Book of Lives, Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s dedication to truth-telling feels much needed in today’s era of censorship and attacks on human and environmental rights. Her body of work is an example of how to use high-intelligence in the service of critical thinking, how to speak out against tyranny in creative ways, and and how writing can be an act of resistance.  

Atwood’s 2025 memoir Book of Lives contains a description of being at an author event where a male audience member told Atwood that her 1984 book The Handmaid’s Tale is autobiographical. She insisted that it isn’t; she didn’t actually live through a totalitarian regime where she was forced to have babies for elite religious leaders; yet on the level that everything a writer creates passes through their own mind, all writing is autobiographical, she admits. 
 
In addition to sharing personal details about her entire life and ancestry in Book of Lives, Atwood reveals the inspiration for many of her books. She shares how The Handmaid’s Tale was influenced by time spent in West Berlin before the Wall fell, a period that included eerie experiences of being under surveillance in buildings when visiting Czechoslovakia. In addition, Atwood explains she called on Hermes while writing her most famous opus, and she was also thinking a lot of George Orwell’s 1984.
 
The Handmaid’s Tale felt so real to me and touched on so many personal experiences, it gave me nightmares. The ways in which women are sexualized, objectified, and demeaned in US society, not to mention in other countries, feels like it could truly lead to a Handmaid’s Tale-world (or like we’ve already lived through such regimes in the collective consciousness), all under the guise of conforming to religious virtue. 
 
Atwood was born at the start of WWII, a cataclysmic event that affected her deeply. Her and her brother spent a lot of their younger years in the woods, or “bush” as they say, of northern Ontario, where her entomologist father built cabins by hand and did lab work, assisted by her sporty mother, Margaret Sr.  
 
Book of Lives takes us through Atwood’s childhood, which involved a lot of messing about in boats, as well as some traumatic experiences as a school-aged girl of 9 and 10, a time period when she was bullied by older girls who were supposedly friends. Also memorable is how when Atwood was a toddler a neighbor boy threw a piece of ice and hit her in the eye, though it turned out the ice was meant for her older brother Harold:
 

The little boy who’d thrown the ice chunk was sent by his mother to apologize. "I’m sorry I hit Peggy in the eye," he said. "I meant to hit Harold." It’s useful to know that you’re sometimes receiving rage and anger intended for a different target. Ever since, I’ve had bad relationships with white objects flying toward me through the air. Snowballs or baseballs or tennis balls—I have an aversion to all of them. When any unpleasant things comes flying at me unexpectedly—a bad review, a false rumour, a sudden death—I think, Ah, Another chunk of ice. And also: This hurts, but you can survive it. (p. 30)

 
I’ve now taken to thinking of unpleasantries that come from outside as “chunks of ice” myself, and the embedded humor lessens the blow. 

Atwood’s sensitivity toward nature and respect for the land comes through in her stories and poems, but her memoir more fully demonstrates her connectedness to the water and woods. She’s been a strong paddler and naturalist since girlhood and was a camp counselor as a teenager where she led natural history classes. She also lived on an Ontario farm with her life-partner Graeme in the 1970s, raising vegetables and caring for animals, and she later became an avid bird-watcher and explorer while traveling alongside migrating birds.

It’s beautiful to read how Atwood’s parents were truly loving and supportive towards her for the most part. Her dad at one point said something body-shaming to young Margaret (Peggy, as she was known), but that seems to be the extent of negativity that came from Atwood’s parents. 

Atwood’s been writing and creating art since elementary school and became serious about being a writer while in high school. She did her graduate studies at Harvard in the 1960s, specializing in Victorian literature, and briefly held academic jobs.  
 
Book of Lives is unique in how it provides a sort of syllabus on Canadian literature. The memoir also outlines the role Atwood played in developing Canadian lit as a genre and shows how she helped in starting early small press Canadian publishing enterprises and literary organizations (though, she doesn’t claim she made such contributions in direct words, as her tone remains humble throughout the memoir). She wrote an early book on the subject of Canadian literature to help raise funds for House of Anansi, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972).
 
It’s refreshing how Atwood acknowledges the existence of First Nations peoples living on the land throughout her memoir, and how she honors Indigenous voices as being at the roots of Canadian lit. She eventually taught writing and camped with Inuit women in the Far North, as she talks about in Burning Questions. 

Atwood tells a notable story in Book of Lives about working as a census taker in 1961 and interviewing an elderly man in a rooming house who was Indigenous, yet there was no place to list Indigenous peoples on the census at the time. She writes, “I was shocked and embarrassed. Having spent so much time up north, I knew there were lots of Indigenous people. Why then was there no space for them on the census questionnaire?” (p. 154) 
 
Another highlight of Book of Lives is how it discusses many side projects Atwood has been involved in over the years, such as Once in August, a 1984 documentary about Atwood made by Michael Rubbo. It’s a bit cringe how the filmmaker was searching for some level of dysfunction in Atwood and her family. Yet, Atwood behaved gracefully under the circumstances of a film crew invading her family at their summer cabin in the remote wilderness, and the film is gorgeous in how it showcases the landscape of northeastern Canada’s boreal forest and its pristine lakes and loons. It’s wonderful to see footage of Atwood reading from her work and being interviewed in her natural habitat, and the film gives visual documentation of what a skilled canoe paddler and outdoorsperson she is. 

I admire how Atwood has long been a poet of witness and used her role as writer to call out authoritarian regimes and injustice. She says being a freelancer since the early ‘70s has given her more freedom to speak out on behalf of social justice issues because she can’t be fired. 

Book of Lives includes an excerpt from “Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written,” which Margaret Atwood wrote after reading accounts of torture and imprisonment in an Amnesty International newsletter:
 

This is the place
you would rather not know about,
this is the place that will inhabit you,
this is the place you cannot imagine,
this is the place that will finally defeat you
 
where the word why shrivels and empties
itself. This if famine. (p. 298)

 
Atwood's truth-telling regarding society extends to honesty about facing hurdles in her own life within Book of Lives. It's inventive how she was able to write about difficulties she went through with her late partner Graeme without making him sound villainous in any way: through the form of letters to her “Inner Advice Columnist” she shares feelings of sadness she experienced around wanting a second child and marriage, which Graeme didn’t reciprocate. Letters back from her “Inner Advice Columnist” show how she coped.

 
Book of Lives recounts Atwood’s experience overhearing a group of Irish women on a train talking about her books. One of the women said, “I read her latest,” and another said, “I thought it was a little long.” (p. 446). Well, I’m thankful her memoir is long, and celebrate how much Margaret Atwood has contributed to literature, turning out almost a book a year since 1961 while helping many arts organizations and nonprofits in the process. There’s an inherent wisdom present within her mesmerizing storytelling, and I’m grateful for the powerful record she’s given us. 

 
I also appreciate that Atwood doesn’t take herself too seriously; she’s been known to tell interviewers that Beatrix Potter is one of her greatest influences, and both authors do support conservation efforts and respect for animals.