Mantel and Weldon

Fiction and autobiography

18.00, Thursday 17 December 2009
Old Anatomy Theatre, King's Building, Strand Campus

Hilary Mantel
Fay Weldon
Chair: Robert McCrum

Discussions are free and open to the public but booking is essential.
Please contact Susie Christensen to book.

Both Hilary Mantel and Fay Weldon have written major autobiographies that interrogate the autobiographical form and test the boundary between life-writing and fiction.

At the end of Mantel’s 2003 Giving up the Ghost, the writer wonders if all her subsequent fiction will be affected by this act of life-writing, which she sees as necessitating (or allowing) a more organic structure than fiction.

Fay Weldon has found that since writing her 2002 autobiography Auto da Fay, all her books have become autobiographical. In her 2004 Mantrapped she juxtaposed autobiographical scenes with fantastically unreal fictional scenes, creating a new kind of literary ‘truth’ from the collision of fantasy and reality. Her most recent novel Chalcot Crescent is written from the point of view of an unborn sister, who she posits as married to her own dead ex-husband.

For both Weldon and Mantel autobiography seems to be a form of haunting. Both their books are peopled by the life-like dead, and Mantel’s Beyond Black explored the life of a medium, who makes no distinction between the living and the dead. Associate Observer books editor Robert McCrum will ask the speakers about the relationship between autobiography and fiction, opening out the discussion to wider questions of what autobiography is/is for, where fiction becomes autobiography, and what the process of locating the self involves