“She writes like a man,” a fellow poet said of Margaret Atwood in the early 1970s, intending a compliment. “You forgot the punctuation,” she told him. “What you meant was, ‘She writes. Like a man.’”
I read Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts while also listening to the audiobook, which Atwood reads herself. I listened on walks and in the car, then went back to the text. On the page, the writing is controlled and precise. In her voice, it’s drier and funnier. Reading and listening together reinforces what the memoir makes clear throughout — there is more than one Atwood here. The one who lived. The one who wrote. And the one who now reads what she chose to remember.
Atwood sets out explicitly to avoid what she calls the “dead boring” version of a literary memoir: “I wrote a book, then I wrote another book, then another.” Given that her bibliography runs to more than 50 titles across fiction, poetry, essays, children’s books and graphic novels, such an inventory would be long and lethal. Instead, she writes about how stories happen and what real life leaks into them.
“What you remember is usually silly things you did, evil things other people did to you. You don’t remember so much the evil things you did to other people. You remember catastrophes and exceptional high points. I concentrated on the things that were memorable to me. And that was fun.”
What fun indeed.
Atwood was born in 1939, the middle child of entomologist Carl Edmund Atwood and dietitian Margaret Dorothy Killam, both of whom she describes as “big storytellers”. She grew up partly in Toronto and partly in the Canadian wilderness, where her father spent six months of the year doing field research.
“Everybody’s childhood seems normal to them because they’ve got nothing to compare it with,” she writes. “It was just normal life. Up in the woods, no electricity, no running water, no flush toilets. Things were done differently. Kerosene lamps, wood-burning stoves. That was very useful to me when I came to write about the nineteenth century, because that’s how everyone was living then.”
There was nothing else to do. No television, no theatres, no school. That wasn’t always bad, she says. “School in the forties was line up and march. It was still the war. Boys’ door, girls’ door. What would happen if you went in the wrong door? Too horrifying even to think about. So it was freer. If we did our school lessons quickly, we could go out and do whatever we wanted. Which has made me a very superficial person.”
Atwood started writing very young. Her first opus was a book of poems she wrote and illustrated in grade 1 called Rhyming Cats. Why cats? “I was obsessed with them. But I wasn’t allowed to have one, because if you took the cat up to the woods, it would escape and be eaten by something. I did eventually get one. I was extremely bonded. It brought dead birds to the window, sometimes semi-dead birds, and on one memorable occasion, a rabbit. It did like me, even though I dressed it up in a bonnet.”
In high school, she showed her teacher, Miss Bessie Billings, one of her indecipherable, Byronic, dark, Gothic poems. She said, “I don’t understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.” After she died, someone found a note she’d written to the other English teachers and sent it to Atwood. “I didn’t know until much later that she’d been looking out for me and thought I should be encouraged. She told me to go to Victoria College because it had the best English department. In those days, universities didn’t hire women much. Victoria did. A lot of very qualified women who should have been teaching at university were teaching high school, and we benefited from that.”
When she told her parents she wanted to be a writer, they were horrified. “My mother said, ‘If you’re going to be a writer, you’d better learn to spell.’” They invited a second cousin who was a journalist to dinner. He said that if she worked for a newspaper as a woman, she’d end up writing obituaries and the ladies’ pages. That would be it. “I thought, maybe I should go to university after all.”
There wasn’t much of a literary scene in Canada in the 1950s. Atwood writes that Canadians didn’t respect writing, especially Canadian writing. She was told to go to England, New York or Paris. She stayed because the Canada Council for the Arts started up in 1957. “People my age stayed too. Some started literary magazines. Some started small presses. I got involved with one of those.”
When The Edible Woman came out, a male radio journalist said, “I haven’t read your book. Tell me about it in 25 words or less.” Her first professional book signing was in the men’s sock and underwear department of the Hudson’s Bay Company. “Why there? My only explanation is that it was near the escalator. Men came in on their lunch breaks to buy socks, took one look at me sitting there with my little table of The Edible Woman among the jockey shorts, and galloped away."
Her partner, Graeme Gibson, was part of Canada’s early literary scene. “It was the Milton Acorn People’s Poets Prize, which Milton invented for himself. Graeme was there. I’d read his book and said I thought he should have won. I wasn’t flirting. It was just a statement.” She later read his palm. Everybody asks her about it, she says. “I don’t do it professionally. I don’t charge.”
One of the striking things in Book of Lives is how clearly people from her life appear in her fiction. “As Robertson Davies said when asked why he started writing novels at 60: ‘People died.’
“I’m eighty-five. A lot of people have died. I can say things now without destroying someone’s life.” About those who are alive, and whom she names, she mostly says nice things. Of some, however, she’s unsparing. “I don’t have a choice. I’m a Scorpio. We hold grudges. It’s not an attractive thing to say about yourself. I struggle against it, but not very hard.”
She describes a night when she blacked out at a party after her drink was spiked. She woke up in the basement being groped on a couch. “I know your names, but won’t mention them here because it was a long time ago and anyway you are probably dead,” she writes.
Dystopian prescience
On her dystopian prescience, she says if she’d told her publishers in 1984 that she was writing about the US as a theocratic dictatorship, they’d have thought she was bonkers. The Handmaid’s Tale sold well, but it was not an instant mass-market phenomenon. Then came Ronald Reagan’s administration, the end of the Cold War, the evangelical right, 9/11. With Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the book became a cultural flashpoint as people tried to make sense of real-world battles over reproductive rights, religion, state power and authoritarianism.
The final chapters of Book of Lives focus on the long decline and death of Gibson, a novelist and central figure in Canada’s literary life, and Atwood’s partner of more than four decades. The distance created by death allowed her to write not just about love and loss, but about resentment, loyalty, boredom, tenderness and endurance. Gibson is present in the text as he was — complicated, admired, loved, and then gone. He died in 2019 after a cerebral haemorrhage, following years of dementia.
Writing about the slow, disorientating and relentless progress of the disease, she says, offered no relief. Sadness, for Atwood, is not something to be processed or overcome. She later wrote about grief in Old Babes in the Woods, describing the strange persistence of presence — the feeling that he was still in the next room.
As Gibson’s condition worsened, and after his death, she kept working. When The Testaments was published, she continued with the international book tour rather than return to an empty house. In interviews at the time, she described moving through events in a daze, appearing focused while feeling detached. “It’s easier to keep going than to stop.” Work continues to structure her days.
Book of Lives is an unsentimental triumph. Atwood writes plainly about what happened because it is an obligation to the reader. Ageing itself is treated with the same refusal to console. There are no lessons, no attempt to universalise the experience. Time passes, bodies fail, people die.
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