Help! I need an intelligent question to ask...

[MonkeyGoneToHeaven]

Hilary Mantel! I am going to a talk she is giving tomorrow and as DH is helping to organise, I may (please, please, please God) get to meet her. I expect we will be able to ask questions after the talk (about her new book) and if I do meet her 'properly' afterwards I would like to say something that doesn't make me look a complete lemon.

So, any suggestions for questions about her work, and also general chit chat? I'd like to ask her who in current public life she thinks most resemble Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn, but I bet she won't answer that one!

If I do meet her, I'll report back...

'if you were out with him he would know how to properly order from the wine menu, but also be able to kick the shit out of any wannabe footpad on the way home.'

Ha ha, yes. Also he wouldn't get overcharged but if they tried to he would deal with it without making an embarrassing scene.

If I manage to speak to her without too many other people there I will ask her about sexy Cromwell. I'm not asking her in front of the whole audience!

In the loos....

Quick update - HM couldn't come to the drinks party as planned due to health issues so I didn't get to meet her. Her talk was spellbinding though and she read two long-ish passages from The Mirror and the Light.

Someone in the audience (not me!) asked her with whom she most identified in WH and BUTB and she said it was a beautiful question and that she identified with all of them, except Gardiner and Thomas Howard.

The questions asked by the audience were so well-prepared and she answered so eloquently and thoughtfully that I didn't have the nerve to ask about the sexiness of Cromwell.

Oh, and she got the giggles during one of her readings and had to take a break to compose herself before she could carry on, which made me like her even more.

I also got mistaken for Rachel Cooke and someone told me they 'loved my session last night' .

Oh WHY doesn't she identify with Howard? How can she not if she's read his letters, which she MUST have done? (I know he's evil but he is also drily funny and so self-centred that he's easy peasy to get.)

Can't wait for The Mirror And The Light. Is it 2014?

I don't think HM can forgive Howard for his role in Cromwell's downfall.

TM&TL is supposed to be 2014, but HM said that she is making slow progress. She said, interestingly, that she doesn't write in a linear way - i.e. she can't say, 'I'm up to 1530' or whenever it is. Rather, she has files of papers, and scenes written, and then it all comes together in the end into a book.

There was a cameraman there filming the whole thing, so I am wondering if it might appear on her publisher's website.

That's understandable. Howard did play his part with enormous relish.

HM couldn't come to the drinks party as planned due to health issues

She probably read this thread.