Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Margaret Atwood isn't surprised people find her scary

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Margaret Atwood knows that she scares people. She says that's been the case since the beginning of her career, long before her dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale was published. She talks to Rachel about that perception, and also reflects on the bad advice she's received in her career and how she takes vengeance. Margaret's new poetry collection is Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023. To listen sponsor-free, access bonus episodes and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

What's a piece of advice you were smart to ignore? Oh, my. Well, where do I begin with that? I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the game where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest chooses questions at random from a deck of cards. Pick a card one through three. Questions about the memories, insights, and beliefs that have shaped them. My guest this week is the literary icon,

Margaret Atwood. My usual way of reacting to people's advice that I didn't agree with was my inner voice saying, You're an idiot. The first thing most people think of when they hear the name Margaret Atwood is The Handmaid's Tale. And that makes sense. That book catapulted into pop culture when Hulu turned it into a series starring Elizabeth Moss. But to define Atwood by that particular book, that particular story of a dystopian America where women are enslaved, raped and forced to bear children.

As provocative as that is, it's just a small part of Margaret Atwood's life work. She's published dozens of books, including a new book of poetry coming out called Paper Boat, which is a collection of 60 years of her poetry, including some new works. Other things to know about Margaret Atwood before this conversation. She is a proud Canadian. She knows how to start a fire in the wilderness. She enjoys the company of frogs, snakes, and maybe the occasional slug. She is super into weeding.

She is usually the smartest person in any room, and I'm pretty sure she could win Survivor if she decided it was worth the effort. With that, it is my great pleasure to welcome Margaret Atwood to Wildcard. Hello, Rachel. Hello. It's great to meet you. It's a real thrill. How do you feel about games in general? Well, I've played them a lot, but they're usually card games. Hearts? We've played hearts a lot. Do you know hearts? I've heard tell of this game. I myself am not a card person, which is a great irony, considering I am now hosting what has been dubbed a card game. But, you know, we just let that slide. So you ready to hear how this is all going to go down? Fire away. Okay. I've got a deck of cards in front of me. Yes. On each one, there's a question that I would love for you to answer. Okay. You're going to choose. randomly, one through three.

So this is trivial pursuit for your guests. Yeah, about your own life, so you have an advantage. Or else it's a secret service operation to find out things about people. They wouldn't normally divulge. I like where your mind's going, I'm a little bit afraid of it at the same time. Maybe that's how everyone feels. Okay, but I have to tell you there are two tools that you can use, okay? If I ask a question and you're just not feeling it, you can skip it.

Okay. And then I'll replace it with another one from the day. And the other tool is a flip. You can put me on the spot and ask me to answer the question before you do. Oh, Rachel, that's so dangerous. Isn't it, though? Okay. So that's what you have to work with.

We're breaking it up into three rounds, a few questions in each round. Round one, first set of cards. Your choice. One, two, or three? Three. One, two. Three. What's a piece of advice you were smart to ignore?

Oh, my. Well, where do I begin with that? Which I ignored almost all advice. I'll pick something meaningful. Okay. So when I was at the university, we were given faculty advisors. This is at Harvard.

To advise us, I suppose, about the direction that our life should take. And by that time, I was already writing and publishing poetry, and I had a graduate student scholarship. And my faculty advisor said, why don't you just forget all this writing and graduate student stuff and find a good man and get married. Come on. How about that?

Truly? So this would be 1961. Well, you weren't born, so you don't remember what that was like. But that was a little extreme even for those days. Yeah. So my usual way of reacting to people's advice that I didn't agree with was my inner voice saying, you're an idiot. Did you keep that as your inner voice, or did those words sometimes find, it's find their way outside into the public reddit.

I'd let it out a bit too much. Maybe I should have kept it as an inner voice. But at that moment, it was you're an idiot. And okay, is this conversation over yet? Thank you very much. Goodbye. To get good advice, did you have to, I mean, did all your good advice come from good friends? I'm not sure that my good friends would have been much use at that time because I was quite a lot different from people of that time. But I did have another person on faculties who did give me a piece of good advice and I'll tell you what it is. Are you interested? I'm very interested. Okay, so I really did think this in the days of existentialists and being artsy at university. that I was going to go to France, work in a restaurant, live in a garret, smoke Gitan, no hope of that,

and write masterpieces while coughing myself to death as in La Boeim. So I thought I would do that. Tre Romantic. No, I didn't share the whole package with this person on faculty, but I shared enough of it so that they said to me, I think you would get more writing done if you went to graduate school. And they were right because I was a waitress in a restaurant a bit later. And I didn't get much writing done. I also got quite thin.

