First published 2025
Margaret Atwood opens her memoir by exploring the duality every writer faces: the person who experiences life and the person who transforms those experiences into art. She takes readers back to her unconventional childhood in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where her entomologist father and dietician mother raised her in rugged independence. These early years were nomadic and often isolated, yet filled with natural beauty and freedom. Atwood connects pivotal moments from her life to the creation of her most significant works, revealing how personal pain inspired Cat's Eye and how her time in 1980s East Berlin shaped The Handmaid's Tale. She chronicles bohemian literary gatherings, her passionate relationship with writer Graeme Gibson, and encounters with poets, actors, and characters as vivid as those in her novels. Through these interconnected stories, Atwood illuminates the mysterious process by which lived experience becomes literature, offering readers intimate access to the mind behind some of our most powerful contemporary fiction.
Genres: 20th-century, autobiography, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Setting: Northern Quebec, East Berlin
Period: 1980s
624 pages · Hardcover · McClelland & Stewart