“When I was writing this memoir and my early readers were reading it,” Margaret Atwood says about two-thirds of the way into Book of Lives, “one of them kept asking: ‘But how famous were you then?’ ‘And what about then?’” The finished version brooks no such uncertainty. In 1976, with three novels and nine poetry collections to her name, Atwood was “a little famous”. Nine years later, after the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale – her bestselling novel about gender apartheid and sexual servitude in a near-future American theocracy – she became “kinda famous outside literary circles”, although “the idea that The Handmaid’s Tale skyrocketed me to international stardom is false”. A time eventually came when she was “screamingly famous” – but here the chronology is less precise.
Perhaps she’s talking about 2017, when Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House brought long-established reproductive rights back into question: The Handmaid’s Tale (with the help of a multi-award-winning TV adaptation) returned to bestseller lists, and for a while Atwood enjoyed (or endured) the status of an oracle. In recent years she has appeared as a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers and been name-checked on The Simpsons; her image has graced postage stamps, tote bags and the cover of Time. Even so, “I was not in the league of Elizabeth Taylor.” It seems unlikely that anyone imagined she was.
A more obvious comparison would be with Salman Rushdie, another distinguished novelist who moonlights as a celebrity – but Atwood’s output has been more consistently interesting than his. She has won the Booker Prize twice (for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and for The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, in 2019) and is perennially named as a leading candidate for the Nobel. The publicity material for Book of Lives refers to her as “our greatest storyteller”, which isn’t an outlandish claim, if the qualities you value most in a story are imagination, formal ingenuity and the vivid dramatisation of ideas. If you place greater emphasis on, say, forceful characterisation or a dynamic prose style, it’s more of a stretch.
Book of Lives begins with Atwood’s birth in 1939 and ends with the publication last year of Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2023. The early chapters describe something of a Thoreauvian idyll. Her father was an entomologist, whose research meant that the family split their time between Toronto and remote corners of Ottawa and Quebec. Atwood spent much of her early childhood exploring the backwoods and playing “military and adventurous” games with her older brother – “the ways of girls were alien to me,” she writes.
The great formative trauma, as she tells it, was a period when she was bullied at school between the ages of nine and ten. The perpetrators, whom she thought of as her friends, would list her deficiencies (“I walked funny, I talked funny… I looked funny”) and propose correctives (“I must be left in the snow, I must be buried in a hole, I must be reprimanded and ordered not to smirk”). Atwood attributes this early acquaintance with “gaslighting” to her choice of career. “You might become a detective. You might become a con artist yourself. Or, a blend of the two: you might become a novelist.” The experience forms the plot of Cat’s Eye (1988), her most autobiographical novel.
In 1957, Atwood entered the University of Toronto, where she was taught by the critic Northrop Frye, one of the few Canadian literary figures of an earlier generation with a serious international reputation. He had just published his Anatomy of Criticism, which divides all literature into five “modes”, with myth at the top and realist fiction – or the “low mimetic” – second from the bottom. Atwood barely mentions him here, and elsewhere she has denied that he had any meaningful impact on her artistic development and has ridiculed the notion that “he exerted some odd Svengali-like influence on young writers, taking their putty-like minds and running them through the Play-Doh machine of his ‘system’ until they came out moulded”. It’s a strange way of framing an entirely uncontroversial model of the pedagogical relationship (since when did a teacher have to be “Svengali-like” to inspire his students and shape their ideas?).
The mode in which Book of Lives is written is, in Frye’s terms, high mimetic comedy – in which a protagonist of superior birth or ability conquers their environment by sheer force of will. Atwood situates herself as the hero of her story, surmounting every challenge, drawing strength and wisdom from every misfortune. She appends little morals to her experiences – “Be careful what you destroy. In parallel, be careful what messages you leave behind” – apparently viewing them as exemplary. She quotes wildly flattering things other people have said about her (“Her mind sure as hell moves on a different level of sensitivity than mine”) without the slightest flicker of irony or performance of demurral. She quotes things she once said (“People expect writers and artists to be dysfunctional”) with little murmurs of approval (“so true”). She never knowingly accepts fault or paints herself in a bad light. In relation to the woman whom her second husband, the novelist Graeme Gibson, abandoned for her, she assures us that “I was not the home-wrecker that Shirley made me out to be” – as if that were ultimately her call to make. It’s all a long way from the confessional mode of autobiographical writing pioneered by Rousseau.