I love that advice because it's so dispassionate. And it doesn't demean the dream. You know, it's not like, that's a stupid idea. It's just practical. Like if you want to be a writer. Well, I knew I would have to have a job of some kind. Because nobody at that time where I was thought they would ever make any money out of writing. Don't be silly.

So I knew I'd have to have some sort of job to support my writing habit. And why not in France? Well, we can think of a lot of reasons why not now at this distance. But it sounded good at the time. And it worked out graduate school. Three more. One, two, or three? How about the middle one this time?

Okay. Two. What's an experience from childhood that made you realize your parents were only human? Well, okay, so here's the experience, which was very traumatic for me at the time. I had a cat, and so I wanted a cat. I couldn't have a cat for a long time. We were up in the woods too much. get eaten by wolves.

So I finally got a cat. And I was very keen on this cat. It lived in my room. He used to bring me present, dead mice, you know, as they do. And then I had a baby sister. And one day I came home and the cat wasn't there. Because my parents were worried that it would smother the baby. That was a belief of those times.

So they hadn't explained this to me. They had simply dispensed with the cat. And they said, you know, it had gone to a good home, which I don't believe for a minute. Oh. There, how about that? I've forgiven them. You've forgiven them. But you, I mean, you clearly saw that they made a mistake.

That's why you... I thought that they had handled it badly, which they had. So they should have explained ahead of time. But in that generation, you didn't particularly explain things to kids ahead of time. Things happened, and then the children were expected to cope with it. When we come back, Margaret shares the advice she gives young writers and her secret to combating personal attacks. Before we start round two, I want to talk about your new book. It's called Paper Boat, New and Selected Poems, 1961 to 2023.

Would you read me a poem? The one I'm thinking of is Tell Me Something Good. Yes. When did you write that? Just a couple of years ago. It's new, yeah. So things were already in the period that we're in now, as it were. I just seized on this.

I mean, I just saw the title. And I was like, yes, Margaret, I do want you to tell me something. good. Well, I can tell you something bad as well. Never mind. Yeah, no, I know. Tell me something good. Tell me something good. Just one good thing. Just tell me something that will get me through the hours, the days, the weeks that bring nothing of any goodness, just mourn news of other things like spoiled meat or else raw bones that dogs keep dragging in from God knows where. What bombed out. car or ocean wreck, whose child's ribs wrenched open, what woman's torso torn like bread, whose son's now headless, what trashed home, what oily sludge a hundred miles wide on which we

feed, the words pour in, the door won't close. Oh, stop, go mute, just one good thing instead, is all I ask. So let's say, Green buds or wait. There aren't a lot of those. Just one green bud might do despite. No, wait. Let's say a person said, hello and not unkindly. No, let's say that it got cooler or else warmer or the rain finished or else it rained, whichever one was needed. No. Instead, say breakfast. That could do it. A few, Faint shimmering of plates and pearly spoons, a tender cup. What comfort there. That's 30 minutes past, in any rate.

The gate defended for a little space, and wasn't that enough? No, wait. I love that poem because it feels like you're constantly shifting your own goalposts, right? As we often do. The world is shifting them on us, Rachel. Right. Yeah. So you have to, I don't know, lower your expectations constantly for what can bring you joy or make you feel good.

It's a good recipe, high aspirations, low expectations. This kills my husband because I do this constantly. I prepare for worst case scenarios all the time. And then I'm so pleased when it doesn't happen. And for him, it does the opposite. He's doing fine, but then when I lower an expectation, then he's down here and he can't find his way. back up again. Well, you don't have to tell them you've done it. Right. That's my problem is that I say it out loud too much, like so many other things. This party is going to be horrible. Yeah,

you don't want to do that too much. No, I say that. That's like, like, it's one of my go-to lines, Margaret. You could say it afterwards. That party was wrong. I have one more question about the book. literary types are already looking at this and saying, oh, it's just wonderful. We can see the evolution of Margaret Atwood as a writer because it does chronicle your career and the poems in the beginning are from the early parts of your of your working life and there's this arc. Do you go back and read it that way? Do you recognize that arc of your own writerly evolution? You know things when you're older and you have experiences when you're older that you haven't had when you're 20. I hate to break this to you since you're obviously 20. It's obviously I am, so thank you for recognizing it. Yeah, so your preoccupations are different when you're younger, and they're certainly different when you're older.

