Margaret Atwood is an indefatigable time traveler. The prolific Canadian author, perhaps best known for “The Handmaid’s Tale” and its phenomenally successful Hulu series adaptation, has written 17 novels, 11 nonfiction titles, 9 short fiction collections, 17 volumes of poetry, several graphic novels and children’s books; she won Booker prizes for “Blind Assassin” and “The Testaments.” In short, she has had many lives — public and private — and displays them all, her own and others, in the hefty 624-page tour de force “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts,” recounting the challenging symbiotic relationship between life and art.
In her light-spirited introduction, Atwood notes how a “sinister alter ego” nudged her to “spill some beans … dish some tea” and to “thank my benefactors, reward my friends, trash my enemies” in order to go beyond what she terms a “witchy reputation.” It also establishes the primary thematic premise of how time serves the dual personalities of a real and a writing life.
At most book signings, someone inevitably asks her, “Where do you get your ideas or material?” Atwood posits that “every question-and-answer session” is an illusion where there are “at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes.” The one doing the living, not the one doing the writing, is present on such occasions where “no writing is being done at that moment,” she notes. Rather, like “Jekyll and Hyde, the two share a memory and even a wardrobe.” They also share other constraints.
Atwood asserts, “I move through time, and, when I write, time moves through me. It’s the same for everyone. You can’t stop time, nor can you seize it; it slips away like the Liffey in Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’ Memories can be vivid though unreliable, diaries can distort. Nevertheless, each life has its own particular flavours and textures, and I will attempt to evoke those of mine.”
For Atwood, real time begins with her birth in Ottawa General Hospital on Nov. 18, 1939. She has a keen recreational interest in astrology, palmistry, and other occult and paranormal subjects that sometimes enter her writing, and her natal chart — determined, of course, by time and space — suggests that she could be an implacable enemy, Atwood notes. She would also make a “good detective, spy, and criminal mastermind. And undertaker.” Or, as she writes later, blend investigative skills with con artistry (with “at least two stories being told at once”) to become a novelist.
The author was born into a traditional nuclear family: father Carl was an entomologist and mother Margaret a dietitian/nutritionist; her brother Harold preceded her, and sister Ruth arrived a dozen years later. Her father’s research led to an unconventional nomadic childhood (winters in Ottawa; summers camping in Canada’s wilderness, lumber towns, Shield country), which generated an interest in science (“Every time you look at a piece of a rock, you’re looking at a time machine. Everyone’s life is shaped by geology.”) She recalls searching for insects, collecting snakes, “manufacturing poison,” living in a cabin in the bush with no electricity, water, or telephone, building a “board and batten” house. It was a life that encouraged resourcefulness and resiliency.
The path to publication started around age 6. Inspired by a Little Golden Book titled “The Lively Little Rabbit,” she began to write. Her first self-described opus was a collection of poems, “Rhyming Cats,” before she moved on to a morality puppet play featuring a ghost and an “expose of false narratives.” It’s not surprising then that her first published book was a collection of poems, “The Circle Game,” which won her Canada’s 1966 Governor General’s award.
In the memoir, Atwood describes the inception of her novels. Her debut novel, “The Edible Woman” (1969), drew its setting from an abandoned clay pit and a side interest in cake decorating, for example, while “Alias Grace” (1996) began with a few words on stationery in a Zurich hotel. She frequently moves her original opening scenes elsewhere as her novels take shape. “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her prescient novel of totalitarian dictatorship, began with the group hanging scene, which was shifted to the back of the book. All the Aunts in the novel, written in Berlin in 1984, were “named after products aimed at women.”
It’s virtually impossible — even in a lengthy long-form review — to cover all the material in Atwood’s life and books. But one name that must be included from her real life is Graeme Gibson. An irascible Canadian writer, he was her life partner after her 1973 divorce from Jim Polk until he died in London in 2019. Gibson dominates her life — and much of the memoir. She dedicates the book to him. Grief haunts her, invades the short stories in “Old Babes in the Woods” (2023) while “no story or novel could ever contain the total complexity of another human being.”
Neither can most memoirs, but, at 85 years, Atwood’s valediction to readers shares “many strange happenings, incidents of malice, odd dreams, conversations, joyful moments, ghosts, stupid mistakes, and catastrophes.” She sprinkles “Life Lessons” throughout: “During public appearances, any humiliation can be overcome unless you throw up or die”; “You can make anything talk, including your sleeve and the salt and pepper shakers. Novelists do it all the time”; “There are some things you can’t fix”; “Governments, such as Communist ones, that claim to be ‘helping the people’ can do terrible things … So could your own government. Nobody is immune”; “If you’ve got a megaphone, hang on to it.”
“Book of Lives” might as well be one of Atwood’s novels (with the addition of photos and illustrations). It’s a remarkable read. She makes space for everyone. Her engaging voice is populated by a large cast of beguiling characters, settings are enriched with vivid details, all of it grounded by a compelling story line. It contains multitudes, conflates life and art, and, evoking Jim Croce, successfully puts time in a bottle.
Papinchak, a former English professor, is an award-winning freelance critic in the Los Angeles area.
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