Why is Atwood turning an eye to her own life after all this time? “My publishers made me do it,” she quipped to Vogue in an interview about the new book. Yeah, even at 85, she’s absolutely still got it.
Elaborating on the joke, she explained: “When they first proposed it, I said, ‘Oh, that would be so boring.’ I mean, I wrote a book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book…Who’s going to read that?” (She famously wrote 17, not to mention 19 books of poetry, 11 nonfiction works, nine short story collections, eight children’s books, and three graphic novels, so the answer is almost surely “a lot of people.”) She changed her mind when her publishers suggested writing “in a literary style,” she continued. “Simply, a memoir is what you remember, and what you mostly remember—if you think of your own life—is stupid things and catastrophes. It’s not: ‘I went for a walk. I had a lovely dinner. Here’s a picture of my food.’ I thought of my own life, the stupid and the big, and how all of that affected the writing of the books.”
Despite focusing on the dark plight of women under authoritarian societies in novels like Oryx And Crake and The Testaments (in addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, of course), Atwood is keeping her memoir light. She describes herself as “a very cheerful person… which surprises a lot of people… So I would rather write about silly things. Stuff we did that, I suppose, you could call capers, or fun-raisers!” Besides, the current Handmaid’s Tale parallels are a lot to process. “We have this same, sad framework again: instead of fantasy, it’s reality,” she said. “I don’t think there will be outfits, but the rest of it… It’s too creepy.”
