What Margaret Atwood Would Like You to Know
“Success is never so interesting as struggle,” Willa Cather wrote. “Not even to the successful.” Would Margaret Atwood agree? She once told The New Yorker she had no plans to write a memoir, since “the parts of writers’ lives that are interesting are usually the part before they became a well-known writer.” That was in 2017, and now we have the 624-page Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, nearly half of which covers the decades when Atwood was “world famous in Canada” (to borrow Mordecai Richler’s phrase) and then, thanks largely to the dystopian phenomenon The Handmaid’s Tale, a superstar.
What changed and why? Atwood is 86 and was drawn, she tells us at the outset, to investigating the various images she’s had of herself, along with the countless others that have been projected onto her. Which one of these represents her? Is she “the ringleted, tap-dancing moppet of 1945? The crinolined, saddle-shoed rock ’n’ roller of 1955? The studious budding poet and short-story writer of 1965? The alarming female published novelist and part-time farm-runner of 1975? Or the version possibly most well-known: the bad typist beginning The Handmaid’s Tale in Berlin, finishing it in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and then publishing it, to mixed reviews, in 1985?”
Through these variations, her reputation has taken on a life of its own, beyond her control. “As the years pass, I have waxed and waned in the public view, though growing inevitably older. I have dimmed and flickered, I have blazed and shot out sparks, I have acquired saintly haloes and infernal horns. Who would not wish to explore these funhouse mirrors?” In a short story, Alice Munro, Atwood’s friend of 55 years, writes, “When you died, of course … wrong opinions were all there was left.” Atwood will leave an astonishing corpus—she is worth reading even on debt—and inevitably a share of wrong opinions and wrong facts. Who would not wish to set a great many things straight?
And there are, truly, a great many things in this book. If Atwood perfectly remembers the toilet seat she is varnishing when a film producer calls, it’s in here, along with chapters about her siblings being born and emails to her sister about why she’s writing them. It should be tedious, but it isn’t. It is something much stranger and more wayward. This is a very long book that is very ample on seemingly insignificant matters and oddly reticent on a few big ones.
Atwood spent her early years in rural northern Quebec. Her father was an entomologist who had taken his high school classes by correspondence course (there was no local school) while working in the winter logging camps. Her mother, who had a habit of sliding down school banisters and climbing in and out of dormitory windows, became a homemaker, but on the 1930s model: “Athletic ability and risk-taking weren’t considered unfeminine, resourcefulness was good, it was fine to wear slacks, lying on a sofa in a negligée eating chocolates was passé, and palship was valued.” When Atwood shows up in the third chapter, she is exactly the brainy and intrepid child one would expect from these two. At home in the outdoors, she proves equally at ease writing about it. After reading a classroom essay by Atwood on mushroom hunting, one of her teachers makes a note for another: “Truly, a remarkable piece of work! What a feeling for words and what an observant eye. Also she must surely write for the love of writing. We should give her every encouragement—tell her now that a scholarship and great satisfaction—both are within reach.”
She headed to the University of Toronto, then earned a master’s in Victorian literature at Radcliffe. While in the United States, she wed an American (the marriage lasted five years) and began publishing. Her first book of poems, The Circle Game, won the Governor General’s Award. Back in Canada, she took up with the engagé novelist Graeme Gibson, who became her life partner and the father of her only child, Jess. Book of Lives gives us their dauntingly energetic existence on a farm near Alliston, Ontario; “origin stories” for several of her novels (for The Handmaid’s Tale there are three); the showbizzy rigors of being one of the world’s few literary giants (a day after Gibson’s death in 2019, she promotes The Testaments on Late Night With Seth Meyers); and plenty of engaging minutiae.
The first third of the memoir is the best. I could read a book about just Atwood’s parents, and though no movie about her youth would be as fine as her recounting of it, someone should make one. “Other families stopped for ice-cream cones,” she once noted in a speech. “Ours stopped for infestations.” She is marvelous too on the sociology of that postwar invention the teenager, and drolly confiding on her own shortcomings: “The cinch belts were not my friends: I was short-waisted, and looked like two tomatoes, one on top of the other.”
As the book progresses, though, Atwood seems so sure of being well received that she often turns breezily ad hominem. In a discussion of a Globe and Mail profile of her by the journalist Jan Wong, Atwood tells us that the “female reporter” sympathized with the Cultural Revolution when she was a student in China and ratted out her roommate to the Red Guards. Wong was indeed a Maoist. Why is this relevant? Atwood thinks it explains Wong’s “snotty” (her word; I’d call it sassy) piece: “It’s hard for anyone to get out of the habit of betraying people, overthrowing the ruling class, or stabbing anyone you perceive as an unfairly bloated target, once they’ve had a taste of the sense of power such stabbings can confer.” Almost three decades after this profile appeared, Atwood reprimands Wong not only for writing about her gloomy kitchen, which she has never seen and “which is explicitly not gloomy,” but for inventing the “nasty fantasy” that Atwood had declined to discuss her daughter because she feared kidnappers and stalkers. Atwood and Gibson wrote to The Globe to point out, among other things, that Wong could not read minds.
