Margaret Atwood has decided to finally meet her many “body doubles”. No, Atwood doesn’t have literal stand-ins for her appearances, but she does have some shadowy figures tied to her writing output. As she says herself, “Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes”.
There is, for example, the double that produces her masterful fiction, taking creative risks Atwood is too fearful of taking herself. There is also the Doppelgänger readers imagine of the author Margaret Atwood, with some seeing “saintly haloes” and others “infernal horns”.
In Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, the Booker Prize-winner marries a lifetime of unconventional living with her own writing alter egos. The capacious memoir – or “literary memoir,” as publishing people ask her to call it – captures pivotal moments from the 85-year-old’s long life to glean their influence on her 18 novels (not to mention 18 books of poetry). And with so much prose, from The Handmaid’s Tale to The Blind Assassin, there are many moments to account for.
The author’s early years were nomadic, spent deep in Canada’s wild forests, exploring the woods with her science-minded parents (one an entomologist, the other a dietitian). Despite the family passion for science, poetry was an obsession for the bookish and precocious girl. Countless poems were penned in her salad days before a “burning desire” to write a novel emerged just as adulthood arrived. (Atwood is, however, grateful that Up in the Air So Blue never made it to the printers.)
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During her time as a grad student at Harvard, Atwood received an important lesson about the United States that would plant the seeds for The Handmaid’s Tale. Her professor of American literature stressed to the Canadian that the United States, ever since its founding, was “not always the enlightened home of democracy”. Its making was one where its subjugation of women and intolerance for other societies, such as Native Americans and Quakers, ran deep.
Even Harvard itself would provide some inspiration – architecturally, that is. The Commander’s house and the headquarters of the secret service, the Eyes, were modelled on buildings Atwood encountered on her daily walks. So similar were the references that Harvard was “not amused” when The Handmaid’s Tale was first published, even having its magazine give it a “sniffy review”.
But it was living in West Berlin two decades later that solidified her idea for the novel, seeing totalitarianism totally besiege one society up close.
However, it was Atwood’s debut, The Edible Woman, that first captured the author’s fermenting feminist beliefs that would later fuel her best fiction. The 1969 novel, about a newly married woman who gradually refuses to eat, was not born out of early feminist classics such as The Feminine Mystique. It was reading media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s cultural study The Mechanical Bride, which examined adverts in mass culture, that sparked her political impetus. “A belated thank you to him for the robotic girdle ad, for the the women dreaming of superpowers,” she writes.
The term “feminism” itself has remained a loaded term to Atwood, who has resisted applying the label to her fiction, instead preferring “social realism”. Even so, her early portrait of a starving woman who bakes a cake in her image – so her husband may eat it – carried a forceful message on disillusionment and the loss of self wrought from modern womanhood.
Reassessments such as these, grappling with the “subterranean rumblings” of feminist politics in her early novels, form a rich exegesis in Book of Lives, illuminating the making of Atwood’s work. The biographer in her, however, does sense sometimes becoming too scholarly, so enjoys indulging in self-deprecation and levity. For example, in the wake of widespread panic over the “Boston Strangler” terrorising Boston in the 1960s, Atwood admits to vainly taking up judo classes: “because forewarned is forearmed”.
Beyond fiction and poetry have been decades of activism (for women’s rights and climate change), many passions (cooking is a favourite) and loving companionship (to fellow novelist Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019). For eager fans, Atwood is also candid in revealing autobiographical details about Cat’s Eye, namely the mean girl who inspired the character Cordelia. (Teary-eyed readers often approach her at book signings to share the emotional impact of this novel.)
With humour and exuberance, Book of Lives charts the remarkable life story of one daring author who looks back on her career with awe and humility, realising how much living and influence she has indeed accomplished. In all, Atwood renders a captivating portrait of personal history, one ultimately enlivened by its wisdom on the art of fiction from one master storyteller.
- Nathan Smith is a books and culture writer
