Novelist Margaret Atwood gets personal with her “Inner Advice Columnist” in a new memoir Clutch Fire

You’re an 85-year-old titan of literature, have been for a half-century now. You’re Canada’s best known author, 64 books and counting. And increasingly you find your work on lists of banned books, scrubbed from 135 American school districts. Yes, that includes your breakthrough work, the dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But you’ve also been censored for work like “The Testaments” and “The Blind Assassin,” both of which won the Booker Prize, the top award for English-language fiction. What to do? Sure, you take to the keyboard and write sternly-worded opinion pieces. But if you’re the indomitable Margaret Atwood, you don’t stop there.

Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Atwood was firing back at would-be book-burners by torching an unburnable edition. It was all promotion for a charity auction to benefit PEN America — a nonprofit that champions free speech.

Atwood’s books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. She told us she was particularly peeved when a recent ban came from Edmonton, Alberta, in her own country.

Margaret Atwood: The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn’t have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? I don’t know. 

Jon Wertheim: Science fiction?

Margaret Atwood: Have you had indirect sex lately?

Atwood speaks as she writes: with a mix of wisdom and deadpan wit. Last month she invited us into her Toronto home. 

Jon Wertheim: Do you know off hand how many languages your books have been translated in?

Margaret Atwood: Well, we say over 50 for everything. How old are you? Over 50. How many books have you written? Over 50.

Jon Wertheim: How many awards have you won?

Margaret Atwood: Over 50.

Jon Wertheim: I thought so. 

Published in 1985, “The Handmaid’s Tale” depicts a near-future America overtaken by religious dictatorship, where a dwindling number of fertile women are forced to cloak themselves in red and bear children for the elite. 

The book would sell more than 10 million copies and spawn an Emmy-winning Hulu series. Beyond that, its scarlet costume would become a uniform of real life protest and resistance.

Jon Wertheim: “Handmaid’s Tale” is your magnum opus.

Margaret Atwood: You think?

Jon Wertheim: Your “Great Gatsby.” How– how are you with that?

Margaret Atwood: Well, I would question the premise.

Jon Wertheim: You would?

Margaret Atwood: Yeah it’s not due to me or the excellence of the book. It’s partly in the twists and turns of history. 

With the ongoing rollback of reproductive rights and the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, “The Handmaid’s Tale” began, for many readers, to feel eerily prescient. 

Margaret Atwood: Had it been so that none of this ever got enacted, then it would probably be sitting on a shelf somewhere, and people would be saying, “A jolly good yarn, but it didn’t happen.” 

Or didn’t it? In 2003’s “Oryx and Crake,” for instance, Atwood wrote of environmental collapse and a global pandemic. Pick a catastrophe, any catastrophe. Before the real world did its thing, she warned about it in her fiction.

Margaret Atwood: It wasn’t, you know, this is going to happen without a doubt. “This could happen. This might happen, so you should be on the watch for it.” 

Jon Wertheim: What is your relationship with this idea that you’re the– prophet of doom, this Cassandra, the forecaster of dystopia–

Margaret Atwood: Oh, you know, I think I’m very positive I didn’t kill everybody off at the end, you know? Some people do. 

If Atwood can see around corners, it’s because her visions have historical precedent; they come rooted in actual events. At the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, Atwood has archived stacks of her research. That is, the hundreds of news clippings that substantiate her plots. 

Jon Wertheim: So this is folder upon folder of your research–

Margaret Atwood: Oh, more of it–

Jon Wertheim: –for “Handmaid’s Tale”–

Margaret Atwood: Oh yeah– lots of it.

She writes by a strict rule: if it didn’t happen, somewhere, at sometime, it doesn’t make it into the pages of her fiction. 

Jon Wertheim: Women forced to have babies. 

Margaret Atwood: Communists are making women have babies. “Persistent non-pregnancy will be considered a crime against the state.” 

