‘This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published. Trust your reader, stop spoon-feeding your reader, stop patronising your reader, give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least, and stop being so bloody beguiling: you in the back row, will you turn off that charm! Plain words on plain paper.’ – Writing advice from Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost.
2026 has got off to a busy start at Slightly Foxed HQ. We’ve been putting together future issues and editions, brainstorming forthcoming podcast episodes and are (tentatively) looking forward to the spring quarter and brighter weather ahead.
We are also delighted to announce that we are launching a new Slightly Foxed Writers’ Competition for our subscribers (details can be found at the bottom of this page). You may or may not wish to take on Mantel’s writing advice – as we learn, she ultimately fails to do so: ‘But do I take my own advice? Not a bit.’ – nevertheless, we thought it suitable to share an extract from the opening of her memoir Giving up the Ghost for some entertainment this Friday afternoon. We do hope you enjoy it. And who knows – perhaps it will spark some inspiration.
When Dame Hilary Mantel died, many readers of her novels learned more about her life and her heroic struggle with endometriosis from which she suffered for many years without a diagnosis. Nowhere is this more vividly or more movingly described than in her own powerful and haunting memoir, Giving up the Ghost. Far from being a misery memoir, it is a compulsively readable and ultimately optimistic account of what made Hilary Mantel the writer she became, full of courage, insight and wry humour.
Please scroll on to read the extract, peruse a selection of SF titles that explore the theme of literary life and find out more about the Writers’ Competition.
With best wishes from the SF staff
Isabel, Rebecca, Edie, Ruth & Jennie
Leave a comment