The Life of Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s recently published memoir, Book of Lives, was somewhat disappointing to me, though I am a lifelong fan of Atwood and I believe that I have bought and read almost every one of her novels and quite a few of her volumes of poetry. Some of the first editions that I have had all these years may even be worth a lot of money (but who knows? I don’t want to sell them.)

My Margaret Atwood shelves and a couple of my early editions of her novels.

A first US edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, which became very famous later.

Margaret Atwood’s description of her early life reminded me of many events and situations that I experienced a few years later when I was growing up. Here are some quotes that evoke my own memories of the life of a teenager —

We had school uniforms to combat the usual teenage girls’ urge to have the latest outfit so as not to appear ridiculous, but in me the sewing impulse was also constructivist: I wanted to see what I could make. I pored through pattern books in fabric stores and haunted remnants counters, and was eager to snap up bargains. Some of the lusher scraps—velvets, taffetas, silks, lace—I turned into sumptuous ballgowns for my sister’s proto-Barbie doll. I made my own formal dance dresses. One was pink chiffon, which ended up as cleaning cloths, says my sister. The next was an elegant Audrey Hepburn spaghetti-strap white brocade. Skirts could be very full, with crinolines underneath, or they could be pencil skirts, worn with cinch belts and sweaters with bat-wing sleeves. The cinch belts were not my friends: I was short-waisted, and with a cinch belt, looked like two tomatoes, one on top of the other. I also made a pleated plaid skirt—this must have been a school project, as I recall no love for it—and my father said, “You shouldn’t wear plaid. It makes you look broad in the beam.” How withering. (p 92)

Our Home Economics teacher, Miss Ricker, was a humourless person for whom dinner was a green thing, a white thing, a yellow thing, and a brown thing on every plate, no matter what they tasted like. Clothes were inner seam finishes and linings, not style. (p. 103)

One of the men who worked in the kitchen, at the potato-peeling level, had a number tattooed on his arm. We counsellors all knew what it meant, but we didn’t talk about it, which you might find peculiar at a Jewish camp. Strange as it may seem today, the Holocaust was not much discussed publicly in the 1950s. (p. 103)

The Bohemian Embassy was a coffee house of the early 1960s kind pioneered by City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. You climbed a set of worn stairs to find yourself in a large former storage room, with exposed brick walls and small tables and the first espresso machine any of us had ever seen. There were jazz nights and folk nights, and a poetry night, which was on Thursdays. A genial fellow named Don Cullen ran the whole shebang. I was invited to read poetry there, on the strength of my college publications, by John Robert Colombo, who curated—as they would now say—the poetry nights. (p. 149)

Phoebe borrowed a strapless, wired formal dress from one of her other roomies. It was a little too big for her, but because of the wiring the dress could stand up by itself. She put it into a dress bag and took the train to the boys’ school, as was the custom. Her date turned out to be the school’s champion rock ’n’ roll dancer. The floor cleared so everyone could watch his fancy steps. He gyrated around Phoebe and her dress, showing off. Then he put his hand on her waist and twirled her. “He twirled me right around inside the dress. The zipper was at the front, and at the back were the two wired…” “Phoebe! How devastating! What did you do?” “He twirled me back again.” (p. 302)

Margaret Atwood — like us — was a birder, and described visits to some of the birding sites that I’ve also been to. However, most of her life was very different from my experiences. She conveyed above all how Canada is very different from the USA, even though it’s also so close to us. Unfortunately, this memoir is very focused on her life outside of writing. She makes it clear that writing is totally a different level of activity than other life pursuits, and her narrative has its focus on the non-writing aspects, and goes through them in chronological order, almost compulsively. Ultimately, this made the book a bit tedious, in my opinion. I think it’s only addressed to fans like me, who know all her books.

To quote the New York Times review:

Margaret Atwood’s memoir, “Book of Lives,” is long, nearly 600 pages, and it doesn’t sit lightly on the lap. It’s a largely shapeless narrative spanning the entire life of Canada’s pre-eminent novelist, … It frequently reads like a Politburo speech, in the sense that it takes its audience for granted.