What Margaret Atwood Would Like You to Know

Perhaps the Munro scandal is still too painful for Atwood to talk about at length, and too many people involved in it are still alive. But she remains elusive on other topics that are arguably less delicate, like the struggles, pressures and dilemmas that accompany success. “You know, I’m practically a conglomerate,” James Dickey once told a girlfriend. So is Atwood: her acknowledgments section includes titles not only for “Movies and Television” but also for “Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Online Platforms.” In 2011, she met with two representatives from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. “Why,” she asked the representatives, “should Rolex be interested in fiction?” She only reports her own response: “Rolex makes watches, and watches measure time, and novels are about time, and time is the main hidden subject of every novel. So it all made sense, more or less, or so I told myself.” Benjamin Cheever told us about his father’s ambivalence about a 1980 Rolex ad; Atwood’s mixed feelings, if any, deserve to be heard, as do her thoughts on the education of writers. “I taught creative writing to undergraduates!” » is his first response to Rolex. “Redundant hyphens! Grocer apostrophes! Dangling gerunds! You can’t take me back!” Instead, she gives us a page on her mentee, Naomi Alderman, not on her fiction but on Zombies, run!, the application created by Alderman.

Future Atwood biographers will have plenty to feast on Book of Livesjust like the kind of devotee for whom no incident in his daily life is unimportant. Towards the end, as Atwood remembers putting together Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2023she asks herself: “How could I say so many words, and so quickly, earlier? » I admit that this is what I always asked myself when reading it. In Book of lives, she writes that in the two years after giving birth, “despite my lack of zeal for writing, I continued with three small projects” – three! And not so little: write and illustrate a children’s book; publishing, under a pseudonym, of a magazine comic strip; and contribute to a volume to Canada’s Illustrated Heritage (“I agreed to take charge of the years 1815 to 1840”).

Perhaps we place far too much emphasis on the productivity and lack of productivity of writers. And yet, if Book of Lives doesn’t end up among the enduring Atwoods, I suspect the reason will be so many words and so quickly– or rather, that she doesn’t take the time to shorten it.