How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S16, Ep10 How To Fail: Margaret Atwood on wisdom, witchcraft and womanhood

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

For International Women's Day, I bring you - NO BIG DEAL - Margaret Atwood. The Booker-Prize winning author of numerous works including The Blind Assassin, Cat's Eye and Alias Grace, has been a pioneer in the depiction of women in literature, redefining the dystopian novel with her revolutionary 1985 book, The Handmaid's Tale, which went on to sell eight million copies and been adapted into a hit TV show.Atwood's work is visceral, wise and sharply intelligent, so it's safe to say I was ever so slightly intimidated by the prosepct of interviewing her. But oh my goodness, what an utter delight she was. We talked about everything from astrology to cults to witchcraft and the scapegoating of women over the millennia. And we discuss her failures in needlework, musicals and a failed novel that led, circuitously, to the conception of The Handmaid's Tale.I was on a high after this conversation for days and I hope you will be too.--Margaret Atwood's new collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, is out now and available to order here.I can also highly recommend subscribing to her excellent Substack. She recently wrote here about her experience of coming on this podcast - including the email she sent me outlining her failures prior to recording which is quite possibly one of the most lyrical emails I've ever been sent. Find that here.--My new book, FRIENDAHOLIC: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, will be published next month and is now available to preorder - at half price - here.--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpodMargaret Atwood @MargaretAtwood Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned

from failure. My guest today believes she might be a direct descendant of a witch, lives in a home which formerly housed a cult, and read fairy tales voraciously from a young age. a cult and read fairy tales voraciously from a young age. Perhaps it's not surprising then that there is something undeniably magical about her work, which often appears to predict the future with startling and disarming accuracy. Her 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, explores the terrifying subjugation of women's rights in a patriarchal totalitarian society. The Emmy award-winning TV adaptation aired in 2017, a few weeks after Donald Trump's inauguration, and the themes continue to be distressingly resonant. The book's sequel, The Testaments, won my guest the Booker Prize for the second time. The first was for The Blind Assassin in 2000.

for the second time. The first was for The Blind Assassin in 2000. Born in Ottawa in 1939, she travelled a lot as a child because of her father's job as a forest entomologist. She began writing plays and poems at the age of six, but didn't attend school full-time until she was 12. At 16, she realised she wanted to be a writer. In her six subsequent decades as an author, she has published, on average, a book a year. Her latest, Old Babes in the Wood, is a short story collection which tackles marriage, loss, memory and family relationships with a reincarnated snail thrown in for good measure.

At 83, she is not only one of our greatest living novelists, but a fascinating thinker on environmental issues. I am, of course, not a real activist, she has said. I'm simply a writer without a job who is frequently asked to speak about subjects that would get people with jobs fired if they themselves spoke. My guest today is, of course, the extraordinary Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood, welcome to How to Fail. Hello, Elizabeth. How nice to be talking to you. The pleasure is all mine. I know because I've done my research this podcast that you have been interviewed so many times and you tend to get asked the same questions again and again and again. And so I'm going to endeavor to try and ask you original questions,

which is why I'm starting with this one. Your birthday is the 18th of November, which makes you a Scorpio. Do you, Margaret Atwood, believe in astrology? Being a Scorpio, I'm, of course, skeptical. I'm also a Scorpio, so it's very nice to meet a better one. You know this. We're very interested in such things, but believe is not a word that we would endorse very often. Very true.

Interested, yes. Believe, that's a whole other thing. Scorpios are also meant to be people who hold grudges, who have a sting in the tail. Are you a grudge holder? I am. Yes, unfortunately. I fight that tendency. I know it's unattractive. But let us just say, we never start first, Elizabeth. We lead a quiet life in the toes of boots. And if somebody puts a foot in on top of us, naturally, we react. Yes.

But we don't go out there first with our little stings. So our word to those who are not Scorpios is just don't start. Does it get tiring being asked the same sorts of things again and again and again? There are no stupid questions. They're only inventive answers, Elizabeth. Well, that's a very generous thing for you to say at the start of this interview. So thank you. I mentioned in the introduction that you live in a home that used to house a cult. Is that where you're speaking from right now? I'm speaking from a part that we built onto it. So the cult was not actually in this room, but it was in this house. It was a benevolent-ish type of cult.

So it was called Therafields. There's a whole book written about it in Toronto. And part of the therapy was they renovated old houses. Problem was none of them were actually renovators. So we did have to do a bit of life-saving work on the house so it wouldn't kill us. They had, for instance, removed a back staircase and put a bathroom in on top of that space, but they had not put in a supporting beam. So had you been having a bath in that room, you might have plummeted to the roof at any moment. So it was a bit of a detective story following up what they might have done

the electrician he said go over the whole house do the electricity he looked and he said oh the amateurs have been at work necessarily want that with your electrical work. Are you someone who believes that houses have certain energies within their walls? Now, we talked about this word belief, Elizabeth. I'm very interested in that belief. But let me just say that after we had been living in the house a little while, I was in a bookstore and I came across a book called Multiple Man. And it was by one of the therapists who had been living in the house. In fact, he had been doing his therapy work in a room that was at that moment, my office. So rapidly did I purchase this book and I read it with great interest,

and it was about all kinds of phenomena, such as multiple personalities. They first appeared in the early 19th century, or first documented, of course, demonic possession, hypnotism, mesmerism, out-of-body states of all kinds. So I read this with great interest. It was pre-Freudian psychology. When Freud came in, he dismissed all this stuff. He just said, it's all hysteria. So people weren't interested in it until it made a return, I would say, in the 1980s. Multiple personalities became of interest again. And then the last chapter, Elizabeth, was by him about the work that he did. And his work was with people who thought there was an entity in their bodies, not multiple personalities, not demonic possession. They were conscious at all times,

but this entity was interfering with their life. So he said he carried no brief as to whether these things were real or not. It was his job to get rid of them because the people didn't like them. So he said, if all else fails, you have to engage in conversation with the entity, find out who they purport to be, and offer them a better piece of real estate than Bob's head. Some of them had wandered into Bob's head by mistake and were dead people who didn't know they were dead. So you had to say, first of all, you're dead. No, I'm not. Yes, you are. You should be much happier in the realms of light. So my favorite was an entity that claimed

to be a cave bear. But when pressed, it admitted that the cave bear was just a front and it was actually an alien from another planet. So his job was to get rid of these. And my first question to myself was, did they go into the woodwork? Especially because you're scared of bears, I read somewhere. Well, no, I'm respectful of bears. Okay. Yes.

So I don't go screaming in all directions, but you have to be respectful of bears. I mean, how utterly fascinating that as a writer, you are someone who holds within you all of these different characters and stories, and you're living in a home that has lots of people with all of these characters. What was this useful for? It was very useful when I was writing Alias Grace, because of course, spiritualism is one of those possession by another entity stories. And it was at its height during Grace's period. So lots of people were doing spiritualism and kept doing it. I think some people are still doing it.

They go off to mediums and get messages through ancient people who speak through the medium. So I'm very interested in all of these things. And like all of them, that some of them are more convincing than others. Now, you are a phenomenally successful writer, but I wonder how you feel about that term success and whether it's brought you the happiness that lots of less successful writers imagine that worldwide fame and acclaim will bring them. Happiness is a byproduct. It's not a goal. So if you set out to, quote, be happy, you're probably going to be disappointed. And as we all know, you have moments of feeling quite happy and other moments of not feeling happy. But I don't think it really has much to

do with, unless you're either starving or out on the street, I don't think it has that much to do with your material circumstances. I think it has that much to do with your material circumstances. I think it has a lot to do with your personality and some of that is genetic. There are some people who can be happy in a tent under a bridge and other people who are not going to be happy no matter how much money they have. And that is one of the celebrity stories that we keep getting told, you know, untold wealth and fame. And then the person jumped out of a window. So I think it's a personality thing.

I'm not a naturally unhappy person. So as for the fame thing, I think it's surf the wave. And if you believe your own billboards, you're probably in trouble. I want to talk a little bit about your magnificent short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood. At the heart of the collection are these seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love. That's what the publisher says. And there's one particular one, it's actually the title story, where there's this beautiful interaction between two sisters, and one of them is Nell, and she's been widowed, and it's about tea. And she uses tea bags, and she suddenly

remembers that her late husband would have been very disdainful of this, would have used loose tea. And there's this phrase, the days of Tig, that was her husband, the days of Tig, full stop, over now. And I thought it was one of the most beautiful and accurate depictions of grief, that moment of seeming mundanity that unravels so many memories of a person. And I wanted to ask you a bit about your writing of grief and what that feels like for you. Well, it's like writing anything else, amongst other things. I don't think of it as writing grief. I think of it as writing life that may happen to have grief in it. And of course, in my demographic, I know quite a few people who have been having

this experience. So yes, it's a thing that happens. And it's a thing that happens particularly if you're lucky enough to get older, because let us consider the alternative. So I think it's a tragedy when a young person dies. It's a completion when a really quite older person dies. You don't think of it as a tragedy and it's not a tragedy. It's, hello, cat. I'm so sorry. That was my cat, Huxley, just wanting to say hello. Now, which Huxley is that cat named after? He's named after Aldous. Really? Yes. Yes. I love Aldous Huxley. I know you love George Orwell. Well, I love Aldous Huxley too. You're allowed to love, you know, more than one

person. Yes, I'm not monogamous in my love for authors. Yes, who's that Huxley? In fact, I did an introduction to Brave New World. Oh, did you? I did, yes. You can find that in somebody's edition. Well, I absolutely will. But there is also a story in Old Babes in the Wood where it's a discussion between, I imagine you and the late George Orwell, through a medium. And George Orwell says, all writers are selfish, lazy, and egotistical. And I wanted to know whether you are, Margaret Atwood. Of course, of course. Would I deny it? Would I write a story with that in it and then exempt myself? No. I admit I'm selfish, lazy, and egotistical. But these are things we must

work to overcome, Elizabeth. I'm so sorry that my cat kind of interrupted your very profound disquisition. It's okay for your cat to interrupt. I also wanted to ask you, and again, it is something that is quite lazy on my part as an interviewer, but I know obviously that you have lived through the loss of your delightful sounding life partner Graham and that happened in 2019 while you were on a book tour in the UK and I wondered how much of that played into this short story collection. Well quite a bit yeah so there's several stories that have that loss in them although they are about lots of other things as well so no events are ever singular it's not just that event how old are you Elizabeth I'm 44

oh well you know you're a babe a child thank you that's very kind of you no no it's just accurate so this is not a thing that has happened to you in your life, I would trust, because you were too young to really have such experiences. And the difference between young writers and older writers is that older writers can remember what it was to be that age. I can remember what it was to be 44. But people imagining what it's like to be older haven't lived that yet. They've observed it. They've observed older relatives and such. And some writers have done pretty good imitations, but you're not there yet. You're inventing.