It’s not all doom and gloom. Atwood showed us the cover she designed for her first volume of poetry. She writes short stories, and children’s books. For her new book, a new genre. Her memoir, “Book of Lives,” published this past week, takes the full sweep of her life, starting with a free-range childhood spent in the deep wilderness of Quebec. She was homeschooled until the age of 12 while her father did fieldwork on insects as an entomologist. 

Jon Wertheim: You wrote, some families stop for ice cream on the side of the road. You stopped for infestations.

Margaret Atwood: We stopped for infestations. So what was that like? You screeched to a halt– father would get out of the car with his tarpaulin and his ax, and he would go to the infestation he would spread the tarp out under the tree, and hit the trunk with an ax, and then the things would fall out, and he would collect them.

Jon Wertheim: And you’re in the back seat thinking what?

Margaret Atwood: Oh, no, we were usually out of the car watching him do it. 

Jon Wertheim: What did you learn watching him go to work?

Margaret Atwood: I think probably growing up with a biologist makes you quite particular about details because you’re not saying, “That’s a butterfly,” you’re saying what kind of butterfly. You’re not saying, “That’s a tree.” You usually know what kind of tree.

Intent on spinning details into prose and becoming a writer, Atwood enrolled at Victoria College at the University of Toronto.

A young poet, she hit the reading circuit and performed in student plays and revues here at Hart House, one of Canada’s oldest theaters. 

Margaret Atwood: No, I’m not. I’m just a show off. 

And when Margaret Atwood wants to show off, you surrender the stage. 

Margaret Atwood: You have to stand over there. Hold my purse.

Here’s not just any curtsy but, she informed us, the 17th century Jacobean court curtsy she learned for a college production. We told you she’s a stickler for detail. 

Jon Wertheim: How do I respond to that?

Margaret Atwood: You bow. 

Jon Wertheim: Oh. 

Margaret Atwood: Thank you.

Jon Wertheim: You remember that?

Margaret Atwood: Why are you so surprised that I remember things?

Before we left the theater, Atwood showed us another party trick.

Margaret Atwood: I’m not getting vibes. Okay? We’re doing–

Jon Wertheim: You’re not getting vibes for me?

Margaret Atwood: No. We’re doing the classic renaissance– hand-reading.

Yes, she reads palms…another mode for investigation.

Margaret Atwood: People might think that you’re just a very reasonable, sort of rational person. But, in fact, you have this other–

Jon Wertheim: Oh, dear.

Margaret Atwood: –this– this intuition. So some people stop there, and they’re very logical, and that’s it. You are not one of those people. 

Margaret Atwood: And we can see that you will never be a murderous dictator, for which we are pleased.

Jon Wertheim: Well, I got that goin’ for me.

Back to our protagonist, when she graduated in 1961, Canadian writers were encouraged to pursue careers outside the country.

Jon Wertheim: Give us a sense of the Canadian lit scene when you were in college.

Margaret Atwood: What Canadian lit scene?

Still, Atwood stayed and helped found the country’s now-thriving literary institutions. Along the way, she met another writer, the late Graeme Gibson who would become her longtime partner. So quintessentially Canadian, their courtship peaked with a canoe trip.

Margaret Atwood: We were both the kinds of people that if the canoe trip hadn’t worked out that would’ve been it. 

Jon Wertheim: Good barometer for a relationship.

Margaret Atwood: Yeah if you can deal with a canoe trip you can probably deal with lots of other things too.

And they did. Gibson came to the relationship with some baggage: a quote, “undivorced wife”…and two kids. In her memoir, Atwood confronts the complications of the blended family. 

Jon Wertheim: Could I ask you to read a bit for us? 

Margaret Atwood: Yes. There are several letters in this book from me to my inner advice columnist. Everybody has one. “Dear Inner Advice Columnist, sorry to bother you.”

Atwood uses the columnist device to confess that though she and Graeme have a daughter of their own, she wants more children. 

