What Margaret Atwood Would Like You to Know

Maybe the Munro scandal is still too painful for Atwood to discuss at length, and too many people caught up in it are still alive. But she is elusive on other matters that are presumably less fraught, such as the struggles, pressures, and dilemmas that come with success. “You know, I’m practically a conglomerate,” James Dickey once told a girlfriend. Atwood is too: Her acknowledgments section includes headings not just for “Film and Television” but for “Tech, Entrepreneurial, and Online Platforms.” In 2011, she met with two representatives of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. “Why,” she asked the reps, “should Rolex be interested in fiction?” She reports only her own answer: “Rolex makes watches, and watches measure Time, and Novels are about Time, and Time is the hidden primary subject of every novel. So it all made sense, more or less, or so I told myself.” Benjamin Cheever has told us of his father’s ambivalence about a 1980 Rolex advertisement; Atwood’s mixed feelings, if indeed she has them, would be worth hearing, as would her thoughts on the education of writers. “I’ve taught Creative Writing to undergraduates!” is her initial response to Rolex. “The redundant hyphens! The grocers’ apostrophes! The dangling gerunds! You can’t drag me back!” Instead, she gives us a page on her mentee, Naomi Alderman—not about her fiction but about Zombies, Run!, the app Alderman built.

Future biographers of Atwood will have much material to feast on in Book of Lives, as will the sort of congregants for whom no incident in her everyday life is unimportant. Near the end, as Atwood recalls assembling Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023, she wonders: “How did the earlier me turn out so many words, and so quickly?” I confess it’s what I’ve always wondered as I’ve read her. In Book of Lives, she writes that in the two years after giving birth, “despite my lack of writing zeal, I continued with three little projects”—three! And not so little: writing and illustrating a children’s book; publishing, under a pseudonym, a magazine comic strip; and contributing a volume to Canada’s Illustrated Heritage (“I agreed to take on the years 1815 to 1840”).

Perhaps we make far too much of writers’ productivity and lack thereof. And yet, if Book of Lives does not end up among the lasting Atwoods, I suspect the reason will be so many words, and so quickly—or, rather, her not taking the time to make it shorter.