Do you ever go back and reread your earlier work and think, oh, I hadn't lived that yet yet I haven't got that quite right I'm not a Virgo not that egotistical thanks George Orwell well I'm not that picky okay when the beat poets turned up and stopped using punctuation I know some poets who went back and took all the punctuation out of their previous poems and that's cheating really yeah isn't that strange yes worry about not being cool or something silly like that huh that's so interesting i would never do that so i if i found a typo i would want that corrected in the next printing but as for taking stuff out and rearranging it, these documents are historical by the time you get to rereading them. And why would you change that? But also, why would you

waste your time reading your own work when you have more of your own work to write? Well, talking of history, I read that you had a rule with the TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, and I don't know whether it was the same for the book of The Handmaid's Tale and then subsequently The Testaments, which was that nothing went in that hasn't happened somewhere, sometime. Yeah, that was the rule for the book. And it wasn't me imposing that rule on the writing team. They adopted it of their own volition. Because once you've sold TV or film rights, you, the writer, essentially have no power. You have the power to take your name off the finished product wearing in the second session. You don't have that power. You can consult, but you cannot decree. I was happy they did that. So it's not a wild invention.

It's what human beings have done and therefore have the potential to do again. what human beings have done and therefore have the potential to do again. It's fascinating and even more horrifying. And you've often been called an oracle, but I wonder if you perceive yourself to be more of an observer. I'm more of an observer. Nobody can actually predict the future. And when we say the future, which bit of the future did you have in mind? There is no the future in any case. There are a number of probabilities and possibilities, but that plan can be upset at any minute, as those about to set out on book tours in 9-11 discovered quite rapidly when all the planes were cancelled. Out of your control. Did that happen to you? Yes, it was a paperback book tour, but think of those launching their first novels. They couldn't go anywhere.

You don't have a great history with book tours, do you? I have a great history with book tours. It's adventures every moment. But if you mean, have they been sedate? No. Because we were talking before we started recording about how you were on tour in Australia and New Zealand days before the pandemic hit. Exactly well we were we were sort of dimly

aware of it so we were scootering about on electric scooters in New Zealand and other hijinks then I went to Ireland and I was in Ireland it was theway Festival. It was the beginning of the Galway Festival, which then had to be cancelled. And I left on March the 10th. And on the 13th, the COVID rate in Ireland spiked like that. So narrow miss, pretty interesting, the whole experience. Before I get onto your failures, I hope you don't mind my asking you about your writing routines because I know that it's something that is of great interest to Atwood fans but generally fans of writing and I I feel and I don't know what your opinion is on this that the whole daily routine has become quite fetishized in the 21st century that idea that we have to start by getting up at

5am and doing a yoga pose and lighting a scented candle and having a match of green tea. And I wonder if you have anything that you would call a routine when it comes to writing books? Well, I was too old, dear, because when I started writing, we didn't even have creative writing schools. So we weren't told we had to have routines. I think some people find routines helpful. And especially if you have been someone with a job which has a routine, and then you decide to go freelance. And you quite frequently have difficulty organizing your time. But if you've always been a freelance, or if you've been writing and having a job at the same time, which I also did, the idea of having a routine of that kind,

it sounds very luxurious. But, you know, if you have a small child, you do not have a writing routine during the times when that small child is awake. If you live in a house with teenagers, you have a sign on your door saying, do not disturb, and nobody pays any attention to it, of course. So I think it's not a matter of routine. I think it's a matter of focus. The ability to focus no matter what mayhem is going on around you. And I think that developed through growing up in the woods without electricity. There was only one lamp That would have been a kerosene lamp. So people sat around the table and did their thing.

And you developed the ability to focus on that thing that you were doing without being too distracted by the things that other people were doing. And do you handwrite and then convey that to a computer? Always with poetry, kicking off with fiction. So I start with handwriting, and then I translate that onto a computer, then I write more, and it can be so that once I get going, I can continue on a keyboard. But I don't know how to touch type.

People who do know how to touch type can do that much more easily. So it's a bit distracting for me to type. It's more distracting for me to type than it is for me to write in cursive. I'm now being told that a lot of children aren't learning cursive, so I will have indecipherable manuscripts. They are a bit anyway, because my handwriting is pretty bad, but they will be really mysterious let's get on to your failures which did you handwrite these and then type them because they arrived no did someone type them for you no I typed them you typed them I can't close my eyes they are I think I'm going to say this the best failures I've ever. I know you don't believe in best and

better, but they are just so beautifully written as one would expect from Margaret Atwood. They're so funny and you grappled with the entire philosophical notion of failure. And I believe very kindly, you're going to make these available on your sub stack for anyone who wants to read them. And they're wonderful. And you started off by quoting Yoda, do or not do, there is no try. Are you a Star Wars fan? Of course. Are you?

Well, I'm so old that I saw the first one long ago. When did that come out? I think it was 77. Yeah, it was really old. So Star Trek had been around already. Star Trek, the television one. So people kind of oozed back into sci-fi, which went out of fashion for a moment, probably in the 60s. We had quite a bit of it in the 50s with B-movies that featured quite frequently heads in jars. I don't know what that thing was frequently heads in jars.

I don't know what that thing was about heads in jars. I think it was maybe easy to make the prop. Yes, good point. Yeah, so the head that wouldn't die, things like that. Aliens had a habit of being ruled by heads in jars. So it got a kind of, this is really tacky reputation but then people became interested in making more quality products although as i recall the first star treks the outfits were a bit baggy were they not you know i don't think really good stretch fabric had been invented but does that quote from yoda does it reflect your own attitude no failure no okay so what's

just broadly speaking before we get on to the minutiae what is your perception of failure well it's much more common than success i know so all of these contests you know all of these spelling bees and olympic championships and horse races and football matches. Somebody always loses. So concocting games in which there are no wins and losses, and such games do exist. But they're not as frequent, particularly in Western society, which seems very competition-oriented. There are a lot of sports you can do that don't involve winning and losing. As long as they're not a race, you can be good at something

without being competitive about it, if you see what I mean. Yes. Your first failure is your failure to win one of those competitions. You came second in a dolls dressing contest in 1949 when you were nine. Please tell us that story. All right. I may even have been eight come to think of it. It might have been 1948. There is an entity, there is an event that took place in May and therefore it was called Mayfair.