(Fair enough, but Atwood does some mind-reading of her own in Book of Lives, speculating on one reason for an affair conducted by Gibson’s then-wife: Shirley Gibson “would be fifty before too long and may have begun to feel that her shelf life was limited and she’d better make as much sexual hay as she could before time ran out.” Does this sound any better coming from a feminist than it would from Mailer, Hitchens, or Updike?)
That is not the only weirdly personal attack. Earlier, Atwood writes of “a bad thing [that] happened in the publishing world.” The shuttering of a great press? A fatwa? No, we’re in the year 2000, and Atwood has received “a stinkeroo of a review” of The Blind Assassin, “written by someone who’d been a friend of Mary McCarthy’s in 1986 when she’d reviewed The Handmaid’s Tale negatively in the New York Times, and who evidently shared Mary’s disapproval of me.” What exactly is being implied here about this reviewer, the novelist and critic Thomas Mallon? (Atwood doesn’t name him, but it is not difficult to figure out.) Mallon wrote an undergraduate thesis on McCarthy, and sent it to her, and she responded with friendship. Surely friends are capable of thinking independently? And surely Mallon was doing just that when he reviewed a novel that McCarthy, dead since 1989, was not around to read? In a somewhat creepy “Booktour Comix” that she drew for her publisher and reproduces in Book of Lives, Atwood notes that McCarthy wrote that bad review “and then she died.… So does Bad Taste.”
It’s notable that Atwood spends so long dwelling on others’ criticism of her but devotes so little space to a significant relationship with another major writer. Her friendship with Alice Munro is relegated to a single paragraph. It begins with their meeting in 1969; ends with Munro’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and Nobel Prize; and along the way mentions the 2024 scandal in which we learned what Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter, had been trying for some time to tell us: that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her and Munro stood by him even after she learned of the abuse. “I knew nothing of this until the scandal broke,” Atwood writes. (Not even the rumor about Fremlin that she told The Daily Beast she’d heard after his 2013 death?) Atwood asserts that her friendship with Munro was limited to conversations about books and plays: “She was always a little cagey with me—we didn’t discuss personal subjects. Now I know why.” If Munro was cagey for the first 23 years of this friendship, it is hard to know why: Skinner did not inform her mother of Fremlin’s abuse until 1992.
Maybe the Munro scandal is still too painful for Atwood to discuss at length, and too many people caught up in it are still alive. But she is elusive on other matters that are presumably less fraught, such as the struggles, pressures, and dilemmas that come with success. “You know, I’m practically a conglomerate,” James Dickey once told a girlfriend. Atwood is too: Her acknowledgments section includes headings not just for “Film and Television” but for “Tech, Entrepreneurial, and Online Platforms.” In 2011, she met with two representatives of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. “Why,” she asked the reps, “should Rolex be interested in fiction?” She reports only her own answer: “Rolex makes watches, and watches measure Time, and Novels are about Time, and Time is the hidden primary subject of every novel. So it all made sense, more or less, or so I told myself.” Benjamin Cheever has told us of his father’s ambivalence about a 1980 Rolex advertisement; Atwood’s mixed feelings, if indeed she has them, would be worth hearing, as would her thoughts on the education of writers. “I’ve taught Creative Writing to undergraduates!” is her initial response to Rolex. “The redundant hyphens! The grocers’ apostrophes! The dangling gerunds! You can’t drag me back!” Instead, she gives us a page on her mentee, Naomi Alderman—not about her fiction but about Zombies, Run!, the app Alderman built.
Future biographers of Atwood will have much material to feast on in Book of Lives, as will the sort of congregants for whom no incident in her everyday life is unimportant. Near the end, as Atwood recalls assembling Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023, she wonders: “How did the earlier me turn out so many words, and so quickly?” I confess it’s what I’ve always wondered as I’ve read her. In Book of Lives, she writes that in the two years after giving birth, “despite my lack of writing zeal, I continued with three little projects”—three! And not so little: writing and illustrating a children’s book; publishing, under a pseudonym, a magazine comic strip; and contributing a volume to Canada’s Illustrated Heritage (“I agreed to take on the years 1815 to 1840”).
Perhaps we make far too much of writers’ productivity and lack thereof. And yet, if Book of Lives does not end up among the lasting Atwoods, I suspect the reason will be so many words, and so quickly—or, rather, her not taking the time to make it shorter.