Margaret Atwood is taking longer than usual with her grocery shopping at a local supermarket in Toronto. It’s not because the author of The Handmaid’s Tale is turning 86 this month, but because she’s carefully checking where each item comes from before adding it to her cart: California satsumas are out; Canadian potatoes are in. While Atwood is a dedicated environmentalist, right now she’s more focused on boycotting products from across the U.S. border than on calculating air miles. “Elbows up!” she exclaims, striking a defiant pose in the produce aisle.
Back in her kitchen, she pulls up a YouTube skit featuring Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and comedian Mike Myers dressed in national hockey gear to explain the meaning behind “Elbows up”—a gesture that’s becoming a symbol of Canadian resistance. “Oh, they’re angry. They’re furious,” she says, referring to the public’s reaction to President Trump’s rumored plans to make Canada the 51st state. “We don’t have a very big army. If they wanted to invade, they could. But I don’t think they would. Do they have any idea what it would be like to try to occupy a hostile Canada? It wouldn’t be a joke.” For starters, Trump would have to contend with Atwood herself.
“I get hate mail, just like everybody,” she remarks. “I don’t get as many strange sexual invitations as I used to, but I still get some.”
She believes her publishers are concerned she might pass away before her new book is released. As she says this, she carries a large tray down the stairs into her back garden—a lush, late-summer space filled with maples, linden trees, and silver birches. The tray holds two coffee pots (one decaf), a plate of biscuits, and a tin of muffins. Her publishers are trying to prevent her from overexerting herself, but it’s a losing battle. Just the week before my visit, Atwood made headlines by writing a short story in response to a proposed ban on books with “explicit sexual content” in Alberta. The proposal was later withdrawn. “The Albertans are an independent-minded bunch,” she notes.
She recently had a pacemaker fitted (hence the decaf) and is on medication that will turn her skin blue if she’s exposed to the sun. She tells me that last winter, her 88-year-old brother Harold was up on his roof with a chainsaw to remove a fallen tree. Their mother was still clearing leaves from the roof in her 80s. I mention that I hope she doesn’t go up on the roof herself, glancing up at the turrets. “Only the flat bits,” she replies quickly.
The book she’s referring to is her memoir, Book of Lives, a hefty 624 pages with shocking pink edges that match her outfit on the cover. Since 1961, Atwood has published roughly a book per year, including beloved novels like Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, the MaddAddam trilogy, and the now-classic The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments. She has worked in every genre—poetry, essays, graphic novels, even librettos—except autobiography, always maintaining that she had no interest in writing about herself.
“I’m an old-fashioned novelist. Everything in my novels came from observing the world around me,” she says. “I don’t think I have much of an inner psyche.” Two impressive water features in the garden nearly drown out her distinctive low murmur. Her speech is consistently laced with irony. “I felt so left out during the age of neurosis, when everyone was supposed to see a shrink. I went to therapy once. He was bored with me. I didn’t have anything interesting to say.”
She finally agreed to write the new book on the condition that it wouldn’t be an autobiography but “a memoir of sorts,” as the subtitle indicates. “The memoir is what you can remember,” she explains. “And what you mostly remember is catastrophes and stupid things.””Oaths and stupid things.”
Written in her chatty, no-nonsense style, the book moves through the decades, touching on the Depression, World War II, McCarthyism, JFK’s assassination, 9/11, the Iraq War, Trumpism, and the pandemic. However, this isn’t her perspective on global affairs or the issues she cares most about—women’s rights, the environment, freedom of expression, and literature. She covered those in her 2022 essay collection, “Burning Questions,” another hefty volume to which “Book of Lives” serves as a personal companion. Here, she shares the origins of her novels, repays debts, and settles scores: the college boys who spiked her drink, the writer who depicted her as a man-killing octopus (“I know who you are, or were, male person”), and the Globe journalist who criticized her kitchen as gloomy, among other things. “Mostly dead people,” she remarks now. “But as for the living, truth is an absolute defense.”
Was it as enjoyable to write as it is to read? “It was fun in parts,” she says. “But the parts where people are dying were not fun.”