And it was one of those things that had magnetic fish. Do you know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean. That's taken me straight back to my childhood. Magnet on the bottom and you're supposed to get a fish carousel and things like that. And this was all pretty amateur. So the children could enter various contests

and one of them was a dolls dressing contest. Since I was a demon sewer at that age and I was also a demon crocheter and knitter, I made a thing and entered it and only came second. How crushing. And of course, what you immediately think is what's wrong with mine. And did you think it was a fair decision? Oh, I don't think you even think about those kinds of things at that age. So giant pumpkin, you can tell it's fair because the winner is bigger. But anything involving aesthetic judgment, it's always a bit slippery, isn't it? Yes. I do find it so poignant that this failure stays with you still some 70 plus years later.

Well, it's only because you asked. I thought, what can I tell you? You're not haunted by it every morning when you wake up. Can you very clearly remember the feeling of it when you were that age? To tell you the truth, no, not really. I can remember the outfit. I can remember making it. I've got the ribbon that I won because all you won was a ribbon. You know, you didn't get any big prize. I remember all of that. And on the one hand, I remember being actually rather pleased that I had got something. You know, at least I wasn't fifth. And what were your parents like? How would they have responded to your distress at not winning?

I wasn't that distressed, to tell you the truth. I wasn't very easily distressed by that kind of thing. Okay. So, yes, it was a failure a failure objectively because it wasn't first. But, you know, let's look on the bright side. I did get this nice blue ribbon that said second on it. I'll get them back later. Yeah, you'll bear that Scorpio grudge for a lifetime.

Who are these people? How dare they? What were you like as an eight-year-old, Margaret? I was very into, as you probably gathered, crafty activities. So making things. I loved making things, all sorts of things, including things made out of wood, things made out of wool. My mother was not in the least interested in clothing, I have to say. She wasn't interested in sewing. She was not interested in knitting.

I learned to knit from a neighbor, not from her. And when I had a little sister, it was I who knit the layout. Not my mother. I think she knitted one sock. I knit the whole thing. I knitted the little jacket. I knitted the little leggings. I knitted the little mittens.

I knitted the little bonnet, knitted the little mittens, I knitted the little bonnet, really just because I liked making stuff. Do you consider writing books akin to making stuff? Absolutely. Yeah, it absolutely is making stuff. And your father, as I mentioned in the introduction, was an entomologist. Yeah, he liked making stuff too. Did he? Yes, it was a big fly tire, fly fishing. That's another thing I made. I've got my little collection of very lumpy, sort of bulgy fly fishing flies that I made. I'm very interested in what a childhood is like when you're the daughter of an entomologist and how much you must know and engage with the outside world. Very specific. So there aren't just trees, there are different kinds of trees. You can't say bug,

only some things are bugs. The rest are different kinds of insects. And if you're going to say bug, what kind of bug? So ew, it's a bug. We didn't do that. We said, how interesting, it's a bug we didn't do that we said how interesting it's a beetle and you're one of three children you're the middle child middle children don't they don't get a great historical rep how was it being a middle child I was a younger child for 12 years then I became a middle child and did you like your younger sister or were you resentful of her appearance? No, I spoiled her. I used to dress her up. It's like a doll. Anyway, she's in my old babe story. That is actually my younger sister who thought that was pretty funny. Yeah, so she is my lovely sister. And as you get older, of course, this age difference becomes less important. When you're 12 and your sister is one, it's pretty large.

So I did a lot of those baby duties and child duties when she was very young. Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time.

So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions. If you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second. Then join me, Hunter Harris. And me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip

and celebrity news. Like it's not a question of if Drake got his body done but when. You are so messy for that but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother.

A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?

This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Now, not winning that prize, what do you think?

Well, it prepares you for not winning all of the other prizes that you subsequently then don't win. Are you talking about literary prizes? Oh, yes, dear. Beryl Rainbridge and I used to have a contest about how many times we could be nominated for the Booker without winning it. And she won that because she was nominated for more than I was without winning it. But then she got a sort of lifetime achievement award after she was dead. I mean, that wasn't much use, was it, to her, but we were pleased to see it. So what's that like when you're sitting at the Booker Prize ceremony, for instance,

and you've been shortlisted and you don't win? you perfect your gracious loser face or do you feel resentful I feel like I would I mean I've never been shortlisted for anything so so that for me would be winning let's shortlist you for something what would you like to be oh would you would you shortlist me just I know you haven't read any of my books but if you could say I'm shortlisted for one of Margaret Atwood's favorite authors then I can just use that as a book blurb what favorite podcast short listen from one of Margaret's favorite podcasts that's what we're doing right now thank you that's made my day first prize for most attractive earphones thank you my mother gave them to me so I'll tell her she'll be thrilled she's one in a way yeah so so then we should make you a little ribbon that says your phone's prize yeah something I read Alice in Wonderland of

course quite early as a child all have won and all shall have prizes that would be the optimum wouldn't it everybody gets a prize for something well literary prizes are like best pumpkin and show because you don't actually do anything to win it you're just an inert object it is then bestowed upon you you have no control over it i was just interested in the process so the first time it was in the days of the great big clunky television cameras sort of on booms and you could tell you hadn't won when the camera lost interest in you and stopped recording the green peas and orange carrots that people had with the white tablecloth during the dinner because they'd gotten a little drunk. And the boom swung over in somebody else's direction. You thought, well, that's it. Won't be me today.

wung over in somebody else's direction. You thought, well, that's it. Won't be me today. And you might as well just enjoy yourself. So do you think you're able, I mean, you must be able now to detach from the outcome? I've always detached from the outcome because as I've said, it's nothing that you are actually doing. It's other people sitting in a room and I've judged these things. I know what goes on. I know the sort of arguments and compromises that get made. And the sooner you can disabuse yourself of the notion that some great all-knowing God is bestowing these prizes, the better off you will be. Because it's just people making decisions. The favorite thing that I read on the internet today was your website FAQs section.

