ABSTRACT
Frédéric Regard has observed the frequency with which the act of writing seems to drive English autobiographers to present themselves to their readers as human heterotopias. The act of writing is all about constructing rival spaces at variance with the dominant geographical order. This observation certainly works as a way of characterising Hilary Mantel's goals as a life writer. This chapter considers the significance of houses in Hilary Mantel's memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. One of the joys of Mantel's memoir is the way she uses the different parts of her grandparents' house and the area surrounding it as a kind of broken mirror reflecting aspects of herself as a child. Mantel's relationship with space was closely connected with her early intuitions about gender. The child's sudden apprehension of the conflict between her parents comes to her as a vertiginous experience of space.