So you get together with your old pals and, We have what we call the organ recital. Got a new kneecap. Ah, right. Had a hip report. What surgery you have next? Enough. We'd had that and how's your heart doing?

So you have to do that first before you get to what you really want to talk about. But sometimes that is what you really want to talk about. So you don't see many poems by 25-year-olds on those subjects. In fact, you don't see any. Right. Do you look back on your early works and say, oh, she didn't know what she was talking about? Not quite that, no. I do look back on it, and I think no wonder people found me scary.

Ah. Say more about that. Because I was scary, not intentionally, but I can see why they found it scary. Poems are pretty intense. Uh-huh. Are you less scary now? I think simply by virtue of being shorter. Shorter, more white-haired and older, I think, unless you're an absolute witch flying around on a broomstick, you're less scary at that point. Okay, we're moving on. Now we do round two.

Three more cards. Just keep coming. One, two, or three. Your choice. Let's do number three. Number three. What was a disappointing experience that now feels like a blessing? Wow. A disappointing experience that now feels like a blessing. Oh, gosh. There's quite a few of those. Thank goodness I didn't fill in the blank. Yeah. Do ex-fiancees count? Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, we could throw in a few of those. But they weren't that it wasn't that disappointing to tell you the truth.

It was more of a relief. But did you have several ex-fiances? Pardon? You had several ex-fiances? You need a selection. Okay, so there's that. But you just admitted to me that they actually, it didn't feel disappointing in the moment. You knew it should have ended.

Well, I think, you know, you're always a nostalgic. about the past. I think everybody is to a certain extent. But on the other hand, you couldn't continue on that path. It was obvious.

Let's put it that way. Or let us say, it was fun at the beginning. There's a Hemingway story in which he's having a camp out with his girlfriend and she realizes that things aren't the same. She says, what's wrong?

And he said, it's not fun anymore. So I think there are points in your life for everybody's life when they think it's not fun anymore. Yeah. I mean, sure. It's a pretty crushing thing to say. I guess, but I don't know, Ernest Hemingway, I don't want to hold up as like my romantic role model. It's not a question of romantic role model. it's a question of good storywriter.

And no matter what you may think of his private life, which I know too much about, in our time is one of the game-changing story collections of the 20th century. No, he was a nightmare as a husband and romantic partner, but that's a different thing. Yeah. What a horrible mother.

Anyway, we won't go there. That's another game. Wildcard, the Ernest Hemingwood. Way edition. You're in a stemmingway wild card. Bad mom. Okay. Three new cards. One, two, or three? Two. How do you manage envy? Oh, directed towards me or envy that I feel. Envy that you feel. I don't feel envy. Do you not? I do not. I mean, apart from envying tall people. Have you always been so enlightened that way? I thought you were going to say, have your

always been so short. So in high school, I was the normal size. But I don't know what's happened. People got taller. No, you haven't noticed that. You're not that short. Oh, yes, I am. I just look tall because all you're looking at is my head.

Okay, you have tall, tall energy. Yes, there you go. When I asked the question, though, you asked for a definition. and envy that you suffered or had to manage or other people's envy of you. Yes. Does that happen a lot? It has, certainly, yeah. Friends?

Have you had relationships in because of that? Oh, usually not. No, no, I wouldn't say friends. No, I would say, so what I said to young writers who had had a sudden success, As I said, within a couple of years, you will have three nasty, vicious personal attacks from people you don't know. And at the root of those attacks is often envy? As a rule, that happens, particularly if you're younger. So if you're younger, you've come up with the cohort of other writers your age.

