A look inside The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood’s new memoir
Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts reveals secrets behind some of Atwood’s most famous novels as well as moments of frustration and betrayal
The cover of Margaret Atwood’s memoir shows a close-up of the author holding a finger to her mouth, a mischievous look in her eyes, as if to suggest a riddle or two: is this a book in which secrets will be revealed, or perhaps one in which secrets are kept?
Yes, and yes.
While Atwood has discussed everything from childhood to parenthood in essays and interviews, she has otherwise been more at home with understatement than with confession.
But after years of resisting requests from her publishers to tell her story, she came to like the idea of a memoir, of sorts, about “what you remember, rather than a biography, which is a lot of things you don’t remember or would rather not remember”, she says.
Atwood writes in the introduction that she was not immune to the “lurid phosphorescent glow” of gossip and score-settling, but did not want to limit herself to “squalid moral bookkeeping”. Her book is, in part, a story of how a writer writes – and gets inspired.
