Margaret Atwood reflects on life, censorship, and democracy in new memoir

Margaret Atwood is eighty-six years old and has spent the last half-century building one of the most consequential literary careers in the English language. Sixty-four books. Over fifty languages. Over fifty awards. The numbers pile up with the kind of relentless accumulation that suggests not just productivity but inevitability—as if the work was always going to happen, and the world was simply waiting to receive it. Yet in recent years, her books have begun disappearing from the places where readers find them. In one hundred thirty-five American school districts, her novels have been removed from shelves. The Handmaid's Tale, her 1985 breakthrough about a theocratic America where fertile women are forced into reproductive servitude, sits on banned lists alongside The Testaments and The Blind Assassin, both Booker Prize winners. The reasons given are familiar: sexual content deemed excessive, moral corruption, anti-Christian sentiment. When Edmonton, Alberta—her own country—issued an edict forbidding school libraries from carrying any books with direct or indirect sexual content, Atwood responded with characteristic precision and wit. What, she asked, is indirect sex?

She did not simply write opinion pieces, though she did that too. Instead, she took a flamethrower to one of her own books—an unburnable edition, specially prepared—and burned it herself. The stunt was promotion for a PEN America charity auction, a nonprofit defending free speech. It was the kind of gesture only Atwood could make: serious and absurd at once, the kind of thing that makes you understand something true about her even if you've never read a word she's written.

Atwood's prescience has become almost mythological. The Handmaid's Tale, published before the internet existed in its current form, before smartphones, before the rollback of Roe v. Wade in 2022, reads now like prophecy. When reproductive rights began collapsing in real time, the book's scarlet costume became a uniform of actual protest. Women wore it to state legislatures. The novel had predicted nothing—Atwood is careful about this distinction—but it had warned. In 2003, Oryx and Crake depicted environmental collapse and pandemic. The specificity of her dystopias comes not from imagination but from research. At the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, she has archived hundreds of news clippings, folder upon folder, documenting the historical precedents for every horror she has written. Women forced to bear children for the state? That happened. Communists made women have babies. The Soviet Union declared persistent non-pregnancy a crime against the state. Atwood writes by a rule: if it didn't happen somewhere, sometime, it doesn't appear in her fiction.

Her new memoir, Book of Lives, published last November, traces the full arc of her life backward from the present moment. She grew up in the deep wilderness of Quebec, homeschooled until age twelve while her father, an entomologist, conducted fieldwork on insects. Family road trips did not stop for ice cream. They stopped for infestations. Her father would screech the car to a halt, emerge with a tarpaulin and an ax, spread the tarp beneath a tree, strike the trunk, and collect whatever fell. She learned from watching him that precision matters—you don't say butterfly, you say what kind of butterfly; you don't say tree, you say what kind of tree. This habit of particularity became the foundation of her prose.

She enrolled at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, performed in student plays and revues, and when she graduated in 1961, Canadian writers were still being encouraged to leave the country. There was no Canadian literary scene to speak of. She stayed anyway and helped build one. She met Graeme Gibson, another writer, and they courted in a way that felt quintessentially Canadian: a canoe trip. If the canoe trip had failed, she said, that would have been it. But it worked. Gibson came with complications—an undivorced wife and two children—and in her memoir, Atwood confronts the messy reality of blended family life. She and Gibson had a daughter together, but she wanted another child. Gibson said three was enough. In a letter to her inner advice columnist, a device she uses throughout the memoir to confess private struggles, she wrote of feeling deprived, resentful, disrespected. The columnist's response was severe: count your blessings, suck it up, get another cat. It was very Canadian advice—get over yourself.

Atwood is now a student of power and its overreaches. She wrote much of The Handmaid's Tale on a rented typewriter in 1984 West Berlin, hearing sonic booms from the other side of the wall. She has traveled to the Eastern Bloc and witnessed policing, paranoia, the absence of freedom. In her memoir, she identifies the signposts of dictatorship: control of the media, the subordination of the judicial arm to the executive, judges doing what the chief tells them to do. Asked whether the United States is on that road now, she paused and said it's concerning. There are warning lights flashing. When asked about her political alignment, she confounded expectations by noting that she has been attacked more from the left than the right. The right thinks her irrelevant. The left thinks she should have been preaching their sermon and considers her a traitor for not doing so. Her response to that, she said, is unprintable and involves a finger.

She is eighty-six now, she says, and has become a nice old lady. She was not always nice. She cultivated a Medusa-like stare that could turn interviewers to stone. But age has softened something, or perhaps she has simply decided that the work is done and the rest is conversation. A Hulu series based on The Testaments began streaming this year. Her books continue to be banned. She continues to write, to speak, to read palms at parties, to perform seventeenth-century Jacobean court curtsies with perfect historical accuracy. The warning lights keep flashing. The world keeps trying to prove her right.