“As your friend Julian Porter says of you, ‘don’t piss her off, or you will live forever in one of her books!’” Robin Young said, Peabody Award-winning documentarian and co-host of NPR’s “Here & Now.”
Facing Young was Margaret Atwood — critically renowned author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and winner of two Booker Prizes.
Harvard Book Store hosted a conversation between Atwood and Young on Jan. 27 to discuss Atwood’s 2025 autobiography, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.” The event sold out of all 600 tickets.
“It’s also a bit of payback — what the New York Times calls a ‘vessel of wrath,’” Young said, holding up her copy of the memoir.
“Very mild,” Atwood said. “You remember what I didn’t put in?”
Atwood’s latest release tells of a childhood in the wilderness of northern Quebec, the cruelty of fourth grade girls, and her interest in puppeteering. She even reflected on her time as a student at Radcliffe College, as every building in Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” exists in real life in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“The Harvard Coop is Soul Scrolls, where you can order up automatic prayers. Widener Library — this is so banned — is where the Secret Service has their headquarters. Well, what the heck, it’s about information, right? Collecting information. Don’t you think that’s appropriate?” said Atwood.
Atwood grew up as far from urban Cambridge as possible — in the Canadian wilderness, unhampered by city streets (or much time spent in the classroom).
“The dark side of that is boredom. So you learn to entertain yourself, and I think part of writing novels is entertaining yourself,” Atwood said.
With her 18 published novels, 18 poetry collections, 11 nonfiction books, nine short fiction collections, eight books for children, and two graphic novels, Atwood described a constant need for entertainment.
Atwood’s first novel, “The Edible Woman,” was published in 1969. It tells the story of a woman who feels separated from her body and bakes a cake of herself, daring her boyfriend to eat it because she feels she’s being devoured by him emotionally.
“I was thinking about cannibalism, as one does,” Atwood said. “I think that I was intrigued by the things that would turn up in confectionery and pastry shops on holidays, such as little pigs you were supposed to eat, but more importantly, bride and groom cakes. So wedding cakes with edible brides and grooms on the top, it causes one to think. I didn’t know about anorexia, but it makes sense to me that if you felt you were turning into a consumer product of a confectionery kind, cannibalism.”
Atwood has received lots of pictures of cakes imitating the one in “The Edible Woman.”
“My favorite one was when I was having my birthday in France, and I was at the Sorbonne, and the Sorbonne people made a cake for me on that occasion, but being French, [the figure] was naked,” Atwood said.
Although Atwood had written “The Edible Woman” in 1964 and 1965, its publication date was in 1969, the same year that second wave feminism came into public view, largely stemming from scholars at the Radcliffe College.
“So those who had heard about second wave feminism thought it was that, and those who hadn’t heard about it thought that I was a young person who had become more mature later,” Atwood said.
Atwood’s rural upbringing differed tremendously from most of the famous second wave feminists, in large part due to her mother, who was born in almost the same year as Simone de Beauvoir — in very different circumstances. Being raised by a woman in Nova Scotia in the early part of the 20th century that was always “tobogganing and skating and skiing” enabled Atwood to challenge the idea that all women could be lumped together into a single, oppressed narrative.
“So they’re the same age, but from very different women’s cultures, my mother’s having been a lot freer,” Atwood said.
Atwood’s novel “Cat’s Eye,” based on her experiences in fourth grade, explores the beauty and darkness of growing into a woman.
“When I wrote that book called “Cat’s Eye,” we were still in an age in which some feminists said that I shouldn’t say things like that about women, because they were supposed to be perfect.” Atwood said.
Atwood used “Cat’s Eye” to depict how women bully.
“[Bullying is] the term we use now, but this is much more Machiavellian and much more Byzantine court. So it wasn’t, ‘You’re a terrible person and we’re going to knock you down!’ It was: ‘We can help you! We’re your friends! There’s some things about you that need to be improved, and we’re doing this for your own good,’” Atwood said.
In all the letters that Atwood has received over the years about “Cat’s Eye,” a far greater ratio of writers admitted to being the tortured than the torturer.
“We tend to forget the bad things we do to other people, although we remember very clearly the bad things that other people do to us,” Atwood said.
One of the girls that bullied Atwood ended up forming a puppeteering business with her later in their childhood, charging $5 per birthday party.
“I never knew whether or not she remembered. I think she might have had a vestigial memory,” Atwood said.
After the talk, audience member Kristen L.K. Brewitt shared her glowing impressions of Atwood.
“What an amazing human, right? You come in with someone who has such perspective and depth of thought, observing the world around her,” Brewitt said. “It’s not just writing the stories. She’s the observer of humanity, and then brings the stories of humanity to life in such interesting ways, from a whole different angle.”
Erica R. Pallo ’27, an English graduate student and library assistant at Baker Library, admired how Atwood adapted “The Handmaid’s Tale” into a TV series .
“There is something really unique [about TV] because you have to think visually. And even though she’s talking about writing words, you could tell when she talked, she was a performer, and she was talking visually,” Pallo said.
Olga Yulikova, another attendee at the event, discussed how Atwood carried herself during the event.
“I was watching her demeanor and how she talks and what she told in her jokes and everything,” Yulikova said. “There are two types of people: one of them you would love to hang out and have a cup of tea with, the other one you’d have a beer with. She’s a cup of tea.”
—Staff writer Laura B. Martens can be reached at [email protected].
date:2026-02-12 02:51:00