The memoir spans from her childhood in the Canadian wilderness to the death of her longtime partner, writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019, giving it a novel-like arc. Gibson passed away while Atwood was in the UK promoting “The Testaments,” and she continued with the tour. Their relationship is the central love story of the book, and his death its major tragedy. “Boo-hoo,” she murmurs softly. Her recent short stories, poems, and especially the later chapters of the memoir are heart-wrenching in their portrayal of loss, but she doesn’t publicly display her grief.
The couple bought their house in 1985, now almost hidden by trees. It was previously a cult house, one of four on this typically Canadian street. The walls were covered in orange shag carpet, “so you couldn’t hear the screams,” she jokes darkly. Today, the walls are adorned with paintings, including a large portrait of Gibson by an artist friend, Atwood-related publishing memorabilia, and books organized into sections like war, witches, and Canadian history. If there’s anything cult-like, it’s the numerous gifts from fans: a knitted Atwood figure in Handmaid’s robes guarding the downstairs bathroom and a tiny handmade library of all her novels, so small they require tweezers to handle. Not all feedback is positive. “I get hate mail, just like everyone,” she says. “I don’t receive as many strange sexual invitations as I used to, but I still get some.”
The cult of Atwood, seen as a 21st-century seer and saint, has been steadily growing. In 2019, she became the first female author on the cover of Time magazine since Toni Morrison two decades prior. Her name surfaces every year during Nobel Prize season, though her popularity might work against her.
“If the U.S. were a full totalitarianism, we wouldn’t be filming ‘The Testaments’ at all. We’d be in jail, in exile, or dead.”
Having lived through a publishing era dominated by postwar male American novelists like Roth, Updike, and Bellow, followed by British authors such as Amis, McEwan, and Rushdie, there’s a certain satisfaction that a petite female writer from Toronto—a city barely on the literary map when she started—has achieved such lasting influence. “I expect it annoys a lot of people,” she says wryly. Yet she downplays her status as one of the world’s most famous authors. “First, I’m still alive,” she reminds me, “which makes me the oldest living whatnot of my generation. Second, Canadians don’t do ‘most famous.'”
If she is “screamingly famous,” as she describes in the memoir, she attributes it to “an accident of history.” “It’s because of the combination of the television series with actual political events,” she explains, referring to the 2017 Hulu adaptation.The television adaptation of her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, launched her onto the world stage. Filming began in the summer of 2016 and was still ongoing in November. “The election happened. Trump won,” she says. “Everyone involved woke up the next morning and thought, ‘We’re in a different show!’ Not because the show changed—it didn’t. Scripts stayed the same. The frame changed. Instead of thinking, ‘Oh, cute, fantasy,’ people thought, ‘Oh my God, here it comes.'”
At a time when abortion was made illegal in some states and people entering the U.S. had their phones checked for anti-Trump views, her vision of a future America as a totalitarian theocracy in The Handmaid’s Tale felt terrifyingly accurate. The red handmaid gowns became a global symbol of female protest, and phrases from the novel appeared on placards and T-shirts. “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again” became a rallying cry.
Nearly a decade after the TV series began, filming has just wrapped in Toronto on the first season of The Testaments, in which the author makes another cameo. In her first appearance, she briefly appeared as one of the aunts, slapping Elisabeth Moss fiercely. She is not allowed to reveal more about the new series. Naturally, Ann Dowd returns as Aunt Lydia.
“The States is not a totalitarianism—yet,” she says. “Though it’s moving toward a concentrated-power structure. If it were a full totalitarianism, we wouldn’t be filming The Testaments at all. We’d be in jail, in exile, or dead.”
Back in 1985, when The Handmaid’s Tale was published, the storming of the Capitol would have been unimaginable. “The wall was still up, the Cold War was still on. America was a beacon of light, freedom, democracy, you name it,” she says. “The wall came down in 1989. People thought world conflict was over. We’re just going to go shopping and we’ll all be fine. Capitalism had won. But if you destabilize a world order like that, people come in to fill the vacuum.”
She pauses to let a wasp that landed on her pastry fly away. “It’s this time of year. They’ve finished their reproductive cycle and they’ve got time on their hands,” she says before taking a bite. “Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘I am the revolution.’ Stalin, same thing. Trump, ‘America, c’est moi! Je suis America!'”
