"I always vote for baffled." --Hilary Mantel

I'm discovering a recurring feature of aging: feeling a personal loss at the death of public figures.  (Philip Seymour Hoffman's death was the first one I felt really personally.)

Another one, now:
Hilary Mantel. Nooooooooo!
Yes, she died of a stroke on September 22. She was seventy, nine years older than me.  Mantel's obit in the Economist, "The ghosts within: Hilary Mantel saw things that others couldn’t". * (I think you have to register (free) to read it.)

Picture ^ from the 2013 video "Hilary Mantel and Fay Weldon in conversation..." (youTube). I enjoyed the whole 53 minutes.
Here's Hilary Mantel, on a problem of historical drama on film:

"Empty gorgeousness.

It's complete nonsense. Looks beautiful. But it's too easy."

And, on the problem of "exposition---one character telling another what they already know":

"If you have to have an audience spoon fed or baffled,
. . . I always vote for baffled.
Give people the credit for being able to work things out. If not immediately, then when they think about it later."

Worth watching the whole thing, for how smart and funny she is––and generous (believing that if readers or viewers are baffled, we will "think about it later").
But not suffering fools...
See, at minute 43, her response to a man's snide comment disguised as a question--why does she turn thugs like Danton and Cromwell into likable people? Here: youtu.be/NXMHruJvI94?t=2565

Oh--I have an index tab for Hilary Mantel, (I'm so glad I tagged blog posts from the beginning--I really do use the index), and looking at the posts where I mention her, I see a post about blogging --and other things--from five summers ago (2017).
I'd probably answer much the same, but I'd like to take some time (later) to answer again that age-old question, Why do you write (blog)?

Mantel became big-time famous with her Wolf Hall trilogy––have you read it?––but I'd stumbled on her early novel Fludd years ago, and it's been one of my favorites.
Just recently I'd pulled it out to reread--it's on my bedside table.
It's about a very young woman thrown into her own life, like an aerealist. It leaves her just as she's grabbing onto the other swing. Not so relevant to me anymore, but I want to reread it again, especially now.

First, though, I'm in the middle of A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War. I picked it up from work because I recently saw the movie Tolkein, about JRR's early years, including being a soldier in WWI. Not a great movie, but it made me interested in knowing more about his war.

It's a weak book, though. Its agenda––to show how Christian the stories of Tolkein  are (and C. S. Lewis's--now there's a spoon-feeder)––dominates and distorts. It has none of the subtle, sometimes baffling intelligence of Hilary Mantel.
I'll finish it though, for the bits that show what happened, when.

Much better on WWI & literature: The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell (1975, Oxford University Press). No Tolkein.
________
*From the Economist's obit of Mantel:

"She wrote his [Cromwell's] death, in several drafts, when she had not yet finished Wolf Hall: choosing the bloodiest account of his end, three strokes of the axe, so that she could follow his consciousness to the last.
The time to write that scene announced itself when she suddenly began to cry at the checkout in Sainsbury’s: a premonition."

P.S. I never knew how to pronounce her last name: it's Man-TELL