Diary 
Hilary Mantel
Let us say, life changes at a glance. Let us say you’re walking forward, you turn your head to look over your shoulder, and behind you the landscape has changed. One life, a life you might have led, is snatched back into the shadows. A different life begins.
This is the day I meet my stepfather; it is the day he meets me. I must not take for granted that you know the topography. You have not seen with your own eyes the long snaking road, nor the hedge on one side, behind which the land rises, nor the wall on the other side, beyond which the land falls away. I am four now. I don’t go to school yet. I am small. I wear a bonnet. And everything about me is as sweet as sweety-pie. My head is slightly too big for my body. The inside of it is bulging with knowledge.
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Other articles by this contributor:
The Real Price of Everything · The Many Lives of Elizabeth Marsh
Is it still yesterday? · Children of the Revolution
Saartjie Baartman’s Ghost · The New Apartheid
The Shape of Absence · The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Giving up the Ghost · My Life as a Boy
Some girls want out · spectacular saintliness
Frocks and Shocks · Jane Boleyn
That Wilting Flower · The Lure of the Unexplained
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