She feels sorry for the States right now. “They’re losing their world-leader status, and China is going to take over if they keep going this way,” she says. “People go, ‘Boo, Americans!’ It’s not Americans. Half of them, at least, are not at all in favor of what’s going on.”
In one of the essays in Burning Questions, Atwood recalls advice on how to escape a crocodile: zigzag. It could describe a conversation with the author, which can dart alarmingly across subjects and centuries: from Brexit (“A mistake. Guess what!”) back 8,000 years to Doggerland (when Britain was physically connected to Europe), from the French Revolution to zombies. You have to watch out for the teeth and the tail. As she admits in the memoir, she has a reputation for “eviscerating interviewers.” If she has mellowed, it’s because journalists no longer ask why she writes such miserable novels or if she should do something about her hair. You still know when you’ve asked a stupid question. “And why is that, Lisa?” she will ask in a querulous, slightly scary voice.
Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939. This historically ominous date, two and a half months after the start of World War II, shaped her worldview; the idea that power can shift quickly, devastatingly, and anywhere informs almost everything she has written.
Her father, Carl, was an entomologist, and her mother, Margaret, was a school teacher before she married. Atwood’s early years were spentGrowing up in a series of cabins in the woods of Ontario and Quebec, she and her brother Harold spent their days playing with snakes and toads. Her nickname was Peggy.
“You have no fear,” a boyfriend later remarked. This boldness, which she later applied to handling various snakes and toads, stands out in her memoir. “Not quite,” she reflects now. “I’m cautious around bears and thunderstorms, especially lightning.” Harold had a close call with a lightning strike. “In the north, those are the real fears—drowning comes a close third.”
When she was nine, her family moved to Toronto after her father took a job at the university. Her sister Ruth was born, and she started attending a formal school for the first time. Wearing hand-me-down pinafores, she was caught off guard by the complex and sneaky power dynamics among nine- and ten-year-old girls, as she describes in her memoir. It was there she met Sandra Sanders, who, four decades later, inspired the fictional bully Cordelia in her novel Cat’s Eye, often called a girls’ version of Lord of the Flies. From that experience, she learned never to fear bullies again.
Young Peggy was on track to follow her father into a biology career. But one Friday when she was 16, as she crossed the school football field, a four-line poem popped into her head. That moment sealed it—she was a poet. She still keeps a button from the dress she wore that day, living by the motto, “Never throw out anything that might be useful.”
She earned a scholarship to Harvard, where every building later found its way into The Handmaid’s Tale, including the Harvard Wall where executed bodies were displayed—a detail the college didn’t appreciate. Her first job at a market research company also made it into her debut novel, The Edible Woman, published in 1969. Everything was potential material.
Finding boyfriends was never an issue; they “just appeared, like mushrooms after the rain.” She recalls her first teenage romance—”naturally, he had a car”—the Very Nice Boyfriend from her early twenties (who’s still alive), a fleeting encounter with a poet in an Edmonton park, and a prolific Canadian nonfiction author she calls “The Ill-Omened Lover,” who wrongly saw himself as the serious writer in the relationship. He’s still around too, but she’s not naming names.
Reflecting on the casual attitudes toward relationships back then, she says, “Nobody thought much of it. It just happened. I think we probably had more fun than this generation.” In the late ’60s, she married her on-again, off-again boyfriend Jim Polk, whom she’d met at Harvard, calling it “one of the odder things to happen to both of us.”
She first met Gibson at the Governor General’s Award for poetry party in 1969. His first impression of her was “canoe trips,” and his first gift to her was a sturdy pair of work boots. At the time, both were married to other people. “In the 1970s, everybody’s marriage exploded,” she notes casually.
The next 48 years were filled with shared adventures, including renovating farmhouses.They traveled extensively, with long stays in Europe and Australia, and made yearly trips to Pelee Island in Ontario to witness the spring migration. They also initiated various writing and environmental projects, along with canoe trips. He was incredibly supportive of her writing career; a journalist once remarked, “Every writer should be married to Graeme Gibson,” a quote Atwood had printed on a T-shirt as a gift for him.
