Just after 'Bring Up the Bodies' author Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker for 'Wolf Hall', she fell gravely ill. This is her remarkable hospital diary.
Originally published in the London Review of Books, this diary by the acclaimed author Hilary Mantel explores in forensic detail her loss of dignity, her determination, the concentration of the senses into an animalistic struggle to get through, and the attendant hallucinations she was plagued by during her stay in hospital.
With her health now improved, and the acknowledgement of the Man Booker prize-winning follow-up to 'Wolf Hall', 'Bring Up the Bodies' as one of our greatest works of fiction, 'Ink in the Blood' remains a significant testament to the traumas of illness, and one of the most incredible and haunting essays published in a very long time.
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[Three or four nights after surgery - when, in the words of the staff, I have 'mobilised' - I come out of the bathroom and spot a circus strongman squatting on my bed]***
(Fourth Estate, 15 December 2010, 22 pages, ebook, borrowed from @AmazonKindle #PrimeReading)
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Mantel is one of my favourite writers and like others I adore I'd read almost anything she wrote. I've never been seriously ill myself and have a strange fascination with those who have been. I found this book both fascinating and incredibly sad as Mantel's illness grows from bad to worse and she struggles to hold onto her sense of self. This haunted me.
