Quick Take
- Narration: Atwood reading her own memoir is an event in itself, her voice carrying sixty years of intellectual life and the particular dryness that distinguishes all her best writing.
- Themes: The double life of a writer, wilderness childhood and literary ambition, love and creative partnership
- Mood: Expansive and intimate, often funny, occasionally elegiac, always unmistakably Atwood
- Verdict: A long-awaited memoir that earns every one of its twenty-five hours, delivered with the wit and precision that readers of The Handmaid’s Tale have always known was there.
I have been waiting for Margaret Atwood to write a memoir for most of my adult reading life. I first read The Edible Woman in my early twenties and spent the following years moving through her novels with the particular devotion reserved for writers who seem to understand something about the world that most other writers are only approximating. Book of Lives is not what I expected, which is the highest compliment I can pay it. It is stranger, funnier, more personal, and more formally inventive than a conventional literary autobiography, and at twenty-five hours it is exactly as long as it needed to be.
Atwood reading herself is the only thinkable narrator for this material. Her voice has an authority that is not commanding so much as it is simply, irrefutably present. She reads with the slight dryness that characterizes her best fiction, as though she finds the whole enterprise of autobiography mildly preposterous and is proceeding anyway because the alternative is leaving the story untold. That quality of self-aware irony makes the tender passages more affecting than they would be if she delivered them with unguarded feeling.
The Forest Before the Page
The biography of an unusual childhood is one of the most compelling threads in Book of Lives. Atwood’s entomologist father conducted research that required the family to spend most of each year in the wild forests of northern Quebec, far from conventional schooling and social life. The memoir’s account of this period is extraordinary: isolated but not unhappy, nomadic, intellectually alive, occasionally forlorn in the way she remembers it and describes with characteristic precision. Her eighth birthday memory, flagged in the synopsis as it sounds forlorn, it was forlorn, it gets more forlorn, delivers in context exactly the combination of comedy and ache that distinguishes Atwood’s emotional register throughout.
This unconventional formation shaped her writing in ways the memoir traces with care. The connection between the wilderness childhood and the alien landscapes of her fiction, between the self-sufficient parents and the unsentimentalized women in her novels, between the isolation and the later fierce independence, these threads are not labored but they are consistently present.
The Handmaid’s Tale in Orwellian Berlin
For readers of her dystopian fiction, the sections dealing with the composition of The Handmaid’s Tale are among the memoir’s most valuable passages. Atwood connects the writing of that novel to the specific political climate of 1980s Berlin, where she was living when she began it. The Orwellian comparison she herself invokes is not casual: she was surrounded by a divided city, by surveillance, by visible political repression, and writing a book that imagined something closer to home. That biographical context enriches the novel retroactively for anyone who has read it, and for those who have not, it makes a compelling case for why they should.
The memoir also covers the relationship with Graeme Gibson, described in the synopsis as wildly charismatic and a major creative partnership, with a directness and warmth that is different from Atwood’s novelistic mode. Gibson died in 2019, and the memoir’s treatment of their life together carries that loss, though Atwood is not a writer who deploys grief for effect. Some readers found certain passages slow or confusing, particularly around the bohemian literary gatherings that punctuate the narrative. This is a valid response to passages that are dense with names and references that require some existing familiarity with the Canadian and British literary worlds of the 1960s and 70s.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Listeners who have read any of Atwood’s novels, particularly the earlier ones like The Edible Woman, Cat’s Eye, or The Handmaid’s Tale, will find Book of Lives richly rewarding. Readers coming to Atwood for the first time through this memoir will encounter a formidable intelligence and a compelling life story, but they will miss the full resonance of the literary autobiographical connections. At twenty-five hours, the length is warranted. The downloadable PDF of images and drawings referenced in the edition’s description adds a visual dimension worth accessing if your platform supports it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Atwood discuss her dystopian novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale, at length?
Yes. The memoir directly addresses the composition of The Handmaid’s Tale, including the Orwellian Berlin context in which it was written. Other novels are also discussed in terms of their autobiographical origins.
Is the memoir primarily literary or more broadly personal?
It is both, and the interweaving of personal life and literary production is its structural principle. Atwood explicitly frames the book around the connection between lived experience and the writing that emerged from it.
Does the memoir cover Graeme Gibson’s death and Atwood’s grief?
Gibson died in September 2019, shortly before the book’s completion. The memoir covers their life together with warmth and directness; readers should expect the loss to be present, though Atwood handles it with characteristic restraint rather than extended mourning.
Is prior familiarity with Canadian literature necessary to follow the memoir?
Not necessary, but helpful for certain passages involving the literary circles and cultural figures Atwood moved among in the 1960s and 70s. One reviewer noted some confusion around unfamiliar names. A basic familiarity with The Handmaid’s Tale and a few of her other novels will enrich the experience considerably.