In 1976, their daughter Jess (whose first name is Eleanor, after Atwood’s middle name) was born. For the first time, Atwood didn’t start a new novel for two years, prioritizing the baby instead. She had hoped for more children, saying she would have been happy with three or four, but Gibson, who already had two sons from his first marriage, didn’t want to remarry, which was a source of frustration for her. This was particularly difficult as she was being celebrated as a feminist icon for having a child out of wedlock. She addresses these feelings through an “Inner Advice Columnist” in her memoir, who tells her to appreciate what she has and move on.
She admits it was bothersome, but they were struggling financially on two writers’ incomes at the time. Now, she considers herself a mother of three, including her stepsons, and a grandmother to three. She fondly recalls Gibson’s eldest son, Matthew, as being exceptionally devoted. Jess, an art historian, lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their nine-year-old son. They stayed with Atwood in Toronto during the lockdown, which followed Gibson’s death. Jess’s first short story collection, “The Good Eye,” is set for release next May, with a novel to follow as part of a three-book deal. Both are cautious about drawing too much attention to their relationship to avoid negative scrutiny, as Atwood has previously experienced her child being targeted in the media.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” was partly inspired by a bleak winter in 1983 spent in a fisherman’s cottage in Blakeney, Norfolk, which led her to abandon the novel she was working on. The family then moved to West Berlin, where she rented a German keyboard typewriter and finally began writing the book she had delayed because it seemed too unconventional.
A key principle for the novel was to only include atrocities that had actually occurred, drawing from events like the Pinochet regime in Chile, the stolen babies in Argentina, and the oppressive atmosphere behind the Iron Curtain. After completing the manuscript, she sent it to novelist Valerie Martin, who predicted it would be a huge financial success—a forecast that proved accurate.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” marked her first of six Booker Prize shortlist nominations. She lost in 1986 to Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils” but won in 2000 for “The Blind Assassin” and again in 2019 for “The Testaments,” sharing the prize with Bernardine Evaristo, the first Black woman to win for “Girl, Woman, Other.” Evaristo has expressed that the joint win was ideal for her.
Following the TV adaptation’s success, Atwood felt increasing pressure to act as a role model for women in all situations, with many projecting their expectations onto her. She has always resisted being cast as the ultimate authority on feminism, often questioning what true equality means.”Equality for who?” Her fiction is filled with morally questionable female characters, such as Zenia in The Robber Bride and Cordelia and Aunt Lydia.
In 2017, she sparked controversy by commenting on the case of Steven Galloway, a novelist and lecturer suspended from the University of British Columbia over sexual misconduct allegations. An internal investigation later cleared him of all but one accusation, yet he was fired anyway, Atwood notes. She viewed it as a clear instance of guilt without a trial. Galloway did admit to having an affair with a student and apologized for it.
“All I did was sign a letter asking for due process,” she explains. “Please read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which you can find online. Remember, women’s rights are part of human rights; you can’t have one without the other.”
Her stance was seen as opposing the rising #MeToo movement, which she called “a symptom of a broken legal system” in a 2018 op-ed titled “Am I a Bad Feminist?” She observes, “#MeToo is no longer the unquestionable force it once was. Now people are discussing the manosphere, which didn’t exist before but does now.”
Some feminists feel betrayed by her reluctance to take a firm side in gender culture wars. In response, she highlights that one of the most banned books in the U.S. is Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about two male penguins raising an egg. “It’s a true story. The most banned books currently are LGBTQ-related, as well as those dealing with race,” she says. “But I also faced backlash from trans activists for retweeting an article concerned about the disappearance of the word ‘woman.’ Go figure.”
She is cautious of rigid ideologies, always questioning what is true, fair, and who benefits. As a novelist, she sees it as her role to ask questions, noting she can’t be fired for her answers.
When asked if she fears being canceled or ending up on the wrong side of history, she replies, “People have been attacking me since 1972. Been there, done that, on various issues.” She corrects the notion of history having sides, saying, “It isn’t a road leading inevitably somewhere, as Marxists and their Bible-inspired teleology once claimed. Trends come and go, and no one can predict the future with absolute certainty.”
Her prophetic reputation often leads to questions about the world’s direction. “Is there hope?” has replaced “Why do you hate men?” as a common query at events. Having lived through dark times like the Cuban Missile Crisis, she usually dismisses doomsday fears, but admits, “It’s really pretty unsettled right now. World power is shifting, old certainties are fading. We’ve had unstable periods before, but we forget. This is among the scariest of times.”