Margaret Atwood: “We are back at the farm after Scotland, and I’ve brought up the subject of a second child. I would like one, but Graeme has said that a total of three is enough for him. I feel deprived, resentful, and disrespected.” 

If that sounds harsh, listen to the columnist’s response, the advice she gave herself.

Margaret Atwood: “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, count your blessings. Some people don’t know when they’re well off. Many would give the shirt off their back to have your luck in men. Suck it up. Cherish your child. Get another cat. Your Inner Advice Columnist.” You can see she’s rather severe. 

Jon Wertheim: That’s very “get over yourself” advice you gave yourself.

Margaret Atwood: Very get over yourself advice, but Canadians are pretty get over yourself people.

Humility aside, Canada’s leading literary figure has become something of a cult figure, and a leading voice on all things Canadian. We asked her about the recent chill between her country and the United States as President Trump raises tariffs and threatens to turn our northern neighbors into a 51st state. Atwood says the Canadian response is best summed up by one phrase.

Margaret Atwood: It’s a hockey thing. And it was this character called Gordie Howe, who is a very revered hockey player. And, “Elbow’s up,” is when somebody gets you into the corner and you block them by putting your elbow up. And it means, “Don’t mess with me.” And for those who speak of the 51st state, I do point out that it wouldn’t be just one state.

Jon Wertheim: What do you mean?

Margaret Atwood: It’s very big. You can’t make the whole thing just one state. And anyway, Quebec would never stand for it. You think you’re gonna make them part of a unilingual big entity? Think again. 

Atwood is a student of government, power and the overreaches of both. 

She wrote much of “The Handmaid’s Tale” on a rented typewriter in 1984 West Berlin. She recalls hearing sonic booms from the other side of the wall. In her ventures to the Eastern Bloc she witnessed policing, paranoia and the absence of freedom. In her memoir, too, she addresses the erosion of democracy.

Jon Wertheim: You say, “The overriding of ordinary civil liberties is one of the signposts on the road to dictatorship.” Do you see the U.S. on that road right now?

Margaret Atwood: I don’t think I would be wrong if– if I said it’s concerning. There are certain things that totalitarian coups always do.

Jon Wertheim: Like what?

Margaret Atwood: –One of them is trying to get control of the media. But the other thing is making the– the judicial arm– part of the executive. In other words, judges just do what the chief guy tells them to. 

Jon Wertheim: If you’re saying the signposts, the signifiers of totalitarian society are–

Margaret Atwood: –there’s some warning lights flashing for sure. 

Amid the warning lights, a series based on “The Testaments,” her sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” will begin streaming on Hulu next year. But just when you think you can predict on which side of the political divide Atwood falls, she confounds by saying something like this:

Margaret Atwood: Just for the record, I’ve always been attacked more from the left than I have from the right.

Jon Wertheim: Why is that?

Margaret Atwood: Well, I think the right thinks I’m irrelevant. And the left thinks that I should have been preaching their sermon, whatever it may happen to be, and that I am therefore a traitor for not having done that which they themselves would do.

Jon Wertheim: And what’s your response to that?

Margaret Atwood: It’s unprintable. It involves a finger. Do I see a little blush? Do I see a little bit of a blush?

She may turn us red…she did not turn us to stone.

Jon Wertheim: I’m paraphrasing here, but in your memoir you say you– you sometimes cut this Medusa-like figure with the Medusa-like stare with interviewers, I feel like we’re doing okay.

Margaret Atwood: The earlier me. The earlier me. Now I’m a nice old lady so you don’t have to be worried.

Jon Wertheim: Why the pivot?

Margaret Atwood: I got older. I became a blonde.

Jon Wertheim: This was my way of saying I enjoyed this conversation. 

Margaret Atwood: Oh, is that your way of saying it?

Jon Wertheim: What–

Margaret Atwood: So why aren’t you a scary old witch, is– is that your– your way of saying it? 

Produced by Nathalie Sommer. Associate producer, Kaylee Tully. Broadcast associate, Mimi Lamarre. Edited by Sean Kelly.