What? I guess I better look at that again. They're so good. There's various things on there. There's sort of the answer to, can you read my manuscript? But there's also a frequently asked question, which is, what is your favorite insert book title? And you make the very eloquent point that you have trouble with that because I suppose the underlying implication is you can't judge art in that way. Well, I don't have lists like that. But the other reason for not having lists like that, if you do have lists like that, everybody who isn't number one on that list is going to hate you forever, including all of the dead ones. And you essentially don't want a lot of dead writers hating you forever. Very uncomfortable. So

impressed. I can always say Shakespeare because, hey, who would argue with that? Good one. Yes. Your second failure is a children's Christmas musical. I mean, I had no idea that Margaret Atwood had attempted to write a musical, but tell us about this. It got quite far. I was doing it with a composer called Raymond Pinnell, who was unfortunately dead,

but he had written all the songs. They're pretty good songs. We had a producer. We were doing auditions. And then something,, the bottom fell out, so somebody got cold feet. Yes, lots of fun. Lots

of fun. What was it called? It was called the Festival of Mist Crest, which is, hint, hint, an anagram for Christmas. It was sort of an anti-Christmas, in which you were forbidden to open your presents, etc. I had tap dancing. I always liked tap dancing. As with a lot of your work, was this

based on something that actually happened? Because when I was reading this failure, I was reminded of Oliver Cromwell banning Christmas in Britain. Yeah, that was a bad move. It was. Dark years. Yeah, maybe it came from my far-distant study of Puritans and what they allowed and what they didn't. I think it was just the kind of fooling around that you do when you're thinking up what you might write for your friend, the composer. Tell us about the drink that appeared in this musical. Yes, it was called Drilk.

So these people all lived in a cave. One of the lines in musical yes it was called Drilk so these people all lived in a cave one of the lines in it was drink your Drilk and that's what my sister has read this thing she says to me when I haven't finished some beverage drink your Drilk so it certainly stayed with her do you like musicals I loves, but not the gloomy one so much. So Carousel is a bit gloomy, isn't it? Yes. West Side Story, it's a bit tragic. Did you like La La Land?

I haven't seen that. I think you'll love it. Okay, so I'll put it on my list to see when I feel I have time to kill. Singing in the Rain? Love Singing in the Rain, but I saw it a lot because it was a favorite at little girls' birthday parties. So, yes, we did singing in the rain quite a bit. And I was a child tap dancer, so I really appreciate the tap dancing. Can you still tap dance?

A bit. I'm thinking of brushing it up. Oh, my gosh. Please, please do that. I need to get some taps because it goes so much better with taps. You mentioned your interest in Puritan history there and I wondered if you could tell us the story of your possible ancestor, Mary Webster. We cannot be definite about that because she would have had to have had children. And she evidently married somebody called Mr. Webster. And that is the real relation, the Mr. Webster character. There are a bunch of Websters who got into New England. One of them was briefly governor of Connecticut. And they gave rise

to Noah Webster, who did the dictionary, who is a direct ancestor, Daniel Webster the sneaky lawyer who is a collateral. So my grandmother was a Webster and it was she who told me the Mary Webster story but she she would say on Monday that yes this was our ancestor and then she'd get cold feet and say on Wednesday that no it wasn't. It was a sort of a dubious distinction. She was accused of being a witch. She was hauled off to Boston, put on trial, and exonerated. This is before the Salem period, right before it. Had it been during the Salem period, I think things would have turned out otherwise. Then she went back to her hometown, which was Hadley, Massachusetts, and the townspeople were not satisfied with the verdict, so they strung her up anyway.

But it was the days before the drop had been invented. The drop, as you know, breaks your neck. She dangled up there all night. She must have either been very thin or have had a very tough neck. And when they came to cut down the corpse the next morning, she was still alive. So she was known as Half-Hanged Mary. And for some reason, they left her alone after that. I guess, why chance your luck?

Maybe she really does have magic powers. She lived another 14 years. Good grief. Well, that's all I know, except that I wrote a poem sequence about her. Witches, accused witches, witchcraft, witch hunts. It strikes me that so much of your work is about those things in various ways. We mean different things by them. So witch hunt usually means that there aren't any witches really and that people are being pursued for reasons that don't exist.

Witch trials are a different kind of thing. In that case, you feel that innocent people are being accused and often condemned on pretty shoddy evidence. If you look at the trial of Joan of Arc, it's really interesting. I mean, they did call her a witch, but what they actually got her for was cross-dressing really yeah it was a put-up job you know from the beginning they were determined to do her in for some reason or other it's a very interesting story altogether and if you've never seen the silent movie of joan of arc it's other. And if you've never seen the silent movie of Joan of Arc, it's fascinating.

It's extraordinary how much of our moral panic seems to remain the same throughout the centuries. Yeah, it does. So quite often there's something real that has set people off. During the Salem period, settlements had run into hard times. They had founded the New England utopia, because it was a utopia. It's going to be God's kingdom on earth at a time before Cromwell had won. So they were going to be the New Jerusalem. Then he wins, and all of a sudden, he's the New Jerusalem. So where does that leave them? Then they became involved in this back and forth warfare with New France that went on for a long time. And they weren't thriving. So if you're God's chosen and you're not thriving, it's got to be somebody's fault. So it must be witches.

Yeah. Stupidly, I hadn't realized until I read a book recently by a man called Malcolm Gateskill about witches. And I hadn't realized the parallel timing of the upheaval of the Civil War in England and the New England foundations and colony and how that topsy-turvy nature of the world instilled in these people in a different land, a desire to impose some sort of order on the chaos that they were feeling. It's a very interesting time. Feeling that something had gone dreadfully wrong. Yes.

And that's when you get moral panic. Something has gone dreadfully wrong. And it might not be something you can immediately connect to the moral panic that follows, connect to the moral panic that follows. But it's a human tendency to want to blame somebody. It's got to be somebody's fault. So little kids, when they bump into a chair, will say that the chair hit me. We have that tendency. It's difficult to resist. So blaming, and then what a feeling of relief it would give you if you could eliminate that thing that is to blame. And I'm sure that's what a lot of people felt. You know, we have to get rid of these widgets and how we'll be so much better off when they're gone. Do you think we're living through an age of moral panic right now?

Where? I know. Well, America. America. I think you've gone through that a bit, but I think some people are still doing it. So if something has gone wrong, but what I see in America is this polarization, which isn't new. You've gone through it before, but it comes up again in a kind of cyclical way. We have, for instance, in Canada, six political parties. So it's very hard to get polarized as you do when you've just got two. So the more multiple a society is, the harder it is to really polarize. And if there's only one, shall we say, minority out group, it's much easier to blame stuff on it. So in Uganda, for instance, it was people from India who had gone to Uganda and

become merchants, and he expelled all of them, partly because they were too successful. So the Salem episode finished when the accusers went too high. They accused the governor's wife. Uh-oh, uh-oh, something wrong here. And it also finished when Cromwell died, the monarchy was restored, and they sent a governor from England. So in that Cromwellian period, they had been choosing their own governors. So good story, bad story. Longfellow has got a poem about that time. Among other things, the Puritans used to hang Quakers if they became too obstreperous. This was when Quakers were not

the quiet, well-behaved people we know today, but were taking off their clothes and streaking congregations and preaching against the Puritans and generally being quite disruptive. So Longfellow's poem is about a romance between a Puritan boy and a Quaker girl, and the girl's in danger of being hanged. And he solves that by having the new governor come in and saying, no, we're not going to do that. But Longfellow isn't quite sure what to think of that because it was an imposition of an external person, which they didn't like. But on the other hand, it put a stop to this Quaker hanging, which was a thing. He doesn't know how to resolve it. He's also got one called Giles Corey, which is about the witchcraft period.

Giles Corey was the man who allowed himself to be pressed to death rather than plead guilty or innocent. Pressed to death? Yeah, so you had to plead guilty or innocent before they could try you. If you didn't say anything when they said, are you guilty or innocent, they couldn't put you on trial. So instead, they put a lot of boards on you and put rocks on top of you until you agreed to say guilty or innocent. But Giles Corey knew that in that period, if you were accused, you were going to be found guilty and your property would be confiscated. So he allowed himself to be pressed to death in order to save the family farm for his family. Wow. That's what The Crucible is based on, the Arthur Miller play.

Riveting. Will you write a witch novel, please? I don't know enough. But I can refer you to the quite engrossing apology that came out after this thing was over. So when a moral panic has happened and innocent people have suffered as a result, and then the light bulb pops on and people realize they've done a wrong thing, they either pretend it hasn't happened, which is what a lot of the Puritans did. They were assiduous journal keepers. They kept journals of their souls and their consciences and their relationships to God and portents that they had seen and very meticulous

recording. Those pages have been removed from their journals. Like this didn't happen. I wasn't there. Who knows? It was awful, but I was in the next town. It wasn't me. Twelve of the jurors did a joint apology. So the other thing you can do is apologize. One of the judges and one of the accusers. That's it. So this apology, which you can find online under Salem Jury Apology, says essentially we didn't know what we were doing. We got in over our heads.

There were dark forces at work, but we didn't know what we were doing. We got in over our heads. There were dark forces at work, but we didn't understand them. Subtext, we were the instruments of the dark forces rather than the remedy for the dark forces. They say rather unbelievably, we didn't mean to cause harm. Do you feel more like a witch or more like a Puritan? Are those the only choices? Yes, I'm afraid in this question. Well, I think each of us has got a little bit of both. Do we not?

I try to avoid being knee-jerkily judgmental. And being a Scorpio, I want to see the evidence. Yes. Tell me your reasoning. Show me the documents. Where are your witnesses? Like that. So I would be that person on a jury. But the rules of evidence for the witchcraft accusations, there was no answer to them. One of them was something called spectral evidence. And that was, you were asleep in bed, everybody will testify to that. But somebody else saw you in a farmyard five miles away, tinkering with their cow. You said, but I was asleep in bed. Well, that shows you're a witch because you could throw your specter, right? There's no way of denying it. It's like saying

you did a bad thing in your past life, which you can't remember. You can't disprove it because you can't remember it. I do think Spectral Evidence would be an incredible name for your next novel. Thank you very much. And you're welcome to write that, Elizabeth. I make you a present of it. Let's get on to your final failure, talking of writing novels, which is your failure to complete the novel you were working on in 1983 and early 84. Tell us what happened, Margaret. Well, I had this thing underway and it was, I have to say, too complicated. It had too many time levels, so much so that even I could not quite keep track of them. I hadn't really figured out who these people were or why they were doing what they were doing. So there's a lot of problems with it.

I did get two short stories out of it eventually, which was more than I got out of the first novel I didn't complete, from which I only got one line. What was the line? About an airplane. So never throw anything out. But on the other hand, some stuff is just useless. So never throw anything out.

But on the other hand, some stuff is just useless. So I was writing it in Blakeney, Norfolk, a less posh place than it has since become. I got chillblains, actually. That was exciting. How Dickensian. Could it be that I've got chillblains? Nobody gets those. But I did.

Because I was working in a stone fisherman's cottage with a flagstone floor, and I had not figured out how to work either the aga, which was supposed to be the heating, or the fireplace, in which you were supposed to apparently mix coal with some really quite damp wood. So I couldn't figure out how to heat it, but I was writing in there with my feet on the cold stone floor. We were living in a different house, which was said to be haunted by some nuns in the parlor, a headless woman in the kitchen, and a jolly cavalier in the dining room. So said the locals. Didn't see any of them, but such was the story. So I was in the stone cottage, and I realized that I had lost interest in this novel when I found that I was reading all of the historical romances left by the summer visitors

who usually rented the stone cottage in season. So I can tell you a lot about Mary, of Scots and somebody called Gay Lord Robert. Gay Lord Robert, one of Queen Elizabeth's suitors. His wife suspiciously fell down the stairs. So you knew a lot about Mary Queen of Scots and Gay Lord. Yes, I just didn't know a lot about my own novel. And I was writing it with this typewriter that you couldn't type an L because it jammed all the time. All of the words with L's in them were missing their L's. You wrote this to me in the email and you said,

For a while I pegged away diligently in my literary masterpiece using a typewriter that lacked an l brackets I of you he murmured what is of she replied and then the best thing was that at the end you say that the failed novel became a manuscript which we're going to talk about and you said that's an accomplishment of sorts. If I and you Emmons make M&A'd. Then I went to Berlin where I was using a typewriter with a German keyboard. And that's a whole other story. Well, yes, German. I'm just trying to think German lettering is almost the same apart from the S, the double S.

A lot of umlauts and other, some of the K keys are different, just saying. Okay. So the failed manuscript, can you remember what it was about? Oh, as I say, it was wildly complicated. But in one of the episodes, a girl called Emma, there are a couple of things that Emma does, but one of them was almost dying in the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls, and that was based on a real thing that happened to Lenny Goodings at Virago. She told me this story about herself when we were on a train going on our first book tour for Virago. We went to Manchester, we went to Edinburgh, and we sat on the train, and she told me this story about how she had almost died. She had been asked if she would like to be one of the early test subjects for a rubber raft trip down the Niagara River below Niagara Falls through something called the Whirlpool Rapids.

And, you know, a big raft, chairs on it, certainly, she said, so she gets on. Raft, chairs on it, certainly, she said, so she gets on. But nobody had told the operators that there had been an extraordinarily heavy rainfall upstream, and they had opened the floodgates somewhat more. So the water was a lot more rapid-y and whirlpool-y than they had planned for, and the rubber raft clamshelled. It went like this, and then it flipped over, and all the people were thrown into the river, and four of them drowned. So Lenny found herself underneath the water, kicking madly and

saying to herself, this is a stupid way to die. I refuse to die in this stupid way. She kicks herself to shore. She crawls up onto the shore, and there are two people walking their dog, crawls up onto the shore and there are two people walking their dog. And here she is streaming with water and blood and, you know, very battered. And she says to them, because all she can think of is, am I on the Canadian side or the American side? Because if I'm on the American side, I don't have my passport. They won't let me back. So she says, is this the Canadian side or the American side? And they say, it's the Canadian side. And they keep on walking. Then she's supposed to be going to her brother's wedding that day. And everybody at the wedding has heard the radio report.

And they think she's dead. So she sloshes her way back to her house where she's living. And they all go oh my god you're alive whereupon she completely upstages the wedding because it becomes all about the fact that she isn't dead it was the same day her brother's wedding the same day good grief i know lenny i have met her what an absolute legend yes we'll ask her about this anyway she turns up in a story called The Whirlpool Rapids. I asked her for permission.

I said, can I use this? Absolutely, said Lenny. So that is actually Lenny's story that started out being in this novel I was writing and then became a story of its own. But the failed manuscript actually had a knock-on effect of rather more seismic impact, didn't it? Well, then I started writing The Handmaid's Tale. And I realized that I'd been fooling around with this other manuscript to avoid that. And The Handmaid's Tale refused to be avoided in that way

any longer. So I just sat to and started doing it. Why do you think you were avoiding it? It was too nutty. Remember what year it is. This is going to be 1983, 4. Three or four years into the Reagan administration. And it was under the Reagan administration that you saw a lot of pushback, dismantling of the New Deal, and particularly pushback on women's rights. Not to the extent we're having

right now, but enough to be a straw in the wind. And that's when people on the religious right started saying the kinds of things they would like to do should they achieve power. And they were already setting to work on the long road to achieving those goals. So my question to myself was, well, if you want women to be in the home, how are you going to stuff them back in? Because they're all running around like ants having jobs and things. How are you going to actually round them up and make them be in the home. Some sort of leave it to beaver 50s fantasy that's going on here that moms were in the home with aprons on and being nice all the time and baking a lot of cookies.

And that never quite happened in that way, but people think it did because they weren't there. It's like all of these fantasies we have about historical periods. It was never the way it is in the movies to the people living through it. Did it feel different when you were writing The Handmaid's Tale? Was there something about it that you thought, this is special? I did think this is insane, but does that mean special? But then I thought, well, that's what they would do, wouldn't they? So there was a lot of that kind of thinking, but then I thought, is anyone going to believe this? So when it came out, there was a range of reactions,

and one of them was in England, and it was Jolly Good Yarn because they had done their religious war in the 17th century. So whatever other splits in English society were going to happen, they would not be that. So that was what I felt at the time. Canada being a nervous place, always said couldn't happen here. Less likely because it's too multiple and you have a number of different kinds of people in it you always have had officially bilingual the strongest women's movement in Canada was actually in Quebec because they had had the most repression of women previously so the daughters of those women said, we're not doing this. And they were actually the strongest at the time. So I felt unlikely in Canada,

less likely, because Quebec, as it frequently does, would have thrown itself on the railway tracks, said, nope, we're not doing it. In the United States, there were two reactions. One, don't be silly, Margaret. Ha ha ha. We're a liberal democracy. We always will be. We're not going to do this. The other one, how long have we got? Was there a third one, which was how dare you say this, which was abusive? That came a bit later, but more with the film than with the book. Right. At the time of the film, I said,

why are we getting death threats for the film and we didn't get them for the book? And they said, oh, those people don't read or they don't read your kind of book. The Handmaid's Tale was published in a pre-internet era. Obviously, the TV adaptation comes about when we're all fervently on social media or so it seems. We're slackening off on that a bit. Have you noticed? Well, you're not on Twitter. Yes, I am.

Oh, you're always slacking off. Okay. I've got the sub stack now. And I'm relieved we're slacking off and we're sort of rediscovering the power, hopefully, of real life community. But have you been the subject of a lot of abuse? But I always was.

I just arrived in different ways. So the other thing that you tell young writers, particularly I have to say young female writers, is if you get a bit of fame, you're going to get hate mail. And if you get a bit of fame or win a prize, within the year you will get three nasty, vicious personal media attacks from people you don't know. So that has always happened. It's just that it proliferates more when you have platforms that allow proliferation. A lot more extreme with female

politicians, much more. How do you deal with it? What's your own personal tactic? Other people's stuff is about them. So if you wish to reveal that side of your personality in public, be my guest. Sensitive souls get quite wounded by it. But we're Scorpios, Elizabeth. We are. We've got this. You throw this at me, but with my magic deflecting powers, I deflect it. And where it's going to land is back on you. Yes. I love that. Send the cave bear at them. I have adored every second of this conversation. I can't thank you enough for giving me your precious time, my fellow Scorpio. I really want to know what you're writing right now. There are two more things I want to know. One is what you're writing right now. Well, apart from my sub stack,

I'm writing, wait for it, Elizabeth, I'm supposed to be writing, quotes, a literary memoir. Oh, how exciting. I said to my editor, well, that sounds pretty boring. It's like I wrote a book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book. There's not much you can say about, I wrote a book. You can say where you were when you were doing it, but she's, oh no, that's what I, not what I meant. I meant of a literary style. You can put in lots of other stuff. I said, good, because that's the interesting parts. Memoir in a literary style or memoir of a literary style? Well, I think that's up for grabs i think just i'm just going to call it writing stuff that happened and was funny that's a genius title i

really hope you are going to call it that writing stuff that was not funny at the time but maybe is now for other people you can put the headless nun in there and the typewriter without the L. I can't wait. Well, the headless nun. So we said to the vicar who had rented us this house in Blakeney, we said, tell us about the haunted house. He said, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha. Have you been talking to the locals? Ha ha ha. Have you seen them? But you never did see them. How disappointing. I didn't see them, but I'm not the kind of person who sees those kinds of things people had creepy feelings in the parlor sometimes the nuns were supposed to be there because they had run a leprosarium there in the 14th century so I didn't see any lepers either gosh you and your houses fascinating yes well vicar said well we don't believe in the

headless woman in the kitchen because the only person who ever saw her was an american woman in search of her roots that's that and we did have the jolly cavalier in the dining room he had wandered in from the pub next door i think he'd gone out to take a leak and got confused and her door was open and there he was saying like where's the pub this is an actual person my final question are you ready it's deeply profound and complicated and I don't know how you're going to answer but let's try my final question is actually about your skincare, because you have incredible skin. Well, thank you, Mom. My mother had good skin, so part of this is genetic.

After I was about 14, I never liked baking myself in the sun. And up north in the summer at that time, before the ozone layer got into trouble, it was really hard to get it in. Yes. It's actually kind of hard. So that, plus I never smoked, not because I'm virtuous, but because I did try. I tried smoking and drinking.

I'm just not cut out for them, Elizabeth. So the part where I was supposed to be in Paris smoking Gitan and drinking absinthe, that just didn't work out. I like that. But apart from that, I do like hats with brims. What else can I tell you? I don't wear the kind of makeup that makes you all a different color. You're not a contourer. You don't have heavy contour brushes. What is that? heavy contour brushes what is that it's um like kim kardashian she sort of pioneered it where you put a sort of brown stripe underneath your cheekbone and then rub it in with a sponge and

it's yeah i've had makeup artists do that for me when i was going to be on tv shows and things so i understand how it's done you, it comes off on your clothing. From contouring to witchcraft, this is a conversation that has taken me everywhere. Thank you, Margaret Atwood. Contouring is witchcraft, Elizabeth, you know that. It is. I believe it is. But I know that there's a whole thing around belief. I'm just so delighted to have met you. And I wish you a very happy birthday for November the 18th when you get there and thank you so so much for coming on How to Fail. Thank you lovely to talk to you. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day I would so appreciate it if you

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