After Hilary Mantel passed away in 2022, her editor Nicholas Pearson gathered dozens of her nonfiction pieces into this posthumous collection. In these essays, Mantel shines, revealing much of the inner workings of her mind. As I read, I treasured every new fact or tidbit about her life. She loved newspapers, folding them as she read. She was a bit of a royal watcher, making side comments about this or that outfit the Princess Royal was wearing, or writing entire essays about Princess Diana in “The Princess Myth.”

But more than these morsels of insight, I found myself drawn to her essays about living with endometriosis. In her 2003 essay “Written on Our Bodies,” she details her experience with the disease, which caused her immense pain, infertility, and early menopause. More than that, disability made her stand out as the “most dreaded” childless woman. People treated her as seemingly “defective,” asking intrusive questions about her fertility. “If you want to know what feminism has achieved, a good measure is our attitude toward the working mother. But you should also look at how the childless woman is regarded. The biological clock is often ticking more loudly in the ears of onlookers, critics. A woman who stays childless is still an object of curiosity, misunderstanding, and dislike. People want to ask, but they can’t find a tactful way. Sometimes they forget tact and ask anyway.”

Few people truly capture what it’s like to live as a childless, chronically ill woman. Feminism declares that women have the right to choose, but what happens when disability removes that choice before you’re ready to make it? Mantel circles this question again and again, determined to raise awareness so people with endometriosis receive better care than she did. She ignored people who told her the topic was too “sensitive” or inappropriate” to talk about in polite company and kept writing about it anyway.

When I started reading this collection, I thought reading her memoir Giving Up the Ghost had prepared me to read about her chronic illness. But reading her essays about her chronic pain, dismissive doctors, and seemingly endless number of procedures hit far too close to home. I’ve had a “useless uterus” (as I like to call it) my entire life. Like Mantel, I never got to decide whether or not I wanted children, and I still spend far too many days a month on my couch with a heating pad. I rarely see this part of my life in books, but here was Hilary Mantel writing about endometriosis and infertility decades ago. Why aren’t more people talking about it in 2026? She’s a two-time Booker Prize winner. If people won’t believe her, who will they believe?

I’m not sure if Mantel viewed herself in the larger disability context, but she did advocate for other disabled people. She pushed for the broader acceptance of infertile people. She called out doctors for ignoring their patients’ chronic pain. While Mantel is best known for her fiction, to me, she will always stand out as an advocate for chronically ill people at a time when few others would. I’m not sure what it means for my reading life that I picked up A Memoir of My Former Self first, but reading about her fire for life and desire to accept her disabled body as it was will always stay with me. What a beautiful thing to carry through the year.