Margaret Atwood has written the memoir her fans have long been hoping for, it has been announced.
In Book of Lives, which is due to be published in November, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale will recount memories from her unconventional childhood in northern Canada, as well as the story of her writing career, from her early feminist works to her bestselling, award-winning fiction.
“I sweated blood over this book – there was too much life to stuff in, and if I’d died at 25 like John Keats, it could have been shorter,” Atwood said. “But I also laughed a lot. A memoir is what you can remember, and you remember mostly stupid things, catastrophes, revenges, and times of political horror, so I put those in – but I also added moments of joy, and surprising events and, of course, the books.”
The 85-year-old author has previously published 17 novels, 19 books of poetry, nine short story collections, eight children’s books, three graphic novels, and 11 nonfiction works – but never a memoir.
“My publishers made me do it,” she told British Vogue when asked why she felt now was the time. After originally thinking it would be “boring”, she came round to the idea when her publishers said they were after a “memoir in a literary style”.
Subtitled A Memoir of Sorts, Book of Lives is described as a “landmark publication” by UK publisher Vintage. “As we travel with Atwood along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations.”
Born to an entomologist father and dietician mother in 1939, Atwood was encouraged to be independent and connect with nature, spending much of her childhood in the wild forest of northern Quebec.
Encounters with bears, poets, Hollywood actors – and of course with the author’s late husband, Graeme Gibson – will all feature in the memoir, in which Atwood will also reveal the seminal moments in her life that inspired her most famous novels.
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Atwood has won numerous awards, including two Booker prizes (for The Blind Assassin in 2000, and The Testaments in 2019, which controversially joint-won with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other), the Arthur C Clarke award and PEN Center USA lifetime achievement award. A number of her works have been adapted for screen, including The Handmaid’s Tale, which was turned into a popular TV series by Hulu. Costumes inspired by Atwood’s dystopian novel and the Hulu series have since been donned by pro-choice protesters around the world.
