women are not meant to be so perceptive as to make others rethink their positions.  We are not supposed to talk about loss, violence, our bodies, interior conflict, or public politics in a manner that still leaves us whole.  It’s an afront to show how Anne Boylen had a hand in her own demise, to notice that the press love Kate Middleton only because she seems void of the vulnerable neuroses Diana couldn’t hide, to admit that many have wished Margaret Thatcher or Donald Trump dead.  We are not supposed to tell of how our wombs are ruined or stolen by pig-headed surgeons and politicians, and that the ghosts of our miscarried, aborted, or never-conceived children lurk in the sidelines of our lives.  Hilary did all this with writing so brilliant that it was impossible to criticize, even as she herself was sometimes vilified.

            Apart from being a human encyclopedia (she had studied the law at university and could retain more information than almost anyone I’ve ever known), she was very funny.  Once, as I was preparing to update and republish my endometriosis essay for the Huffington Post, I asked her if I could quote a line from her own diary of her last surgery: It’s very difficult for me not to regard my body as my enemy. But it’s the only one I’ve got.  True to her ever-sharp wit, she replied, “To save ambiguity, let's amend the last sentence to:  It’s the only body I’ve got… Because I sure as hell have more than one enemy!”  I assured her I was not one of them.

            I will miss the exchanges we had, and her unexpectedly bold but always nurturing advice:  “Do not read The North Water as you recover from surgery, I should read something more cheerful”; “It’s a great relief that you take my criticisms with such good spirit, it is the test of someone who is a proper writer”;  “Try to put yourself in your reader's place, and don't puzzle them unless you mean to”.  

            I will miss discovering the commonalities we shared which made me feel, for the first time in my life, not alone: surviving a medical condition misdiagnosed and disbelieved since childhood; surviving a mother who replaced her child’s father with a lover, changing the family’s last name to his and moving house to erase identity. 

            I know I am not the only writer who had her ear or shared her heart.  She supported and guided young authors she believed in with the same energy and shrewdness she approached her own books.  A remarkable thing, not least because she had very little energy to spare. 

            As another writer recently noted, she was—for those of us in pain—someone who was mindful of holding up a light as she moved through the dark tunnel of life, helping to lead the way.  Stepping forward without that light will be very difficult indeed.