4 ideas
From her late teens Mantel had severe pain, which doctors attributed to stress, ambition or mental disturbance. Later hormone and steroid treatment changed her body so much that strangers misread who she was, which added a second loss of identity to the first.
As a small child in a Derbyshire mill village, Mantel felt an invisible, formless presence near the back of her garden. She experienced it as a disturbance in the air and knew it to be evil. It filled her with dread and a lasting conviction that she had met something real. She does not explain it away as fantasy; she records it as a fact of her inner life that shaped her sense of the world from then on.
Mantel treats the children she never had, and the selves she might have become, as ghosts that stay with her rather than as abstract regrets. On this view, a life is haunted by the alternatives it cut off, and these phantoms have presence and weight. Grief for what never existed is therefore real grief, not self-indulgence.
Mantel argues that others, including doctors, family and a household that kept its secrets, wrote her early story for her. Setting it down herself is how she takes possession of it. Memoir works as an act of authority over a past you had no control over, even though memory is partial and unreliable. The unreliability does not cancel the claim to ownership.