You make a big success. And then your friends divide into, like the Red Sea, people who can handle it and people who can't handle it. And you find that out pretty quickly. By my age, everybody knows that this is who I am. It's a lot of big surprise. A lot of my contemporaries are dead. What were the attacks that were leveled at you in your first couple of years of success? Some of the were quite funny. You can't say you're so short, Margaret Atwood. Someone commenting on your height doesn't count. Really short. So a lot of it has. had to do with hair, medusa hair, frizzy hair, you know, name something about hair. Yes, and one of them wrote a satirical fairy tale in which I bit the heads off men and made them

into a pile and turned into an octopus. Figure that out. So you were a medusa-haired man-hater. Yeah, and power mad ladder climbing. Power Mad. Yes, Power Mad, ladder climbing witch. Oh, wow. I mean, that's evocative. I thought so, too. I am curious how you manage that. You were just able to just let it go, or did any of that get under your skin? No, I'm a vengeful person. Are you being serious? Oh, yes, I'm quite vengeful. I can't help it. It's who I am. So I make them into any other people and fiction.

Oh, that's a sneaky, sneaky way to deal with that. Now she thinks, I better watch myself. I know. What's going to happen in this new book? It's an annoying radio host. After the break, Margaret talks about premonitions and gives me a poem reading on the fly. Okay, this is the last round, and I've got a new deck of cards. Oh, they're red.

how attractive. I know. You like that. It's funny. Some people see the red and get afraid. They have like a visceral reaction to the color red. And immediately you did the opposite. That's right. These are my glasses. Very red. Yes. They look amazing. Okay. Well, then this is your color. This is your round. One, two, or three, Margaret Atwood. Three. Three. Have you ever had a premonition about something that came true? Ooh, yes. Would you share it with me? How many would you like to hear about? The one you think is the best story. Writing The Handmaid's Tale in 1984, at which point the critical reaction went along these lines. So in England, where they had done their religious totalitarianism under Oliver Cromwell,

they knew they weren't going to do that thing again. So they said jolly good yarn. So they treated it as completely fictional. In Canada, an anxious country where they frequently pose questions to themselves. They said, could it happen here? In the United States, it split into two. On the one hand, don't be silly. that will never happen here.

We're the world's leading liberal democracy, a beacon of hope to countries all around the world. How could you even suggest that we would go along that path? On the other hand, on the West Coast, where many things begin, they said, how long have we got? Before the scenarios that you had outlined in the Handmaid's Tale, the oppression of women became reality. That's right.

Before women's rights got rolled back in essence. So you could see in the early 80s that that was always a possibility. And then the Cold War ends in 1989, 90, people say quite wrongly, well, now it's just going to be liberal democracy all over the place. and, you know, conflict is at an end, and now we're just going to go shopping a lot. So I thought, okay, maybe this has receded somewhat. But as you can see, it came back. Sorry to ruin your day, Rachel.

Is there a sense of satisfaction? No, I don't feel satisfaction. I would rather have been wrong. Yeah. Do you think you have a gift in that direction? You mean, am I psychic? Yeah. I don't think so, no.

If I were, I would be playing the stock market and betting on horse races. Yeah, but I read that you read people's palms. So that isn't anything to do with being psychic. It's just Renaissance science. So I don't go, I'm holding your hand and getting an aura feeling. I'm going, I'm looking at your palms, and this is what a Renaissance palm reader would say about them. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Not the same as having a permission. It comes people down backstage at TV shows.

Is a good party trick. Yeah, it is. It is. People like to hear about themselves. Okay. I can't see well enough. I don't need a question. I don't know you can't. It's okay. But I can see the shape of your handle that I hold them up again both. Oh. Can you say something? Oh, right. You're a sensitive person.

You can tell that by looking at my hands? Woo! Come on! Oh, Margaret! I'll tell you what I am. A trusting person. Yeah, you probably, I can't say the inside of your hands, but you're probably one of those people who's affected by the wallpaper. Okay.

Three more cards. One, two, three. Oh, let's do the middle one. Have your feelings about death changed over time? Have my feelings about death changed over time? Have my feelings about death changed over time? Well, what do you mean by thinking about death? You mean, are you afraid of it?

Yeah, I guess it's open to her interpretation. I'm not afraid of death, death, death-de-death-deat-death-death. What comes before can be very unpleasant. So I know people who've had horrible hospital and disease experiences. I know people who have ended up in care homes, not knowing who they were, things like that. That's what you are worried about, what I anyway, I'm worried about rather than, quotes, being dead. I'm not too worried about being dead. Right.

Am I going to write my own funeral? It's creepy, and I've been to ones like that. But it's kind of fun. Oh, my mom had a great time planning her funeral. And I remember thinking that's so macabre. And she didn't think it was at all. No, it's like event planning. You're planning a party for people.

You want them to have a big time. I used to be a great birthday party planner. So I just think of my funeral as a fun time for kids. Okay. Last question. You pick one, two, or three. What haven't I done as much of? I think I haven't done as much of one. What's your best defense against despair? My best defense against despair. So I'm not much of a despairing person. I don't do despair very well at all. I'm much more.

Does that mean you don't do it, period? Have you never suffered from despair? Of the total kind, like there's nothing good, it's completely bleak. I will never climb out of the spirit. Yeah, no, no. I think it's a temperamental thing. I don't think I was born that way. So crises, setbacks, very discouraging things.

Awful events. Yes, sure. Total despair? No. Right. Then I'm going to also take the liberty of changing the word. What is your best defense against sorrow? Oh, sorrow.

Sorrow. That's a different thing, but that's not despair. I agree. I think sorrow is natural. And I had a friend one. who in the age when psychiatrists thought it was a good idea to give you a lot of drugs if you were going through grieving and sorrow and then you just wouldn't feel it. But what that means is you never get over it because you haven't had that experience,

which is a very human one, and everyone has it sooner or later. it's grief. And since I'm now in the land of widows, I'm the person that they phone and they say, will this ever be over? How do I get through this? We should just say your longtime partner, Graham Gibson, died in 2019.

Oh, yeah. So one day at a time, but don't expect that there will be no sorrow. So there is not a defense against it. The defense is to just move through it. Well, why would you, Why is it something that you should defend against? It's something you live through, but that's not a defense against it.

By defense, you mean it's not getting in the door. We're not letting it in the door. Well, that would just be acting. You know, that would be quite fake. I'm fine. I feel great. You never do that. No, no.

So we end the show the same way, every time. with a trip in our memory time machine. So you pick, Margaret, if you would be so kind, one moment from your past that you would like to go back to. It is not a moment that you would change anything about. It's just a moment you would like to linger in a little longer. What moment do you choose? All right, let's pick 2001. 2001, the first time we went very far north into the Arctic.

This is you and Graham? Yes. So it was an outfit called Adventure Canada, and we traveled with them really up until now. And Graham loved ships. So, yes, that was magic. First polar bears, first glacial. Sears, first icebergs falling into the sea. We were at the place where the glacier, where the iceberg originated that sank the Titanic.

May I ask you to get granular? Describe what it smelled like. What were you looking at? What did it make you think? Okay, so I took a girl from London on one of these trips, a fellow writer, right out of her comfort zone. She'd never been in such a place before, and she was sitting under a water. full, wearing the red caribou skin mittens that she had acquired. And she said to Graham, none of this cares about us, does it?

And Graham said, no, it doesn't. And she said, that's very comforting. I mean, I love that. Did that resonate with you? Yeah. So there are, you know, you're worried about this and that and this and that and this and that. and of course you're worried about the climate and you can see things melting and all of the above.

But as I say, it's very big. And you also see life adapting in very clever ways. For instance, you will see trees there that are 200 years old, but they're flat. They put their energy into leaves and seeds, and they keep low to the ground because it's going to be warmer there out of the wind. Very clever things.

You can see tiny little sea creatures about this big. There's a lot of marine life. Whales, belugas, narwhals, humpbacks, bunny rabbits. They're white. They're quite large. They're quite tame.

Arctic hairs. I'm just going to have the end of this interview be you just naming other animals that live in the Arctic and we'll just let it trail off that way. Margaret Atwood, thank you for doing this. It was a real pleasure. Margaret's new collection is called Paper Boat, new and selected poems, 1961 to 2023.

Congrats on the collection and thank you so much. Thank you. Fun. We have a wild card plus question with Margaret Atwood for our wild card plus supporters. Margaret talks about her relationship with censorship. Destruction of knowledge,

destruction of books, it's an old motif. It seems to be a power thing that human beings do, particularly when they want to really control the agenda. You can listen to that bonus episode and every one of our episodes

sponsor free by signing up for Wildcard Plus at npr. org slash wildcard. This episode was produced by Romel Wood with help from Lee Hale. It was edited by Dave Blanchard. Fact-checked by Greta Pittenger and mastered by Neil Tivalt and Robert Rodriguez.

Wildcard's executive producer is Beth Donovan. Our theme music is by Rom Teen Arablewe. You can reach out to us at Wildcard at npr.org. We'll shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.