Playing with Fire

Margaret Atwood on feminism, culture wars and speaking her mind: ‘I’m very willing to listen, but not to be scammed’

At 82, the Canadian author has seen it all - and her novels predicted most of it. Just don’t presume you know what she thinks, she tells Hadley Freeman

Sat 19 Feb 2022 03.00 EST

‘How are you? You’re named after Ernest Hemingway’s first wife,” Margaret Atwood announces by way of a greeting when we meet on a hotel’s heated patio near her home in Toronto. Atwood, 82, has often been described as a prophet, thanks to her uncanny ability to foresee the future in her books. When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in January 2021, it looked, terrifyingly, like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale, when the government is overthrown and the dystopian land of Gilead is founded. She seemingly predicted the 2008 financial crash in her nonfiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, published that year. Atwood has always scoffed at any suggestion of telepathy, pointing out that every atrocity in The Handmaid’s Tale had been carried out by totalitarian regimes in real life, and she “predicted” the crash by noticing the number of adverts offering to help people with their personal debt. But as she stands in front of me, snowflakes glittering around her like stars, the flames of the hotel’s gas heaters leaping on either side of her, dressed all in black save for her little red hat, correctly guessing who I’m named after, she certainly seems to have a touch of magic about her. How did she know about the Hemingway connection?

“Because I’m deep into Martha Gellhorn,” she says, launching into a long discussion about the celebrated war correspondent and Hemingway’s third wife. Atwood isn’t writing a book about Gellhorn (yet), but she found a letter from her to the father of her late partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, and is now a Gellhornologist. After six or so minutes, I wonder if we’ll ever talk about anything else, but Atwood has a regal quality that makes interruption unthinkable. It does not, as I later learn, render argument impossible.

Proceedings begin peacefully enough. Atwood and I are meeting because this month she will publish her latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, a 500-page doorstopper that gathers together her nonfiction output from the past two decades. During this period she also published five novels, one novella and Payback. Atwood is arguably the most famous living literary novelist in the world and unarguably one of the most prolific: in her half century of writing, she has published, on average, a book a year. She has won the Booker twice – in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and in 2019 for The Testaments, controversially sharing the prize with Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. Atwood shrugs off that literary hoo-ha – “So fun! Bernardine’s a great gal” – and adds that she is “a veteran of not winning the Booker”. Of course, being a veteran of not winning means being a veteran of being shortlisted, which in Atwood’s case is four times on top of her wins. So when she describes herself to me as a “grade-A procrastinator and goof-off”, I say that seems unlikely, given how much she writes, and she looks abashed. “I know – it’s horrible, isn’t it?” she says. When I ask how she managed to whittle her essays down to a mere 500 pages, she cringes again at her own productivity. “Horrible!” But adds, “If writing wasn’t a pleasure, I wouldn’t do it.”

And Atwood’s writing is – unfailingly – a pleasure to read. She is one of the all-time great storytellers, a truth sometimes obscured by her highbrow reputation. Whole days of my life have been lost to her novels, including Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin. When it comes to making you want to know what happens next, Atwood is up there with Stephen King and JK Rowling. She has written in every literary genre, from poetry to sci-fi to mystery. But there is one connecting thread: many of her novels are told using a retrospective narrative, with a character looking back on their former life while trying to make sense of their current one. It is a device that winks at Atwood’s love of Victorian literature, but it’s also how she thinks, always looking forward, but also looking back. When she writes her books, she types up yesterday’s handwritten pages and handwrites the pages for tomorrow. “The rolling barrage!” she laughs. When we talk about modern social movements, she refers back to the French Revolution; when we talk about the rollback of abortion rights in the US, she cites Nicolae Ceaușescu, the notoriously anti-abortion dictator of Romania from 1974 to 1989. “As you may have noticed, I like to do my research,” Atwood smiles, after we’ve segued into long discussions of Stalin, or Mao, or Robespierre. It’s all fascinating, and evidence of her tirelessly curious mind. But it can also feel as though she is building a wall of words to protect herself from prying questions. At one point, when she pauses in the middle of such a digression, I ask if her research into Gellhorn has been a way to stay close to Gibson.

“Of course. No-brainer. Next question.” She picks up the menu. “Shall we split the ubiquitous avocado toast?”

Much more at the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2022/feb/19/margaret-atwood-on-feminism-culture-wars

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