Atwood writes touchingly about Gibson, with whom she appears to have been very happy, and the pages that chronicle his decline and death (from vascular dementia) are by some distance the most powerful in the book. She also provides moving glimpses into her relationships with her parents, her siblings and her daughter. If Book of Lives confined itself to personal matters, these moments of tenderness might compensate for the self-satisfaction on display elsewhere. Much of it, however, is concerned with matters of public record, and Atwood’s habit of rewriting them to her and Gibson’s credit (and/or to others’ discredit) becomes increasingly hard to ignore.
For example, she claims that Gibson, in his role as president of Pen Canada, was “the only Canadian leader to speak in public” about the Rushdie affair (in fact the prime minister, Brian Mulroney, made a statement condemning the fatwa a few weeks after it was issued). She says that when The Handmaid’s Tale was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986, “it was rare for a woman to be nominated, much less a Canadian one” (she was actually the 14th woman and the second one from Canada to be shortlisted since 1980). When Alias Grace was shortlisted ten years later, she says that Carmen Callil, the chair of the judges, “announced in her speech that we’d had enough of colonials and the Celtic fringe, and that it was time for an English man to win” (of course Callil, an Australian national and ardent feminist, said no such thing – her speech, which is available on YouTube, is perfectly even-handed and entirely bland). At another point she calls Callil a “formidable Australian-Portuguese toughie” (she was of Lebanese and English parentage and had no significant connection to Portugal). Even if Atwood didn’t think it was worth checking these last two facts, you’d have thought that her editors at Chatto & Windus, where Callil was managing director for 12 years, might have found the time.
There is at least one area where Atwood seems to have perfect recall: the occasions when she has been slighted. In a book ranging across her entire life, she finds time to settle scores with sceptical reviewers of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, as well as with Margaret Wente (a columnist at the Globe and Mail who reported in 2002 that Atwood had called George W Bush “a thug” – for which Atwood got her lawyers involved, resulting in the paper publishing a full retraction) and Jan Wong (the author of a profile in the Globe and Mail who used the name of Atwood’s daughter in the same paragraph as the words “stalkers and kidnappers” – Atwood threatened another letter from her lawyers). There are police databases that it’s easier to get your name expunged from than Atwood’s shit-list. The poet Dorothy Livesay, who died in 1996, is included for her tendency “to jealously dislike me and undercut me… a project she continued all her life”. What vile measures did this project involve? The only details provided are that Livesay once offered Atwood’s first husband “a non-verbal sexual invitation” (whatever that means) and on another occasion encouraged Gibson to kiss her hand.
A form of cognitive dissonance seems to be at play here. Atwood acknowledges (or boasts) that after The Handmaid’s Tale she came to be viewed “as a combination of figurehead, prophet and saint”, but it doesn’t seem to cross her mind that when she uses her pulpit to name and shame a journalist who once wrote disobliging things about her, she might be punching down. Discussing Thomas Mallon’s New York Times review of The Blind Assassin, which according to her said that she should be ashamed of herself (it didn’t), she gives the game away: “I’m not very good at being ashamed of myself, having survived that particular acid bath back in 1949 with the nasty preteens.” In one part of her mind, she’s Margaret Atwood, the most famous writer that Canada has ever produced. In another, she’s still nine years old, and the bullies won’t leave her alone.
Edmund Gordon is the author of “The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography” (Vintage)
Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts
Margaret Atwood
Chatto & Windus, 588pp, £30
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[Further reading: David Szalay’s Flesh wins the Booker Prize]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear