On with Kara Swisher - Beyond ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: Margaret Atwood on Memoir, Grudges, & Getting Older

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Margaret Atwood is one of the most famous and prolific authors of the modern era. Though best known for her 1985 hit “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her dozens of works span literary genres — poetry, novels, children's books, essays, short stories — and often defy neat categorization. Now, at 86, Atwood has written her first memoir. At roughly 600 pages, it’s an intimate look at the ways her personal life inspired and shaped her writing.  Kara and Atwood talk about her lifelong passion for the outdoors, how she decided to become a poet when she was just a teenager, and her reputation for having an eerie prescience about major world events. They also talk about Atwood’s fears about the Trump administration’s use of power, and why she still considers herself to be a hopeful person despite her predilection for dark stories.  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've actually been to the Trotsky House in Mexico and where he got ice-picked. Ice-picked. And you can also see the tiny little kitchen where poor Mrs. Trotsky had to work. You always forget about Mrs. Trotsky. Swisher. My guest today is Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood. She's best known for a dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, which turned her into a literary star in the 1980s. The book saw another major boost in popularity when Hulu turned it into a hit series in 2017, just a few months after President Trump first took office. It burnished Atwood's reputation as someone who has an eerie prescience, as if she could see the rise of authoritarianism and the religious

write in the U.S. long before anyone else could. But Atwood has actually written dozens of other important novels, poems, essays, short stories, and children's books. She's also a two-time Booker prize winner, and now at 86 years old, she's written her first memoir. It's called Book of Lives, a memoir of sorts. At close to 600 pages, it's an intimate look at the ways her personal life inspired and shaped her writing. I think it's a must read, and she's such a legend in so many ways. And my favorite book is not Handmaid's Tale. It's Cat's Eye about her young life and relationship with another girl who was a bully, but she's a much more complicated tale.

This woman, she contains multitudes, let's just say, well beyond Handmaid's Tale, and I was hoping to bring that out in this interview. Before we get to my conversation with Atwood, I'm interviewing Dara Kosra Shahi, the CEO of Uber, and Chris Ermson, the CEO of Aurora, live on stage at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. on Monday, December 15th. These are going to be two really sharp conversations about applied AI and autonomous vehicles to register for free tickets, Google Hopkins, and Keraswisher. All right, let's get into my interview with Margaret Atwood, whom I'm an enormous fan of and more so after this interview. Our expert question comes from Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, so stick around.

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That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-Frey at O-D-O-O-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. It is all. Margaret, thanks for coming on. on. I really appreciate it. And it's lovely to be here. So I have a lot to talk to you about, and as I said initially when we were first talking, is I know everyone asked you about Handma's Tale. I'm sure we'll

get to it, but I was really delighted that the book covered lots of other things. And the cover was really striking. It's one of the most striking book covers, and I'm sure you had a lot to do with it. You're wearing a bright pink coat with this dramatic accordion-like collar. You also have a pair of matching pink gloves. I have to say my six-year-old daughter was thrilled with it, by the way. You're looking straight at the camera and you have your finger on your lips and it looks like you've either just told us a secret or you're about to. I was fascinated by your cover. I don't know why. I don't usually pay attention to them, but I'd love you to talk about it because it communicates a lot, I think. Okay. So how did it come about? So you know how these things go. There's a photographer.

He brings a stylist. They have a lot of clothes that they want you to put on. And you say, I'd never wear that, I'd never wear that, I'd never wear that, I'd never wear that. So you put on the black clothing and do the serious author shot. And so you do that, and then they say, well, just for fun, why don't you try on this big puffy thing that will make you look like a dandelion? And you say, oh, I would never wear that, and they say, just for fun, put it on. So you put that on, and you do look like a dandelion, and then they say, well, just try on this nice pink one with the collar that looks like a folio.

Oh, I would never wear that. Well, just for fun, put it on. So you do, because you're weak spined like me. And then, and here's the matching gloves. You put those on. And by this time, of course, you're a little groggy, and you start fooling around, and you go, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

So that is speak no evil that's on the front of the boat. So you're a weak spined. So it's a weak spined. effort. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not weak spine. Well, yes, we can talk about that too. Yes.

So that's how it came about. And the English, being always quite mischievous, put out a set of postcards with all three. And they also put out, in the advanced reading copies, they put some of them with hear no evil, some of them would see no evil, and some of them with some of them with speak no evil. Well, I think it communicates a lot. Even if you didn't, even if you were weak spine and didn't attend it to and you were forced into that. It is striking and everybody's very happy with it and I don't have the outfit because where would I wear it? That's true. There's a lot of other choices you could have made. And I also like the idea

of book of lives and a memoir of sorts, which is, I think pretty much describes the book, which is that you contain multitudes. So let's talk about the contents of the book now instead of just the cover because a book isn't just as cover, in this case slightly. You've written dozens of books, and this is your first memoir of sorts, as you said.

You said one of the reasons you waited until you were in your 80s to write is because, quote, people died. But also that includes people you write about very lovingly like your parents and also your longtime partner and fellow author Graham Gibson. Why do you feel like you needed that distance

even for people you loved to tell the story of your life? Well, I think you do because it's the story of your life, not the story of their life, although their life has a lot to do with your life. In other words, if you didn't have parents, you wouldn't exist.

So I did put in quite a lot about them. They were quite exceptional. I have written about them before in various works of fiction, but this allowed me to put the thing that my father wrote when he was fairly old about how he became an entomologist, which is a real back-of-the-backwoods to major university 20th century story, and part of which, of course, you're always part

of your time and place. At that moment, in time, they were looking for people like him. So today it wouldn't be so easy. No, not at all. Not at all. But when you think about telling the story of your life, do you have to be older to tell it? Do you feel? Well, it's very hard to tell the story of your life, you're pretty much entire life, because quite frankly, we know the plot by now, Kara. And we kind of know how it's going to end. But when you're 20, you don't know that. Right. So it's all before you. Even when you're 30 and think you've just become an old prison, you really don't know, as they say, while reading novels, how it's going to turn out. You don't know that. So memoirs written by younger people are usually centered around an episode, an incident, a motif, and they are circumscribed this many years. So, or this many months, quite sometimes.