She finds it foolish when people ask if she’s the same person she was in her youth. “If I were, we’d be in trouble,” she says. “Your perspective changes as time passes—how could it not? Time never stops.”
Reflecting on death, she believes that when an old person dies, “it is not a tragedy; it is the culmination of their life.” She mentions an elderly friend who has chosen medically assisted death for next month, a legal option in Canada since 2016. Gibson was diagnosed with dementia the following year and, by the end, he…He could no longer recall the names of his beloved birds. “Certainly, Graham would have done that if he hadn’t suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage,” she says.
At the end of her memoir, she writes, “I have used up my thread,” referencing the mice in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester. “No more twist.”
But this doesn’t mean no more books. “I’ve told my life up to the end of this chapter,” she clarifies. She has no plans to retire anytime soon. When asked what’s next, she simply says, “Who knows?” Then she shifts to talking about her latest Substack, which she started as a distraction after Gibson’s death and to raise funds for their Pelee Island bird center. She enjoys commenting on the world and anything else that catches her interest—highlights include a Halloween video and one of her tap-dancing in a hospital gown after getting a pacemaker. “It’s fun,” she says. How does she find the time? “I’m a writer,” she replies.
The next day, we meet for a photoshoot at her old college, Victoria, at the University of Toronto—the students’ pub, The Cat’s Eye, was named in her honor. As she walks across campus, students gasp audibly, and one boy politely asks for a selfie to send to his mom. If she were concerned about her legacy—she’s not, saying, “Other people decide that”—it’s clear she has a new generation of readers. The author cheerfully joins in a dance routine two girls are rehearsing on the lawn. A college staff member recalls a visit where a student pulled out a Sharpie and asked Atwood to sign his backside. She apparently obliged. Later, she says she can’t remember signing any bottoms, “but it sounds like the sort of thing I might do.”
She sifts through the clothes the stylist brought, reminiscent of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. “No. No. Maybe. Definitely not.” They settle on a couple of suitably gothic outfits, but she refuses to wear heels. The makeup artist mentions she has launched her own line of products, noting how hard it is to find Canadian-made cosmetics. Atwood insists on taking photos to post on Instagram, with everyone chanting, “Elbows up!”
Between shots, she sips tea in a long purple satin cloak, her sparkly trainers peeking out from underneath, looking like an off-duty Queen Elizabeth II. “I’ve had tea with the queen,” she says. “Not recently, obviously. Although I might be soon!” Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood is published by Chatto & Windus (£30). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about Margaret Atwoods discussions on standing up to Trump banned books and her memoir written in a natural conversational tone
General Beginner Questions
1 What is the main topic Margaret Atwood is discussing here
Shes talking about her experiences and views on political resistance during Donald Trumps presidency the ongoing problem of book banning and the personal stories she shares in her memoir
2 What memoir is she talking about
The memoir is called Burning Questions Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004 to 2021 Its a collection of her nonfiction writing from that period
3 What does she mean by settling old scores in her memoir
It means she uses the book to address past conflicts criticisms and disagreements shes had with people over the years finally giving her side of the story
4 Why is Margaret Atwood speaking out against Donald Trump
She views his presidency as a threat to democratic norms truth and human rights and she believes its important for artists and writers to speak out against such power
5 What does banned books mean
It refers to books that have been removed from school curricula libraries or bookstores because some people or groups object to their content ideas or themes
Deeper Advanced Questions
6 How does her novel The Handmaids Tale relate to her views on Trump
She has said that the publics renewed interest in the book during Trumps era was because people saw parallels between the fictional Gileads rise and the political rhetoric they were witnessing particularly regarding womens rights and authoritarianism
7 What are some of the old scores she settles in her memoir
She addresses criticism she received for signing a letter defending free speech in a controversial campus case as well as her complex relationship with the feminist movement and other literary figures
8 How does Atwood connect the issue of banned books to modern politics
She argues that banning books is a form of censorship and control often used to suppress marginalized voices and inconvenient ideas which is a tactic common in authoritarian regimes
9 What is her advice for people who want to stand up to authoritarianism
She emphasizes the power of paying attention speaking out and not becoming complacent She also
