Lady oracle

Canuck literary legend Margaret Atwood’s wonderful new memoir lives up to its hype.

Book of Lives is an absorbing must-read for anyone interested not just in the grande dame of Canadian letters, but in North American cultural development in the second half of the 20th century.

Think of such entertaining autobiographies as Peter C. Newman’s Here Be Dragons and Barbara Amiel’s Friends & Enemies.

Just shy of 600 pages — 550 of them devoted to the main narrative — this is not a small tome. But interesting and often funny details pop off virtually every page.

Born at the end of 1939, Atwood turned 86 on Nov. 18. She found her calling as a writer at age 16 and has never deviated from her path. With 60 titles to her credit, including poetry, novels, short stories, non-fiction, graphic novels and children’s books, she is still going strong.

Atwood relates her story chronologically, starting with her parents’ roots in Nova Scotia and proceeding through her own childhood. She spent her early years roughing it in the Quebec bush with her entomologist father, intrepid mother and older brother, Harold.

She covers her schooling in Toronto, marked by her formative experience of being bullied by her girlfriends in Grade 4, a topic she circles back to many times. (She fictionalized it in her 1988 novel Cat’s Eye.)

She moves through her busy high school and university years at the University of Toronto and Harvard in the U.S. She recounts her long apprenticeship as a writer and her gradual emergence as a public figure, the celebrated author of such signature novels as Lady Oracle, Alias Grace and, of course, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Most people think of Atwood as having enjoyed instant success. But by her account she spent her 20s and early 30s living precariously, often in cheap student apartments and working at crappy jobs to pay her rent.

She describes herself in her early 20s as an “unglamorous furtive little person in horn-rimmed spectacles, not stylishly dressed.”

And yet she also had a busy romantic life, with a revolving door of suitors. She was married to another man when, in her mid-30s, she eventually settled into a common-law relationship with her life partner, the writer Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019 at age 85.

The book is noteworthy for its witty and conversational tone. With its short sentences and jokey asides, you hear the sardonic voice of her many media interviews. (Last month she was profiled on CBS’s flagship news magazine show 60 Minutes. Has any other Canadian been so recognized?)

Atwood constantly points out where real people and experiences have worked their way into her fiction. She also writes openly about her conflicts with Gibson. In the late ‘70s, he vetoed her desire for a second child, making her feel “deprived, resentful and disrespected.” Their daughter, Jess, is 49.

Disappointingly, she is mum on the subject of money, once she starts making it. She often breaks through the wall of the past to comment from the present. For instance, in her 20s she meets up in France with her university friend Adrienne Clarkson and is struck by painted fingernails.

“‘Can I put your red fingernails in my memoir?’ I asked her recently.

‘Why are you so obsessed with those red fingernails’ she said. ‘It’s the only time in my life I ever did that.’”

The book is loaded with pictures, curated by her younger sister, Ruth. These include three sections of colour plates and dozens of black-and-white images embedded in the text. Atwood, we discover, is also a talented graphic artist and cartoonist.

There is also a full index, useful to the thousands of prominent people she has met who will check to see if Atwood mentions them or, worse, slags them.

She does settle a few scores here. Ironically, given her feminist convictions, all her targets are women. The late poet Dorothy Livesay, Gibson’s first wife Shirley and two former Toronto journalists, Jan Wong and Margaret Wente, all get the Atwood shiv.

Atwood spent a year in Vancouver and another in Edmonton during her graduate-school days in the early ‘60s. Thus she is not unfamiliar with Western Canada. But her world view remains Toronto-centric.

Winnipeg gets one brief mention. On a 1981 publicity tour, in an empty Coles bookstore in what was likely St. Vital Shopping Centre, she is approached by a man with a burning question: “Where is the Scotch tape?”

She relates many similarly self-deprecating stories about her personal experience with the dubious fame quotient of literary novelists.

“The idea that The Handmaid’s Tale skyrocketed me to international stardom is false,” she writes. “The renown of that book was incremental. I was not in the league of Elizabeth Taylor. Nor will I ever be.”

But to many Canadians, she now wears the crown of another Elizabeth, one with the Roman numeral II after her name, who also served with long distinction above the common rabble.

Long may Atwood reign.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.