Or something, a drug addiction. Something like that, yeah. Yeah. What would you say the motif of your book is then if you had to? The motif? Yeah. You never know. And you do not, actually. You still don't.

You do not. You never know. Yeah, you never know. That's interesting. So you would revisit a lot of your old work to write that book, including some early stories that were never published. And you say the process conjured up strange dreams that you were conversing with the benevolent dead. I love that phrase, a benevolent dead, because there's other kinds, by the way. Explain what you mean by that. And also, what was it like to revisit those stories and photos you put aside for decades? Yeah, so ghosts. Voices from the past. So we're back with Scrooge and the ghost of Christmas past.

When Scrooge says long past, and the ghost says, no, your past. So the ghosts of your past, you as an individual, you as an individual and everybody has them, unless they've lost their memory and they don't. The benevolent ghosts are people that you liked and meant you well. And malevolent ones are people you didn't like who didn't mean you well. What else can I say about that? When you think about that, because I want to get into your book, Katzai. It's my favorite book of yours, actually. Oh, oh, you knew Cordelia. Yeah, I did indeed.

We all knew it at Cordelia. But when you have to revisit those stories, tell me what that was like. Okay, things that weren't published, of which there are a lot, because I wrote copiously from the age of 16 onward, and who knows why I saved this stuff, but I did. So your reaction to those is, thank you, Providence, for not publishing this work. Did you ever look at something and think that's good? I thought this was written by quite a weird person. Oh, wow. Okay.

That's what I thought. Really? But I also thought, yes, it has promise, but I wouldn't want to live or die by this. Did it make you change how you thought of your younger self? I mean, everyone has a version of what they thought they thought of themselves, and then there's the reality. Yeah. Oh, I think your version of yourself changes from decade to decade and even from year to year, because we are all involved. involved in narrative revisions.

Right, right. And changes a point of view. So something that seemed like a terrible tragedy to you when you were 18 seems like a funny anecdote when you're 40 and then when you're 70, you may have forgotten all about it. So we all do that. We all prune, edit, and look at things

from a different perspective. And if we're writing murder mysteries or if they're great unsolved mysteries in our lives, we can even have aha moments. You open the drawer and here's the letter from somebody telling you things that you really didn't know at all. Right, right. How did your personal narrative get revised, would you say,

as you looked at that? Well, I think you get older. If you're lucky, you get older. If you're not lucky, you die. So as you get older, your perspective on your own actions, other people's actions, that changes. And I think you either become more forgiving and tolerant and understanding of things, or you become more set in your ways and curmudgeonly.

And since I knew some set in their ways in curmudgeonly people when I was younger, I try not to be that person, although I can feel sometimes traces of it creeping in. And so I see what they did and how they behaved with what I like to think is more perspective. In doing it. So a lot of the early chapters are about your childhood and summers you spent in Canadian forests around Lake Superior. Your father, as you said, was an entomologist. He studied insects that caused forest infestations. And you describe your mother as a tomboy kind of, I guess it's an old word.

Without a doubt, well, tomboy doesn't necessarily mean gay. It just means not interested in fruit. really frogs. Right. Well, that would be me. I'm also gay, but that's a different story. But it's an old word. I wonder if there's a new word for that. But how do you think of those... Well, that's how she described herself. Well, that was the word of the day. So I'm happy to stick with her vocabulary. That's fine by me. So how do you think those summers shaped your sense of self and what it meant as you got older? Okay. So we're not talking summers. We're talking two-thirds of the year. So from the time the ice would

go out in northern Quebec to the time when it would set in again. So insects do nothing in the winter. And anyway, we would have frozen to death because our house that my father built didn't have any insulation. It wasn't made as a winter residence. So how did all of that shape me? And we're talking about quite a few years. First of all, if there's a problem, figure it out.

So don't just sit down and go boo-hoo. If something breaks, fix it. And if you don't have the part, improvise. So never throw out a bendy piece of wire. So bendy pieces of wire is what you brought away. Yes. Are you listening to me? Are you paying attention?

Collect those bendy pieces of wire now. because you may need to... Right, right. Sort of a MacGyver attitude. When you, from an early age, you're also drawn, even in those settings, obviously it's a beautiful place.

There's a lot of physicality to the world being outdoors. But you were also drawn to writing and the more reflective arts, and you were six when you wrote your first book of poems called Rhyming Cats. At 16, you decided you wanted to be a poet, although you say in the book,

you're not sure why. Talk about sort of the development of you as a writer in this setting then that was so impactful to you? Okay, in this setting, there was nothing else to do when it was raining. So you could read, you could draw, you could write. That was it. So no movies, no Saturday morning programs for children, no, not much radio. Sometimes we seem to have gotten the Soviet Union, I don't know why.

And no television, it didn't really come in anyway until the 50s. And what else was there none of, no theater, no school. So when it rained, you either did your school lessons if you were old enough to have any, or you read and wrote. And I read from an early age, partly because two stories my brother taught me. Second story, nobody would read the funny papers to me. Do you know what the funny papers work? Oh, sure, I do.

I'm old. I'm old, Margaret. I knew what the funny papers. I read Nancy growing up. Oh, yeah, yeah, though. She was good. She was never funny, actually. Nancy was not funny?

Never. Go back and look at it. I would sit and wait and see if it would be funny. It was never funny. Well, ironic. Well, she had adventures. She did. She did.

So you had nothing to do. So rain, essentially, is what you're saying. Rain is the cause. No, I would say nature is a vacuum. So vacuum is the cause. There wasn't anything else to do. So we're in a Bronte situation in which we had an imaginary universe or two and we made up stories about that. And sometimes we wrote them down or made pictures about them. And I think a lot of kids do that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, they used to. One of my kids is like, what did you used to do when you stood in line? I'm like, nothing. We just stood in line. So what drew you to poetry specifically as a kid as opposed to writing novels or biology like science or something? You write about your decision to become a poet when you were crossing your high school football field on the way home one day. Do you remember the four-line poem you said composed in your head? I do, but I'm not going to tell it to you because it's not very good. Okay, all right. What else can I tell you about it? What made you decide to be a poet there with not a very good poem or why poetry first?

Yeah, you don't decide to be a poet. Poetry says, come with me, and you either say yes or no. But if poetry doesn't say, come with me, there's no point. Right. If you look at the juvenilia of people who became, quotes, famous poets, usually what has survived shows promise, but it's not the same as their later work. Because they go through an apprentice period

in which they're essentially imitating other poets and things that they feel an affinity with. And I do describe my period of, writing a lot of garbage blowing around on the streets, T.S. Eliot-ask types of poems. That was your inspiration, T.S. Eliot? Oh, I had a lot of them, but he was the one I imitated in university because, hey, he was the guy. He was the guy? Mine was Louise Glock. I love Louise Glock. Yeah, but she hadn't appeared yet.

No, I know that. So can you tell us what that poem was about? Or just are the topics that interested you when you started? When I started? Well, I do describe my rather bad poem about, in fact, I put it in, about the Hungarian Revolution. Okay. You weren't born in 1956, no. I almost was born, but.

Well, it was very cliffhanging at the time. Everybody got very excited about it, and then they got very despondent as it was crushed, and a lot of people died, a lot were arrested, and a lot of them came to Canada. Oh, I didn't really. So I knew a number of these, and still known people who had gotten out at that time. Yeah, for me, it was Salvador. That was a lot of Carolyn Forchay and then Glouc.

Yeah, well, Carolyn Forchay is an old pal, and she told me about El Salvador as we were driving away from the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption. away from Portland. Wow. So the story of that was, I was supposed to go out and read poetry there with Carol and Forchet. This mountain blew up.

So I phoned them and said, it's still okay to come to Portland. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The window always blows in the other direction. So we're doing the reading and we look out the window

and it's snowing. Ash. But it isn't snow. It's volcanic ash. So by the time we're finished the reading, you can't get out of Portland. So no planes, everybody's taken the last train, buses aren't running nothing.

So we feel quite trapped, and we arm twist and browbeat somebody into driving us to Eugene, Oregon, which is out of the fall zone, and we hire a car. And we both have a plane that we're supposed to be catching from San Francisco. So we'd drive down the coast of California in the dark and to keep stopping at Smitty's pancake houses and to keep ourselves awake. This was back in the days when I could drive no longer with me. We told each other stories of our lives.

Oh, my God. And one of the stories of the lives that she told me was El Salvador and what was going on there. And I said, well, can you write about this? No, no, no. Nobody will publish it. They're all too scared. I said, well, why don't you publish it in Canada?

Oh, my God. Why don't you break the story in Canada in which she did? I can't. For people who don't know, Karen Faw, she wrote a beautiful book of poetry about El Salvador called The Country Between Us. And I can't believe you're the reason. Well, thank you. Let me just say.

I'm not the reason. Well, I'm just the fix-it person. Well, it works for me. It's one of my most important books I've ever read, actually. So, especially the Colonel, of course. everyone knows the colonel, but I like the entire book, actually. Carolyn, I hope you're listening, Carolyn. We'll be back in a minute.

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and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC. So let's pivot to your career in some of these books. The duality is a theme that runs through. a lot of your work, including this memoir. And you say, every writer is at least two beings, the one who lives and the one who writes. But you say in your case, there are more than two, as you said on the cover, Book of Lives. That comes through with these two parts of your identity. There's the Peggy Nature side, the nickname you earned as a teenage camp counselor. Then there's the author, Margaret Atwood's side, who's maybe a little more serious, maybe not. So how is Margaret

the person distinctly different from Margaret the writer? Margaret the person? Yeah. Well, is there a Margaret the person? I don't know. No, we don't know. Maybe there's just Peggy the person and Margaret the writer, which would be very neat. So people say, well, what's the connection?

And I usually cite Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So I'm the Dr. Jekyll person, and Margaret is the... Mr. Hyde. Well, explain that, please. I can't leave that there on the ground. You could. I could, but I'm not going to. I should have just picked it up and I'm asking you what it is.

I know you are. Okay, so Mr. Hyde, and we're not going to push this too far, because Mr. Hyde is unequivocably evil. But let us say that the writer's side of people is usually somewhat more intense, and it's usually somewhat darker in its imaginations, in its imaginings, especially if you're writing in the 20th and 21st centuries when carefree social comedy is harder to write than it was in, say, 1820. Yeah, because those are the fun days.

Well, no, it's that social classes were isolated, and you could write about them as if nothing else existed. Right, as things weren't linked to each other. So you think the writer is darker than the person? I would, it's what's something is very interesting. I've seen you speak at a number of things. I never had the guts to come up and introduce myself, but your humor really comes through in your memoir in a way that I have seen you in public at speeches and various book readings. And you're very funny, which is something I was caught off guard by, I think many people are. I had someone sitting next to me, and they were like, she's hysterical.

Like, how dares she be? She wrote The Handmaid's Tale. How couldn't you be not dire? Well, Maid Maid's Tale has a number of jokes. I agree. But when you think about yourself and your presentation, because you do carry around the seriousness part of it, right? And the darkness part as a public figure. Yeah.

What can I say about that? Somebody said to me, why do you always write these gloomy dystopias and you're so pessimistic? I said, I'm not really because I didn't kill them all off at the end. You know, some people have. So that's the hopeful part. They're not all dead, correct? They're not all dead, yeah. They're not all dead.

And as for The Handmaid's Tale, we know by the historical note at the end that this regime did not last. Right, exactly. Which I think, I actually tend to argue when people are talking about your books that they're actually quite hopeful because they're about the fight, the existence of a fight that continues despite. Yeah, there is always a resistance and that can go either way. Yeah, so for my characters, I write the year of their birth and then all the years across the top and I write the months down the side. and that allows me to pinpoint what is going on in their lives when they are a certain age. So we all are part of our own time and place

and I cannot escape the fact that I was born in 1939 two months after World War II began. So the whole Hitler trajectory, the whole World War II trajectory was part of my growing up And so was the Stalin trajectory, which was somewhat different. But it, too, eventually fell apart. The question that always occurs when these things fall apart is what happens then? You know, what replaces it?

What becomes that, right. It's an interesting idea because one of the things, I have a relative, even though I sort of rail on tech and billionaires and things like that, everyone's like, you're rather hopeful. And I said, well, to me, all dictators end up dead in a hole. That's been my historical, just observation. But so does everybody. Right. But there's a dead in a hole and then there's... Yeah, there's a dead in a hole and then there's... I mean, killed by their people or strung upside down or the Chachascus. A lot of them, not Stalin. He died with his boots on. He did. I lived in Germany right after the wall fell. I covered stuff there and it was really interesting.

What part of, were you in Berlin? I lived in Berlin, and the wall had just fallen, and I lived in Kreuzberg, which was right next to the wall at the time. Shape at the time. Yeah, and it was still there, pieces of it. I mean, it had been broken down. But what was really interesting is when I went into East Germany, and they had never been taught about the Holocaust that much, or it was their fault or anything else. And so they had a whole different history, and it was. Completely.

It was riveting. And, of course, the West Germans had been very much taught about the Holocaust in their culpability. And so the difference between them, and I was covering race riots about immigrants, they were anti-immigrant in Rostock. And I'll never forget, it was the birthday of Rudolph Hess, so these neo-Nazis went and had a march, and you couldn't do it in West Germany. So they wandered all over East Germany, and I followed them on a small car. And I kept thinking, God, Rudolph Hess is the worst Nazi to celebrate, but all right. And all these people in East Germany were celebrating this, which was really interesting, except for one woman who stood in front of the march and said Shada, which is shame, of course.

And I wrote about her, but it was something else. And you wrote part of the Handmaid's Tale while you were in West Germany and visited East Germany. Yeah, West Berlin. Yeah, but you also went there before the wall. file, correct? Oh, yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. Well, it was very tight. In fact, it was the tightest

probably of those East Block countries, and people didn't really want to interact with you as adults, and they were quite happy to say, Oh, decline an angle about your child. That was safe.

Yeah. But obviously everybody was worried about who else was watching them, and rightly so, because we now know that at least one in every 50 East Germans was spying for the regime. Through those files that came out, right? You probably know this book called Staziland. So, yeah, so that was East Germany with terrible ice cream and awful chocolate, and not much you could spend your converted money on,

which you then couldn't convert back. So there was always a cash grab at the border. You had to change Western money into their Deutschmark. and you could not re-convert it. Right, so you had to keep their money. I assume it was formative, seeing that, presumably. Well, it was very interesting, and then we went to Czechoslovakia.

Also very interesting and pretty tight, but not as tight. And then we went to Poland, which was very loose, even in 1984. So I thought to myself at that time, it's going to crumble here first, which it did. Yeah, and then Czechoslovakia, and then he stony. But Poland had a big opposition, namely the Catholic Church. Yeah. And it was huge, and it was so big that they couldn't arrest and shoot everybody,

although they arrested and taught some people. Right, they did. So like we're talking about, your lived experiences are a big influence in your writing, though in your memoir you revealed that you were bullied by a group of girls when you were nine and your experience inspired Katzai, which, again, is my favorite of your books. And you're right. Everybody has a Cordelia, I feel. Not everybody.

Some people were Cordelia. Oh, right, fair. There's an imbalance there if everybody has one. Well, everyone who writes about a Cordelia had one, and Cordelia doesn't write. Yeah, sometimes Cordelia does write, but she writes different things. Yeah. Could you read a little bit from the part of a book for us? Yeah, so I'm talking about Katzai, but despite its universality, it was true that parts of the novel

were autobiographical. I avoided saying so then because the chief perp was still alive. She'd become a teenage friend and we'd kept in touch, but now she and her immediate family are all dead. While writing the novel, I came to realize that she was a damaged person, that she was a lot unhappier than I'd ever been, and that she would be hurt if I identified her. Did she even remember what she had done to me. In some way, probably, though for her it had been a sort of game. For me, on the other hand, it had been serious. Anyone who thinks that females are perfect, that girls are nicer than every sadistic thing girls and women do is the fault of the patriarchy has either forgotten a lot or never been a nine-year-old girl at school. The desire for power

is a human constant, though the ways of demonstrating this desire change according to circumstances. Amazing. You're absolutely right. Your credula was a girl named Sandra. How did that experience of being boldly play into your views? Because I think that's a very nuanced view of feminism, right, and your willingness to criticize some aspects of the movement. I find it to be, again, factual. Yeah. So if you look on Wikipedia, at least last time, And look, there were 75 different kinds of feminism. So when somebody says, are you a feminist, I always say, what kind did you have in mind? Because there are many different kinds, and I saw it during the 70s, and there are factions, sub-factions, differences of opinion, arguments, all of this stuff goes on while feminism is actually achieving some success.

in the 70s, the right to have your own credit card, even if you're married, and a lot of other things actually got achieved. But there was always factionalism, and you do find that whenever something new hits the ground. I'm quite interested in the moment, at the moment, in the Cromwellian revolution in England in the 17th century. So I'm reading Baudet, and I did not realize it was so factional. It doesn't mean that the movement has no value. It doesn't mean that people in it are not serious people or anything like that. It just seems to be something that happens at these moments in human history

when things are in serious flux. So you have a reputation for writing stories that do speak to women, though, and the issues they face, but on a personal level, many feminists idolized the fact that you never married your longtime partner, Graham Gibson, you didn't take his name, you had one daughter, but that's not what you actually wanted,

reading this. You wanted to get married and have more kids. It was something he apologized to you for it toward the end of his life, as you were right. But talk about the disconnect between your personal life and how people perceived you. Well, you kind of get stuck with these things, which you can't contradict without sounding like a complete idiot or just unbelievable. So the reason Graham didn't want to get married, which is quite funny from this perspective, from my age now, it's quite funny. He said he already had known three Mrs. Gibson's, and he didn't want to create another one. So his mother, his stepmother, and his ex-wife were all Mrs. Gibson.

Don't you think that sounds quite strange? It does. So you just don't correct people, like in that regard? Well, I can correct them now because all those people are dead. Right, that's a fair point. But I couldn't correct them at the time without causing real trouble with the stepmother and the ex-wife, and we're still alive. and still, you know, joined at the hip in some way with Graham's life because he had two sons. So you can see the dilemma.

Well, actually, it's my decision not to get married as Graham's because he dislikes the other members of Gibson's. You know, that would not have added to tranquility and general peace of mind. That's true. And what's good about this book, I have to say, there's definitely, I like score settling myself personally, But you do score-settle with Gibson's ex-wife, as there isn't any good memoir. One of your friends is quoted in one of the first pages is saying, don't piss her off or you'll live forever, which I love. But you also draw, you know, but you do draw in history extensively to shape novels

that are set in the future like The Handmaid's Tale. Well, what else do you have to draw on? Because you can't actually time travel to the future much as we would like to believe you can. You cannot do it. Right. But how do you marry the personal with a historical to write? call speculative fiction, which is what you call it. Other people think you're some kind of clairvoyant or, look, she was right, et cetera. I know. Well, you reject that, correct?

Yeah, I reject the prophetess because, in fact, there isn't anyone the future. There are lots of possibilities for the future. And then they're completely unexpected things that alter it a lot, so a volcano blows up. So the bubonic plague hits. Europe. You know, all of those things you could not necessarily have predicted. In fact, you couldn't have predicted them at all. Right, but you are prescient. I would say prescient. Profit probably is too much. I mean, the rise of authoritarianism, the financial collapse, a pandemic. But you say you say you were just pointing out things that could happen and that we should be on the lookout for. Absolutely. But you certainly are putting things together. You're almost like one of those CIA agents

who figures out scenarios. That's what you're doing, is scenario building. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, and I read a lot of murder mysteries as a child. I also read a lot of sci-fi as a child. So, yeah, how will it work out? What is the what-if scenario? What if?

So what if America were to become a totalitarian dictatorship? What kind of totalitarian dictatorship would it be? And for that, of course, you always look at a, country's past history, see what it has been. So under the Tsar, Russia was an absolute estate with an extensive secret service and a gulag archipelago. A communist revolution happens. Everything's going to be wonderful. These things always come in as utopia, as you know that. And then, bingo, So it's a totalitarian regime with an even bigger secret service and an even larger gulag archipelago. Yeah.

You are talking about DNA or things going back to their shape. No, no, no, no, just patterns that people are used to and that they tend to fall back into. So the Aztecs, when they wanted to build a new pyramid, didn't knock down the old one. They built a new one on top of it, and that's what countries are always doing. So the old regime in China was an extensive bureaucracy, and so was mouths once things got settled. But settled down, so we don't sort of move out of our shape, is what you're saying. Well, we can move out of it temporarily, but we have a habit of falling back on a shape that we already know. Right, right, right.

So communist regime goes down in Russia, goodbye, authoritarianism. It's all going to be wonderful. In comes capitalism. Ray, hooray, you can get Kentucky fried chicken in Moscow. I'm not sure if that's true, but you can certainly get burgers. And then along comes, you know who, Mr. Putin. And basically, he wants to restore a combination of the czar. He does.

And Stalin. Yeah, old Russia. Yeah. Well, old Russia, you know, in his mind, obviously Stalinist Russia was pretty much the same as czarist Russia. Yes. So you change the flag, you change the statues, but really the structure is pretty similar. So are you essentially saying you're a good guesser based on historical observation? Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

So we go back to the 17th century in America, the answer to our question, what kind of dictatorship would it be? would not be a communist dictatorship. It would not be the French Republic during the revolution. It wouldn't be anything like that. It would not build a cardboard mountain and have a festival to the divine being, although you'll notice on the American money. There is that eye in the triangle.

I saw a national treasure. I know. Anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, the masons got in there pretty solidly in the 18th century. you would have a group of elect elders running what is essentially a dictatorship. They got to say what people were going to do. But you could not become one of those elect elders unless you had a personal conversation with God, according to whom I put in parentheses.

So it's much less likely to be a one-person dictatorship and much more likely to be a top group of people like the commanders in the Handmaid's Tale. Yeah, or say the billionaires in front row at the end of the inauguration. Yeah, like that. I'm not sure he was actually running the American government at this time and neither is anybody else. That is correct.

One of my favorite parts of my history is the chaotic nature of it, which is why it won't last. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. You know how important it is to hire the right person for your small business. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant so you can feel confident you're finding top talent that you can't find anywhere else. The best part is those great candidates are already on LinkedIn. LinkedIn says that employees hired through LinkedIn are 30% more likely to stick around for at least a year

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Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Let's move on to the current state of politics for a second. Every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Yours comes from Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. So, Margaret, I am a big fan, and I wanted to ask you a question. In The Handmaid's Tale, one of the first, things the government of Gilead does is strip women of their economic rights, from closing bank accounts to firing all-female employees. That's the canary in the coal mine before Gilead rips away the rest of their rights. So, flash forward to now, women have lost a disproportionate number of jobs since Donald Trump took office. Women, small business owners are feeling the strain

of Trump's chaotic tariffs and skyrocketing costs more acutely. In short, women are bearing the brunt of an economy that's flattening just about everyone. So people have called you Prussian. How do you view this moment? Okay, the women moment. Well, all dictatorships do this. I can't think of one that has not. Sometimes they have nice slogans at the beginning.

Women hold up out of the sky, et cetera. but it doesn't usually play out. It sometimes plays out that a select group of women get fairly high-profile positions, and you can see that in the Trump government. There are a number of cabinet people, and certainly the White House spokesperson. They're all women. But that doesn't translate any more than it did with duchesses into the lives of ordinary women. and they do seem to be, I mean, even the Soviet, early Soviet state in which it was supposed to have all of these improvements resulted in total chaos for women.

They had no security. Yeah, so I have an even more sinister view. I don't think it's confined to women. I think that the powers that be in the United States have decided that there's too many poor people. So all of the changes that they are making in food, security, and in health care, and particularly in not providing medical care to pregnant women may run into difficulties, the end result is going to be people dying. So I think it's a plan to get rid of poor people. Does that sound too severe? No, I think they hate them.

I think they hate them. And, of course, they get them to vote for them, too. I just interviewed Beth Macy, who wrote Dope Sick as a new book about her small town, and that's exactly what's happening to them, and yet they voted for Trump, which was interesting. Well, he gives the appearance of standing up for the common person, but it's only an appearance, as I'm sure they're going to discover all too soon. I think they kind of have discovered it. I mean, one of the things you said is if you were an American,

you'd be worrying a lot about my country right now, and that we should pay attention to the patterns of power grabs infighting and the disintegration of the rule of law. What are the things you think people should look out for? And what alarm bells do you see? And I think you are actually a hopeful person. What is the antidote to that? In the history you've seen of the United States?

Oh, you mean, how are you going to get out of it? We opened our last podcast event in Toronto. We sold out immediately, and we apologized to the entire country of Canada on behalf of all Americans, except for the Trump people. I don't think you have to apologize on behalf of all Americans, because half of Americans didn't... Yeah, I know, but we felt bad, so we just... Yeah, well, thank you, but don't apologize for things you didn't do.

Right, that's true. Yeah, how are you going to get out of it? Well, I think you will get out of it, but there's going to be an awful lot of repair work, and will it go back to the way it was before? No, because things never do. They don't go back to exactly the way they were before, which is why it was always a pipe dream, make America great again, just exactly what period of history were you thinking of. So I think what you really have to pay attention to is voter fraud and gerrymandering, what they're going to try next in order to maintain control of the government. but I think it's also not out of the question that there will be a rebellion from within the ranks of, for instance, the army, that there will be resistance.

And I think there's already a certain amount of resistance going on with people just not falling in with this plan, not accepting as a given, you know, the patently illegal actions that parts of this government have been due. Yeah, yeah. So rule of law, we won't talk about the Supreme Court, but general rule of law. You know, judges who actually know the law. Which they've been very strong here. A lot of them have been very strong. And how far is the current regime willing to go in its defiance of the law?

and how many Americans will actually sit still for that? Yeah. I have to tell you, there's a distinct fuck this guy sentiment across the country more so. How do you know that? I travel just extensively recently and from people. But do you talk to Joe and the diner? I have. They're all my relatives.

They're my relatives. And it's more like, you know, a lot of people who's interesting were like, well, I think there's too much immigration, but not like this. Like, this isn't how we feel, but not like this is said by a lot of people. Yeah. Like, I believe in, I don't love trans people, whatever, they hate trans people, but not like this, but not like this enters into every sentence. So they don't like the method, even if they might agree with some of the issues they have. And I think affordability has trumped everything.

Yeah. Everything costs me. I think so. Everything costs. Right now, an inexpensive chicken sandwich cost as much as someone makes it an hour. So I think that says it to everybody, like what? Yeah. So, yeah, I have a lot of West Virginia relatives, so I pay a lot of attention to them.

There's a passage in the book about how you started using Twitter. One of the things that I read about a lot is the impact of social media when it started to become popular. You said it helped you fill some seats for a New York event that hadn't gotten much publicity. No kidding. Helped you recover a laptop. You actually left on the plane. This is all good. But how are you thinking about the downsides of social media?

media and the rise of these tech titans alongside authoritarianism in politics right now, because they're the version of the commanders here alongside authoritarianism in politics. Yeah, and they didn't start out that way. Well, they did. I was there. No, they didn't. Okay. That was not the public face they were putting out.

No, but that's what they were like. But go ahead. Yeah, okay, sure. Any entrepreneurial person is going to want one thing, more market share. Right. And a second thing, their shares going up in value. So, of course, they want those things. And it was brought in, same as the Internet.

