The Current - It’s finally time for Margaret Atwood to tell her own story

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Writing has shaped Margaret Atwood’s life, from childhood poems about rhyming cats to watching The Handmaid’s Tale become “an approaching reality” in Trump’s America. The Queen of CanLit sat down with Matt Galloway to discuss her new memoir, Book of Lives — and ended up giving Galloway an impromptu palm reading. 

Hey, I'm Sarah Marshall, and there's one story from the past that I've been circling around for years now. This eight-part series traces the hidden history of the satanic panic in North America. We'll connect the dots from Victoria, BC, to the backroads of Kentucky. Satan was having a moment, the sensationalist heartthrob of our time. The Devil You Know, available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Margaret Atwood, nice to see you. Thank you.

Loved to see you again. The last time you and I spoke, we were on a stage, and you were finishing this book, and you said you were nervous about it. Why would you be nervous about telling your own story? Well, I think I was nervous about the ending. It's not going to end happily ever after, Matt. Just letting you know. Just in case people don't know where the ending goes.

How do you feel now that it's out in the world? Well, it's pretty jolly. Everybody's being very nice. They like the cover. I won't really know until, of course, it's actually out there in the world, but so far so good. What was the process, I mean, in doing something like this?

It must have, when you go through your life and go through all of the kind of bits and pieces of your life, was it emotional in putting that together, but also just going through photos and letters? Yeah, that was a huge job, huge. We've all got way too many photos. Sparser at the beginning because it was the age of having to send them to get developed

and it was expensive. And so people had photo albums and they put special ones in there with the little corners. But the first part of it, of course, was my publisher's trying to talk me into doing it. Why would I do that? And I said, what exactly are you thinking about?

And they said, well, a literary memoir. I said, so that would mean, I wrote a book, I wrote a book, I wrote a book, I wrote a book, that sounds pretty boring to me. I said, no, no, no, no, a memoir in a literary style. And that was even worse. So then I thought a memoir is what you remember. It's not like a biography in which people go through all kinds of stuff you've forgotten about. and what you remember usually is silly things you did, evil things other people did to you,

you don't so much remember the evil things you did to other people, and catastrophes and exceptional high points, and the rest of it, like went for a walk, you tend not to remember. So I concentrated on those things, and that was fun because they were memorable to me, anyway. When you look back, I mean, do you recognize the person that you were researching and that you were remembering in some ways and putting this book together? Well, there were moments of what was I thinking? Why did I do that? Who was that person? Yeah, so as you get older,

mad. It happens. Baby. This will happen to you too, probably. So, Yes, what was I thinking? My goodness, I was young and naive, and why did I ever think that? So, yes, there was a certain amount of that, but I think that happens to everybody. Tell me about when you were young growing up in the bush. You spent a lot of time in the woods. Your father was a scientist, and he studied bugs. Insects.

Yes, please. Thank you. And because of that, you spent six. months in the bush and then six months in the city. What was that like? Yeah, a bit more than six in the bush. So we'd go up in April and then we'd go back as soon as it was impossible to be there because it was too cold. What was it like? Well, everybody's childhood seems normal to them because they've got nothing to compare it with. So it was just normal life. And up in the woods, no electricity, no running water, no flush toilets. And things were done differently.

So kerosene lamps and wood-burning stoves, which was very useful to me when I came to write about the 19th century, because that's how everyone was living then. There was nothing else to do in the media area, so no television, no theaters, no school, no, that wasn't always bad because my days in early school, the 40s, it was line up in March, it was still the war, and that's how they did things, boys' door, girls' door, what would happen if you went in the wrong door? It's too horrifying even to think about. It was a lot more free and easy. And if we did our school lessons very quickly,

then we could go out and do whatever we wanted, which has made me a very superficial person. What did you love about the woods? I mean, you have a real affection, and this has continued throughout your life in being in nature. Well, what did I love about it? Are you getting that ick a snake look? on your face. No, no, no. I love

it too. But I just wondered, there are people who would find the snakes and, I mean, everything that was around you. Yeah, because they didn't grow up with them. So I think you if you're used to something and understand it and know it, you generally like it except

for black flies and mosquitoes. They're the worst. I exempt to them. Everybody said, did it make you a writer? And I know not necessarily because writers have had all kinds. kinds of childhoods, nothing like this. So I think writers are writers for all sorts of different reasons,

but you can't stick a person in the woods and expect them to become a writer. You were an artistic child. You did a dance routine, a tap dance routine to anchors away. Margaret, that would the tap dancer? Well, he was surprised. Yes. The thing I remember about that is that I was being

mischievous backstage and was told that if I didn't stop doing that, I wouldn't be able to go on on top of my cheese box decorated like a drum. And I knew they were lying because I was the middle person they couldn't do without me. You also started writing and you wrote, and it's in this building, in this library, your first opus, a book of poems you wrote in grade one called rhyming cats. And illustrated. Very nice. I did the cover, a tradition that continued, because when I got into small press publishing, it was cheaper.

Why cats? Oh, I was obsessed with them. But you weren't allowed to have one. I was not allowed to have one because if you took a cat up to the woods, it would escape and be eaten by something. So I did eventually get one. With him, I was extremely bonded, and I used to bring me dead birds in through the woods,

window, and sometimes semi-dead birds, and on one memorable occasion, a rabbit. It means it liked you. Oh, it did like me, yes, yes, and had good reason to like me, even though I used to dress it up in a bonnet. Tell me about Ms. Bessie Billings. She was your high school teacher. Miss Bessie Billings, a memorable character and well-known in the world of high school teaching, and with many students who remembered her.

well, students of around my age and younger and older. Yeah, she was a paragon of English teachers. We all had to do the grade 13 exams. And it was her job to sort of drag us through by the hair to make sure we passed. But she also said, when I started writing poetry, actually, showed her one of my indecipherable, bironic, dark, gothic poems. And she said, I don't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.

She said you had a feeling for words and an observant eye. So after she was dead, someone found this note that she had written to the other English teachers in the school and sent it to me. So I didn't know this until

quite far along the pathway. But she was looking out for me and felt that I should be encouraged. And it was she who told me to go here and go to Victoria College because it had the best English department. You wrote in your high school yearbook that you wanted to write the Canadian novel.

Yeah, I wrote that. We were doing the write-ups for the yearbook of everybody in our class. And it was me and my boyfriend and we were fooling around. But you also said that it wasn't an act of bravery to say that, but an act of social stupidity. Well, that's what, I mean, you know, high school kids.

Who would say that? But you knew at that time that you wanted to be a writer, right? Oh, I was already writing, so I would have started, I started in grade 12, and I wrote that in grade 13. So, yes, I was quite determined, and that was when I was thinking of going off to France and living in a garret and, you know, smoking jitaine, although I couldn't smoke, and drinking absent, although I was bad at drinking. And that was what I intended to do.

And meanwhile, I was going to support myself originally by writing true romance stories because I'd got hold of writer's markets, the magazine for writers. And they told you at the back what things paid. And those paid the most. More than poetry. Oh, way more than poetry. Just tons more.

So I was going to do that as my day job and then write my works of genius masterpiece at night. But I wasn't any good at writing to romance stories, sadly. What did your parents think of you declaring that you wanted to be a writer? I think they were horrified. Horrified. Probably what. I think they were a she'll get over it. But being my parents, they didn't say any of this. My mother said, if you're going to be a writer, you better learn to spell. That's a bad speller. A lot of writers are because they spell by ear. so I said others will do that for me and they have

so then they invited a second cousin who actually was a journalist because I said I was going to go write for a newspaper bit their tongues invited this journalist to dinner and he said that if I were going to work for a newspaper as a female person I would end up writing the obituaries and the ladies pages and that would be it.

So then I thought, well, maybe I should go to university after all. Tell me about life in Toronto at that time. You would hang out at the Bohemian Embassy. In this book, there's an amazing photo of you at, it was at a club in Yorkville. You're watching Sylvia Tyson on the stage. There she is. Yeah.

But she was Sylvia Fricker. Singing murder ballads or something? It was the folk song era, and a lot of these folk songs were about. people being murdered. So she was singing probably the banks of the Ohio or something like that.

What was that scene like? Okay, so now we've skipped ahead a whole bunch of years and I've gotten out of high school. I've gotten into university and we are now in about the third or fourth year, probably early fourth year of university.

The Bohemian Embassy was on St. Nicholas Street and it was a walk-up. You walked up to this disused warehouse space that they'd turned into a sort of city lights-type coffee house where you brought your alcoholic drinks in a paper bag and poured them into other things because it was coffee only.

And there was an espresso machine, the first one anybody had ever seen. What's that? and you had the little table clause, checkered tablecloths, and the little round tables and the candy bottle with the candle in it. And Thursday was poetry night, and that's when the poets came out from under their logs and read their poems aloud.

So I met older poets and younger poets and would-be poets and people interested in poetry. And that was kind of it. It was an age where there was a real Bohemian underground and respectable people did other things. You say in the book that, I mean, at that time, there wasn't, and you're hinting at this, there wasn't really a literary scene in this country.

Well, there was. It was just very underground. and quite small. You say the Canadians didn't respect writing, especially Canadian writing? At that time, that is absolutely true. And I was told by other people, if you want to be a writer, you better go to England,

or you'd better go to New York, or if you were French speaking, you should go to Paris. Why didn't you do that? Why did you stay? Well, I did go to the States, but not as a writer. I went as a graduate student.

Why did I come back and say, day, the Canada Council had gotten up and running, and things had begun happening that were not happening in, say, 1948. So the Stratford Festival had just started. It was an intent. There was a symphony orchestra. The Canadian Opera Company had just started. It didn't have a big auditorium or anything, but it had begun. And there were other people my age who also had stayed. And some of them then started literary magazines, some of them started little publishing companies,

and I got associated with one of those. So we saw, and Expo 67 was a big, big deal. Canada could actually do something. So just to dial back in time, Canada had done something during World War. too. It was a big player. I think it had the fourth largest merchant marine in the world. And all the convoys to England went from Halifax Harbor. But then after the war, that diminished. And in the 50s, it was really the rise of the American Empire as the only big player, because

England was recovering from the war. Europe was rubble. had to rebuild, and the States was it. And that was when there was a capital gap in Canada because we'd sent so much stuff to the war. What did it feel like to be part of the creation or something? The creation of something, well, we didn't think we were part of the creation of something. You see these things in retrospect. Oh, boy, we did that.

But when you're doing it, you're not thinking that. You're thinking, okay, now there will be a place where we can publish our weird experimental first novels and undecipherable poetry. And to support that, we had to publish other books that people would actually buy, like Law, Law, Law, which was about how to do your own divorce. And VD, which was, I think, the first sexually transnational. Transmitted Diseases book. We got as far as warrants, but we didn't get to AIDS because nobody should know about it yet. So that's how I came to write my book on Canadian literature called Survival. It was going to be like the VD of Canadian literature.

So popular guide for people who didn't know anything in early idiots books. Remember, you know, right them? Yeah. So we were ahead of them. We did it first. What was, you talk about the reception that you were getting when you were writing. You were interviewed by a male radio journalist when you published The Edible Woman who said, I haven't read your book and I'm not going to.

Tell me in 25 words or less what it's about. That's what radio is like then. What can I tell you? I like to believe it's different now, but continue. Oh, I'm sure it's different. You've looked at the pictures anyway. You also did, you did a book signing, what, in the men's sock and underwear department? of the Hudson Bay Company?

You're stealing my lines. Yes, my first professional book signing was in Edmonton, and it was in November when everybody had galoshes. And it was in the men's hawk and underwear department of the Hudson's Bay Company, and why did they put it there? My only explanation is it was near the escalator, and I think they thought people going up and down the escalator would see me sitting with my pathetic little table of edible women amongst the jockey shorts

and would run over and buy them, which they didn't. What happened instead was that men in on their lunch break to buy some socks took one look at this and galloped away in their galoshes. Your longtime partner, Graham Gibson, was he, part of that nascent sort of literary scene. Did you write about how you met him for the first time at a literary event in Toronto? What do you remember about that?

Oh, that was the Milton Acorn People's Poets Prize, which we invented for Milton because he hadn't won the Governor General's Award, and his ex-wife, whom he was still pursuing, had won it. So we did not know that he was bipolar, but we did know that he was prone to depression. So we invented this thing and we even made a medal and we had a party for it.

So all the poets came and literary people. A surprising number by that time because now we're in 1969. So by that time things were really hopping. And Graham was there and he hadn't won it either and I hadn't won it either. But I had won it earlier for poetry, so I didn't much care. But I'd read his book, which was five legs,

and I thought it was really good. And I said, I thought you should have won it. I was not flirting. You're very explicit in saying that. Yeah, no, it wasn't flirtation. It was just a statement. So I think that made an impression on him. You read his palm as well?

That was later. You're a palm reader? Yes. You say that just, yes. Well, everybody asks me about that. I guess I think it's weird. I don't do it professionally. I don't charge money.

If you want me to read yours, I'm happy to take a look. I'd say you have a rather frightened look on your face. I wonder what my palm would say. Are you to read my palm? Right in front of everybody. Oh, my goodness. You want me to do that? Let's see.

I have to see both. Oh, both. You're right-handed or left-handed? Are you going to give me bad news? No, I'm not. You're very healthy, and you're going to live a long time. I don't say that to everybody. Well, you're a pretty stable character. Could I have a flashlight?

Because what am I doing? It's just the Renaissance method of palm reading, which is connected with astrology. So this is your pointy finger, it's Jupiter, this is your Saturn finger, this is your Apollo finger. It's the artistic one, and this is your mercury finger. Now I need my glasses. Oh, no. All the things. I've created a disruption by asking you. I have. I had no idea. Sorry, this is not. Yeah. Okay. So, ooh, how stable you are. Wow. You really see a hand like this. So this is the hand you were dealt, and this is the one you've played. and they are pretty similar.

The only difference is you've cut back a bit on your intuitive functions here. You can see that shorter. And you are really not going to be a bloodthirsty dictator. Sorry about that. You do have some unexplored artistic capability. of an excuse me minor kind Yeah, you're just a pretty

well, everybody should want you for a friend because you would certainly back them up. Oh, that's wonderful. Just a second, I'm not finished. Oh, there's more. Okay. you used to be more flexible, you've stiffened up a bit, I think you've had to stand your ground a bit more than you used to.

But, you know, you'd rather go around than through. You'd rather not have confrontations. You'd rather sort of maneuver your way around. And you're not going crazy any time soon. I think all of that sounds fairly reasonable and maybe actually vaguely accurate, too. Thank you. Yeah, some people, at least most people have at least a few, you know, minor depressions and things.

What did Graham make of you reading his palm? I think he liked me holding his hand. You say in the book that he would look at you and he would think canoe trips. Well, that's a joke. So, you know, in the... days, people look at you and they think different things. But I think he thought canoe trips. Because it's not easy. It's not easy always to find somebody who'll go on canoe trips with you and be any good at it. You said earlier that when you met him, you weren't flirting. You were both married at the time.

More or less. More or less. Was it scandalous at the time? the 60s? Are you joking? 1970 was the year that everybody's marriage exploded like popcorn. You could just hear them exploding all across the country. So I think what happened was a couple of things. It was very hard to get a divorce in 1960 and much easier in 1970. And I think a lot of people who had been bottling up

their desire to get divorced, woo! Here we go, but it was also a point at which grown men were wearing love beads and going peace and other obnoxious, things like that, which I was really a bit too old for. So I wasn't a hippie, and I wasn't a beatnik. We were existentialists. So what does that mean? You are what you do. In four words, you are what you, in five words.

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One of the neat things about this book is that you realize that a lot of the characters that we know from your novels are drawn from actual real people. And, I mean, you can offer plausible deniability when you're doing interviews about the books, but it turns out that maybe there were real people like the mean girl in Katzai is a real person. So let me quote Robertson Davies, who, when asked why at the age of 60, he had suddenly

broken out into novel writing after not having done it for years. He said two words, people died. In other words, now that all these people are dead, I can say these things that I wouldn't have said earlier, not just for fear of being sued, but for fear of, you know, wounding them or causing a family fracas or something like that. So people died. I'm 85. A lot of people have died.

So I can actually say these things now without destroying somebody else's life, except for the people whose lives I wish to destroy. Can I ask you about that? There are some people who remain unnamed in the book? They're still alive. And there are some people who are still alive who are named. They don't mind because I say nice things about them. And then some people you don't say such nice things about, like...

They deserve it. Jan Wong from the Globe and Mail? That was bad. You shouldn't have done that. Do you like holding a grudge? I don't have a choice. I'm a Scorpio. We hold grudges.

It's not an attractive thing to say about yourself. I struggle against it, but not very hard. hard. You get the sense, I mean, you say that all writers are kleptomaniacs, you get the sense that there's a giant repository, that everything is being hoovered up in, it can be stored away for future use. Is that kind of how it operates as a writer, that whatever you see can and could be used in future? You never know. So there's two things about that. Number one, my parents went through the big depression, and they never threw out a useful piece of bending wire, and neither do I. So if something isn't working, in the writing, you put it in a drawer because it might be useful later.

So that's one line of thought. The other is my grandmother's attic on the paternal side was a place of wonder to me as a child because there are all kinds of things up there. Lord knows what they were doing there, but there they were. and that's a description of my mind. It's an accumulation of all kinds of things. You never know when they might come in handy. Maybe they won't.

Maybe they'll be like the dressmakers for them in my grandmother's attic. What is that? But it's there. And you might be able to use it for something. We have an awful lot of trouble and our family cleaning out the communal woodshed because we can't agree on what to throw out.

You can't throw out that. You might need it. You might need it. When I came into this space here, I just looked over behind us, and there's an early, early draft of the Handmaid's Tale. Yes. You said you wrote, started writing that book,

put it down, started writing, because it was too weird even for you. and what did you mean by that why was it too weird even for you okay i had written some somewhat weird things already i never tell my publishers what i'm writing because i know that they will say what you're writing what so imagine that i had said to them okay i'm writing a book said in the future about the united states as a theocratic dictatorship can you imagine what They would have thought of that in 1984 when America was the beacon of light to the Soviet bloc. Nobody would have believed it.

They would have thought I was bonkers and so forth. And my publisher acquired it in a blind auction and was probably pretty horrified when she found out what she had bought. Why if it was too weird for you, did you keep going out? it. Because, as I say, my family contains a lot of eccentric people. If you're trying to write something else and it's not working, and then you try to write some other thing and it's not working, you realize that you've been trying to write those other things that weren't working because you're avoiding the thing you should be writing. So I really had to get back to it and do it. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to write anything else.

How do you understand why so many people say that it's more relevant now than it was, even when it was published? It wasn't very relevant when it was published. That's just it. Although some people in the States said, how long have we got? But people in Europe just didn't believe it. You know, the United States would never, ever, ever, ever, ever go that way. But Ronald Reagan had been elected in 1980, and there was already a push in that direction. from the rising religious right wing.

So I was looking at what they were saying and wondering how you would enact that. You know, if you wanted to get women back into the home, how were you going to make them go there? So that was part of it. So then we had the fall of the Berlin Wall, then we had the 90s, which I can't remember very well, because I was writing three big novels.

And I think in the 90s people thought, oh, good, the Cold War is over. It's going to be world peace. Somebody wrote a book called The End of History, apparently not so much. And then it was 9-11 and everything changed. Then we had a little interlude, which we will call either the Obama years or there was silence in heaven. And then you get the love. trumpet. So then we have the election of Donald Trump and the fantasies of the religious right started being enacted. We were filming Handmaid's Tale, the TV show, beginning late

2016 summer. And we were still filming it in November, and we woke up on the day after the election, and everybody had the same thought, which was, we're in a different show. Nothing about the show changed, but the frame changed, and it was viewed differently from the way it would have been. It was no longer a remote fantasy. It was an approaching reality. So, no, I don't think we're going to get the outfits. But the rest of it, it's not just something I made up. What have you learned about how... I mean, I think people see

what's going on right now and they see people being, you know, scooped off the streets and put onto planes and sent off to other countries and whatever. And they're wondering how they push back. They're wondering how they fight back against that.

What have you learned about that? Okay. You just had a huge no-king's event in the United States and that's part of it. There's a lot of push back through the courts. But when I see, you know, these facilities being built, and people being scooped with no warrant and things.

It's the 30s, and it's also violently unconstitutional. And you are seeing a move away from the principles on which the United States was founded in the 18th century back towards absolutism. And the reason the founding fathers of the United States set it up as a Republican, not a monarchy, was that they'd seen what was happening with monarchies for many hundreds of years in Europe,

which were widespread wars and abuse of citizens. So they wanted to avoid that. They wanted to put in checks and balances, so they would never be in the clutches of Mad King George III. And there is a deliberate attempt to destroy that in the United States now. So these people want to disassemble the United States and put it back together as something else.

Either that or it's a deep plot to wreck the whole country because that is the effect that it appears to be having. That's one side of it. The other side is Americans are ornery. They don't like lining up and saluting. They don't like other people telling them what to do or say or think. or read, there is an inherent, oh, no, I won'tness about Americans, and that is now coming out.

I think they're coming out of their shock and numbness and fear that they had right after the election, and they're putting on frog suits and having big rallies. And fighting back? Well, I wouldn't call it fighting yet. We're not having physical violence. And that's smart of them. They may have paid attention to Gandhi and his principles of nonviolent resistance.

So they know the other side is just looking for a chance to send in the stormtroopers. So best not to be violent. Anyway, it's very, very interesting. And let us be clear, It's not Americans that Canadians dislike. It is what's going on right now, which is by no means all Americans.

In fact, when you go down there, people begin, oh, you're Canadian, I'm so sorry. So don't forget that part and don't start going. We hate Americans because that's silly. When we started talking, you said that one of the things that you were nervous about with this book was the end and writing about the end. The end.

Can I ask you a little bit about that? The way that you write at the end of this book about... We're not going to talk about the end, because that's blowing the ending, Matt. That's not the end end end. It's not the end end. It's different than anything I've read by you, the way that you write about Graham and dementia and his decline.

What was it like to write that? Well, it was truthful. It was sad. It was not fun at the time. And parts of the book were fun at the time. Parts of it weren't fun at the time, but were funny afterwards. And this is just an interlude in which things are sad. After he died, you continued to do your book tour,

and you read about grief in the moment that you were in. You say that you wandered around in hyperspace, appearing focused but not at all there. Why was it easier to keep going than to stop? Oh, I think it's easier for everybody to keep going than to stop. Yes, I just had a friend whose partner of many, many years, died. And she said to me before this happened, should I go to Portugal? Because this is somebody who did, Maid, so there was a date.

And I said, absolutely. You know, travel, do something, be with other people. Yes, we had quite a rollicking book. tour in a very weird sort of way, but my publishers made sure there was somebody with me in all of the places that I went to. Was it hard to write as personal as you are in that section? I mean, it's very, it's a memoir, and so you're obviously writing about your life, but the way that you're writing about that is really, there's a lot that's exposed.

It's a memoir. That's what you do in memoirs. but personally was it like I just wonder whether there were things that you thought maybe I should hold this back or I shouldn't I think there's a lot you hold back

because who needs to know but that's what happened in my life I can hardly not write about it in a memoir there's a line at the end of near the end of the book that says art is long life

is fleeting the shadows lengthen it's hard to shake the feeling. I'm living in the half-life of a partial eclipse. Oh, you're not very old yet, are you? I'm older than I've ever been. And it's your birthday. Happy birthday. Thank you.

Yeah, well, this is just what happens when you get older. So I did write a book, The Blind Assassin, in which the person I was writing about was young, than I am now. And I'm thinking, did I get it right? When I was 60, writing about somebody in the early 80s. Did I get it right? Because it's very hard to know these things

until you actually do them. And of course, they're different for everybody. So, hooray for me, I don't have knee problems. But a lot of people I know do. or I went to the hearing doctor and he said for a person in your demographic you have remarkably good hearing

and I said most people in my demographic are dead so they're not hearing anything and he was quite shocked by that I think he was shocked number one that I said it and number two that I thought it was a joke but a lot of things

do become that way when you reach that age. So you get together with people your own age, and we have what we call the organ recital, which is, you know, what ailment have you had recently? Which part of your body has fallen apart? So, yeah, that happens. And if you're lucky and live long enough, which looks as if from your hand you're going to,

it will happen to you. Yates has a poem in which the old people are quite twinkly and enjoying themselves, and younger people often just can't understand that. They think it's going to be this awful tragedy. I wrote a short story when I was 20 or so, or 19 about this really, really, really decrepit falling apart. cobwebby gray hopeless, no future burnt out

person who was 40 because I thought 40, it's going to be the end Turns out there's more There's more And actually the more I think is probably quite a lot better than when you're in their 20s

which is more or less the pits because you don't know the plot so you're more anxious What do you want? I hope the time is long but what do you want to do at the time you have left? Oh, you put that so succinctly. I'm not sure.

I wouldn't tell you anyway. And I certainly wouldn't tell you what I'm working on, so don't even ask. But, you know, I can still walk. This is good. I can still have interviews with you. Wow. I hope there's more.

That's a measure of mental health. I hope there's more. It's always a joy to talk to you. And this is a wonderful book. It's surprising and funny and sad and everything in between. And, yeah, you're a marvel. Thank you. Well, thank you.

And happy birthday again. And many more. And many more. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.