The Current - Margaret Atwood tells her own story

Episode Date: December 26, 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.

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Margaret Atwood is one of the greatest writers of our age. She's won some of the richest prizes in literature and helped define Can Litt. Now, she's created something of a literary self-portrait. It's called Book of Lives, a memoir of sorts. Matt Galloway sat down with Margaret Atwood in late October at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book

book's library. It's on the University of Toronto campus and home to her vast collection of papers. Here's their conversation. 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 what. 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. 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? moments of what was I thinking. Why did I do that? Who was that person? Yeah, so as you get older, Matt. 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. 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 would 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, 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. 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? No, not necessarily, because writers have had all kinds of childhoods.

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 Out with the tap dancer. Well, he's 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 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. 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 all the 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?

Well, 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 writers 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 writing? I think they were horrified. Horrified. Probably what. I think they were a shill 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 time 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.

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always. over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.com. Hi, Steve Patterson here. Host of the debaters, Canada's comedy competition judged by live audience applause. This week's episode asks if children are smarter than their parents. So tune in to find out

wears the smarty pants in their families, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 a club in Yorkville. You're watching Sylvia Tyson on the stage. But she was Sylvia Fricker. What was that scene like? Oh, okay. So now we've skipped ahead a whole bunch of years. And we are now in about the 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 table clause, 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. 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 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 stay? 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. Some of them then started literary magazines.

Some of them started little publishing companies. And I got associated with one of those. And Expo 67 was a big, big deal. Canada could actually do something. 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 sock and underwear department of the Hudson's Bay Company, and why did they put it there? my only explanation as 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. away in their galoshes. Your longtime partner, Graham Gibson, was a part of that nascent sort of literary scene. And 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 Graham was there. and he hadn't won it either. And 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 see 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 glass Oh, no, all the things. I've created a disruption by asking me. 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 capabilities of an excuse me minor kind. Yeah, you're just a pretty woo. 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 too. 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 anytime soon. I think all of that sounds fairly reasonable and maybe actually vaguely accurate, too. What did Graham make of you reading his palm? I think he liked me holding his hand. You said earlier that when you met him, you weren't flirting. You were both married at the time. was that was that 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 bought 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. 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 waste 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 grudgets. It's not an attractive thing to say about yourself. I struggle against it, but not very 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. 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 in 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 at 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 had, 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 last 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. 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 pushback 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, you know, 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, we're nervous about what 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. It's not the end 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? This is somebody who did, May, 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 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.

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 that says art is long, life is fleeting, the shadows lengthen, it's hard to shake the feeling. I'm living in 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 younger 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 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 with the time you have left? Oh, you put that so succinctly. I'm not sure. I wouldn't tell you any.

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. Margaret Atwood speaking with Matt Galloway. Her new memoir is Book of Lives. The interview originally aired in early November. If you'd like to hear it in full,

you can subscribe to our podcast or check out our website, cbc.ca slash the current. 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 slash podcasts.