And I remember when that started, it was a bunch of scientists who wanted to be able to exchange information more quickly. And, hey, it was great at the beginning. And so was Twitter at the beginning. It was a fun place. You could use it in helpful ways. could share information helpfully. And in my mind, the Democrats won the Obama election because they figured out social media, and the Republicans hadn't. But then they did. So yeah, the other

rule of military history, which I'm sure you know perfectly well, is that if you invent a new weapon that's quite successful, your enemy's going to get hold of it pretty quickly and it's against you. That's correct. So that's always what happens. Are you still on Twitter? I had 1.6 million followers. I'm not on it. I, like, left. I called it a Nazi porn bar,

and I said I just don't like Nazi porn bars. Yeah. I'm still on it because a number of people that I follow are still on it. And I did set up a blue sky account, but I haven't really figured out how to use it. It's the same. It's the same. Yeah.

So it's threads. They're all the same. They're all the same. No, it's not a Nazi porn bar. there. It's actually, speaking of which, it's a little, it's very left in that regard. And you've talked that you've come under attack more from the left and the right through your career and that the left thinks you should be preaching their sermon, whatever that may be. What has to happen in this retrenchment of the rights that many spent decades fighting for? Because right now, everything is

the binary, right? You mean over here, over here? Yes, exactly, because you're complex. And I think people want you to be something, right? Oh, sure they do. But, Good luck with that. I can see that. I can see that. But you have said they've been tougher on you if you don't follow through on a row. Well, first of all, they were actually paying attention to me, whereas most people on the right don't. Yes, that's true.

That's fair. So when the Handmaid's Tale came out as a book, we didn't get any death threats. When it came out as a movie in 1990, just as the wall was coming down, we launched it in East and West at the same time. We did get death threats for that. And I said, why didn't we get them for the book? And they said, well, those people don't read. So I must ask the TV series people how they're doing in that department. But it is a conundrum for the right, because why are you objecting to someone portraying what it is you have said you actually want to do?

And the answer, when you say that to them? Well, I never got a chance to say that to them directly. but that's their conundrum. And also the religious part. Some people think it's an anti-religious book. It isn't. It's about the misuse of religion in these power grabs, and that has happened a lot in history.

Especially in the U.S., actually. A lot, yeah. So it has the banner of religion, but it's not Christianity. as anybody who actually reads the New Testament would understand it. I think a lot about Father Coglin and a lot of our history. Yeah, we had people like that in the 30s in Canada. Just curious, when you're on the left side, which I assume you're progressive.

I wouldn't even be able to describe you. I don't use the word progressive because I don't believe in inevitable progress. Oh, okay. And I don't believe in the right side of history because history doesn't have sides that are inevitable, and we are not on the yellow brick road to the Emerald City of Oz. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, which of course was a tale, a populist tale about monetary policy. People don't. And the Emerald City, I think, was D.C. No, we certainly don't understand that. But the Emerald City of Oz, by the way, when we get there is a totalitarian dictatorship. But never mind. It's a benevolent one. Well, the new movie kind of spells that out pretty clearly, right?

Yeah. Yeah, you've not seen Wicked? I haven't seen it. No, no, no, no. It's, okay, so I should go and see it? Oh, both of them, yes. Why should I? Because the singing is great.

Oh, I thought you were going to say because it has a profound political mess and competitive. Yes, too. That does too. Yes, yes, no. It doesn't hit you over the head with it in a, right. But the singing is fantastic. How about that?

The singing is amazing. All right, I believe you. They're very gifted. It's a story about, speaking of, you know, Katzai is about a relation between two women and, or girls and then women later. You talk about that, but it's about a relationship between two women is what it's about. Right. You know. Each one is a different outfit.

Yes, absolutely, but they're the same, you see. You see, it's a mind-funk. How are they? Oh, Dr. Jacqueline, Mr. Hyde. Well, there you go. I think you should say it. You would laugh your ass off is what I would say. Anyway, I want to end by returning to your memoir and talking about you, toward the end of the book you mentioned in passing, you've been doing some Swedish death cleaning lately. This is a practice for people who don't know where you get rid of a lot of your belongings so your children don't have to deal with them, which I think is a very kind thing to do.

It made me wonder if this memoir is also part of that process for you. And if so, do you feel, what do you feel like you've gained from the experience of writing it? Well, I had a lot of fun. Does that count as gained? Yes, absolutely. It's lightning your load, right? Yeah. So I don't get too profound about my deep inner self. You may have noticed that. I appreciate it. I'm the same way. But go ahead. I'm a Tom Stopper girl. You leave everything behind on the journey. But go ahead. He just died. R.I.P. What have I gained?

What have I gained? I don't think in terms of that gaining things. For me, I think more in terms of have I done the best that I could buy the book. No, that's what you want. As a writer, that's what you want to be concentrating on, is your relationship with the book. The book then has a relationship with readers, which you can't control and can't anticipate. participate. It's completely out of your control. So you do the best you can with the book. You have a very intense relationship with it while you're writing it. And then you have a very intense relationship with the

three editors, one from each of the English markets, the states, Canada, the UK, all of whom have different views about what you should put in. And then when it's done, it's out there. It's out. It's gone. Yeah, so what you have gained is the experience of writing, and I suppose you could say that. Then in your real life, what have you Swedish death cleaned recently? What have I Swedish death cleaned? It's a verb now. Is it?

I just made it one. All right, thank you. Mostly they are paper objects. So if you don't want somebody doing your thesis on this, throwing out. So out how it goes. I like the idea. just destroying it. Yeah, it's good by it.

No one need no. Yeah, so I'm getting around to, I always put my novel papers in my, my, I hate to say, okay, my writing stuff. I put it into the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto. So why do I do that?

It would just pile up, would it not? And they will take care of it, and if you need to retrieve something, they can lay their finger on it right away. Yeah, and 100 years from now, some lady will be pawing through it. Maybe, but I might be pawing through it myself for some peculiar reason.

Right, for going forward, yeah. So, you know, finding things in my own house. Is that first poem in there? Not yet, but it will be. Oh, good. Oh, you're not destroying it. Oh, wow, good for you. So you're still writing a lot, and you're still traveling, We were recently in the Arctic Circle for a two-week trip.

You're getting 10,000 steps a day. Your follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale, and the Testaments is being turned into another series. I know you hate being asked what's next, so I'll ask instead, what's inspiring you right now, and what are you watching a reading, and obviously not wicked, but go ahead. Well, I'm paying pretty close attention

to the American political scene, because, of course, you know the old saying, Washington catches a cold Ottawa sneezes and I'm also watching the Canadian political scene which is pretty interesting to us right now

so yeah I mean it's get the popcorn you don't know from one day to the next what's going to happen Yeah life is more interesting than fiction right now in a weird way Well it's also more

terrifying. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that, I'm looking at the situation in Europe as much as I can. And who's going to benefit from all of these shenanigans? Well, I think it will be China. Yeah, agree. I think they're playing a long game. I think they're being pretty smart. And anybody who thinks that you can make a deal with Russia to hand over Ukrainian hoo-ha to anybody in the West is dreaming. You've got to punch them in the nose until they're... Well, because they're in hawk up to their eyebrows with China. That's correct. So the person who's going to get that stuff, it's China should Russia get its hands on. Right. One time I was writing about a tech billionaire and he said, when are you going to stop hitting me? And I said, when you stay down? So that's how I feel

about Russia. Yeah. So the other question people ask me is, what about AI? Is it going to take over the world. And I say, you have a major energy problem. Unless you can solve that, you're just going to run out of electricity. And then they go nuclear fusion. And I go, it hasn't happened yet. Not yet. But they are reviving the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. I don't know if Microsoft bought it, essentially. They need a source of energy because otherwise all the lights are going to go off in every city in America. Yeah, that makes you feel warm and fuzzy. Let's revive Three Mile Island. Yeah, and also the idea that everybody in the world is going to be plugged into some kind of AI and become walking zombies. There just are not enough resources to have that happen.

You don't want AI Margaret Atwood? Well, people have tried. I know. I've seen it. Yes, they were rubbishy at it so far, but they might improve it. They will. All right, my last question is about something not dead, not AI, not whatever, is a longtime birder. I want you to explain why you are.

And are there any species you're still hoping to add to your lifelist? I don't have a life list. Oh, you don't? No, we made a point of not having life lists. Explain why you're a birder and what a life list is for people. Yeah, okay. I grew up with birding because my family just knew all that. By the way, nature will kill us before we kill it.

100%. Jeff Vandamere, I think about him a lot. Yeah, well, you know, microbes will survive. Right, right, along with cockroaches and rats. Cockroaches, yeah, my dad used to say, and this is in the 50s, it'll all be cockroaches and grass. Mm-hmm. And happy Thanksgiving to you, too. Thanks, Dad.

That's what he said, it thanks. Oh, well. Oh, well, this was dinner table conversation, like how many fruit flies multiplying unchecked would cause the earth to be covered to a depth of two miles with fruit flights. Why do you need to know that? Never mind. Well, now you do. We've gotten off the course. Why are you a birder?

What is the, what is, it's because you're a kid? Okay, so I grew up with it. My parents were early environmentalists. So back in the 50s, my dad was systems biologist. This eats, that eats, this eats that. So I just grew up with it. It's my outlook on life. So Graham gone into it.

it in an activist way. And we did for some years, I think it was about 10 years, we worked with BirdLife International, which does very important work internationally because, of course, birds, a lot of birds migrate. They're not limited to one country, so you have to deal with all of these countries. We worked as the honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club, which means we helped to raise money. And that's on the macro level. On the micro level, we set up an organization on Pele Island, which is in the middle of Lake Erie, is the most southerly part of Canada and is on a migration flyway that goes from the Ohio shore,

funnels up across Lake Erie, and spreads out into the boreal forest where these birds breed. So we are migration data monitoring among the other things that we do. And we are right now converting in 1928 large liquor store on Peeley Island. You've got one guess as to why there was a large liquor store on Peeley Island in 1928. Because people need to drink when you're sitting on Peeley Island in 1920s. No, prohibition. Oh. How much rum running was going on across Lake Erie quite a lot.

A lot, that's right. So where was the depot? Well, there was certainly one on Pellion. Right. So, yes, we got hold of this building because our previous building where we put our bird banders was sinking into a swamp, and there were snakes in the bathroom, and we're converting it right now. That's amazing. So do you still bird? Even if you don't have a lifeless, is there a bird you want to see?

Well, I've never seen an ostrich in the wild, and I'm unlikely to see one. Why? Because I'm getting a bit too old to go to ostrich land. Well, you seem like you have a lot of kick in you. I don't know. I think so. Ostrich. Why an ostrich? They're big. I can see them. Oh, you don't have to be like, where this is the bird. That's a fair point.

I'm going to show this with you because you're obviously not ready for it. your vision may decline a little bit as you get older. My vision's been terrible since I've been four years old, so I'm good. It's going to get worse. I can't imagine it would get worse. I'm almost nearly blind. But I get it. I get the age.

You're going to get catarized. But you are not, Margaret Atwood. I'm sorry to tell you. You're still kicking. I really love this book. I thought it was joyful, which is really a nice thing. And I've recommended it to a lot of people. And they're like, isn't Margaret Act depressing?

I'm like, no, she is not. Oh, thank you. I'm glad you're not. Well, so many other things are so much more depressing than me right now than I come across is actually quite bouncy. Yeah, you're bouncy. That's how I think of you. Anyway, I really appreciate it. What a delightful interview.

The memoir is called Book of Lives. Margaret Atwood, would thank you so much for your time. And thank you. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro O'Ssel, Kateri Yokem, Michelle Eloy, Megan Bernie, and Kaelin Lynch. Nishot Kerwah is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you're an honorary Canadian.

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