In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the many themes that feed into her novels --- revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia.