Margaret Atwood’s Crystal Ball Is Scarily Accurate
Long before Margaret Atwood became a poet and a Booker Prize–winning author, with more than 60 works to her name—including her terrifying, prescient classic The Handmaid’s Tale, the English-class staple and inspiration for the Emmy-winning Hulu show and countless women’s rights protests this year by activists dressed in oppressive bonnets and red cloaks—she was raised to be a storyteller.
“My mother read to us every night when we were little,” says Atwood, with a surprising tenderness to her voice. “And my older brother would make these little books by folding paper and putting on a cover and writing in them until the end, and I did that too.” As she was growing up in the woods of northern Ontario, consuming and creating narratives was more than just a pastime. It was a solace. “There was no electricity, no school, and no libraries, and television wasn’t there yet,” Atwood remembers. “We weren’t getting any radio except for Moscow shortwave, but there were lots of books. I read all the books, and then I read them all again.”
By age 16, Atwood was determined to become a professional writer.
In the 1950s, in Canada, though, that wasn’t a conventional path. “It wasn’t in the book of careers,” Atwood recalls. “There were no creative writing classes, but the thing about the school curriculum was that although there weren’t many Canadian writers, there were women, English women, and one dead American woman, Emily Dickinson, who were really inspiring.” While reading Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen, and the Brontës as an undergraduate at Victoria College, Atwood explored her own voice, self-publishing a book of poetry, Double Persephone.
Atwood is far from sentimental about the start-cute of her career: “We went around to bookstores, and they actually took them for 50 cents. It’s just what you did,” she explains. “It taught me that you could make things, and there are still these entry points that involve a certain amount of self-publication.” She considers the 1966 debut of The Circle Game, which was accepted and then rejected (“I’d told all my friends—that was depressing,” she says) and then, finally, published by Contact Press, her “real debut.”
In an industry of commercial-thriller writers, and historical-fiction writers, and literary novelists, and poets, and essayists, Atwood has, from those earliest days, refused to pick a lane. She’s a true multigenre author. “Nobody told me not to be,” she says. “There aren’t any rules that say you can’t. There’s other people—and sometimes it’s you—who make up those rules, but are they really rules?” she muses, both alarming and hopeful in her conviction. Like so many of the protagonists that live on her pages, she doesn’t shy away from the difficult task of challenging the status quo, particularly for women. Atwood’s morality, her intellect, and her imagination are all fluid between genres. All of it is a map of her heart and her mind. Her lane, you might say, is feminism.
A steadfast voice of reason in a world of political chaos, Atwood creates worlds and spins all-too-true tales that serve as reminders of how dangerous patriarchy, capitalism, and the abuse of power can be. She urges her readers—women in particular—to confront injustice. Her protagonists choose to be courageous and rebel, even when the odds are stacked against them. As the world crumbles around them, they persist.
This September, after months of rumors and excitement, she published her 17th novel, The Testaments (18th, if you count Scribbler Moon, which is set to be released in 2114 as part of the Future Library Project), a sequel that picks up more than 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. Thanks to the hit Hulu show, a new generation is obsessed with the dystopian story that imagines a U.S. government overthrown by a totalitarian sect of religious radicals who strip women of their reproductive and civil rights, enslaving them. Forced to serve men or face death, the novel’s narrator, Offred (literally “of Fred,” the man she services), and her fellow handmaids, marthas, and jezebels struggle to survive in Gilead’s patriarchal hellscape.
The Testaments aims to answer the questions raised at the end, and to ask new ones too: How do we find joy in dark times? Who deserves redemption? What does it mean to be a survivor in a world that is crumbling? Atwood’s instant best-seller, which sold more than 125,000 copies in the U.S. within days of its release, forces readers to reckon with the contradictions and irrevocable consequences of tyranny and how it alters the body, the mind, and the soul. The Testaments unblinkingly bears witness to the cost of injustice.
“The heroes of Margaret Atwood’s books are a lot like the heroes of this moment in our history: brave, determined women who come together to take on fascism, injustice, and misogyny,” says the former president of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards. In her new work as a cofounder of Supermajority, which galvanizes women’s political activism, Richards continually finds inspiration and strength through Atwood’s work: “On the page and off, her voice has never been more relevant than it is today, when groups of mostly white men are voting in state legislatures and in Washington, D.C., to strip away the rights of pregnant people to make their own decisions.”
Despite her penchant for dystopia, Atwood’s outlook on the present and the future is far from pessimistic. “It’s been worse,” she says. “You may not think that if you’re young, but it’s been worse for the world in terms of wars. But it hasn’t been worse in terms of the climate crisis, that’s pretty unprecedented, and it’s going to drive a lot of other things unless it’s dealt with, so I think that one hopeful thing to say is that if you’re considering voting, you have to remember that we’re not in the land of the perfect.”
Already at work planning the fourth TV season of Handmaid’s, series creator and executive producer Bruce Miller feels an urgent need to do Atwood’s work justice. “Margaret is the confluence of imagination and intellect that doesn’t come along very often, and what she is wielding is unique and very rare,” Miller says. “She’s a fearless storyteller.” Working with the literary legend, he says, has been a transformative experience. “She treats me with so much respect as a writer—and at the beginning that was very hard because I don’t consider myself in any way, shape, or form on the same level as someone like Margaret Atwood—but she treated me like someone who was just another traveler on the same road as she was,” he says. “It changed me a lot because I learned how to bring someone in and get them to do their best work by treating them the way she treated me—like a peer.”
Would she share that peer mentoring with the world in memoir form? “I’m not that interested in myself,” she says. “It would be like, Here’s my summer vacation, and here’s a picture of me in front of the Eiffel Tower, and then I wrote something, and here’s me writing. I wouldn’t read a memoir by me! I’m more interested in the story and the reader because if you’re just writing for yourself, why publish? If you’re writing for the reader, you’re actually interested in what you might evoke for the reader.” Action is the whole point. Her work is a rallying cry for empathy, justice, and tolerance, an urgent reminder of what’s at stake if we allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence.
It’s quite a legacy, but she’s not so concerned about that lofty notion: “I’m going to say something very weird,” she warns before pausing to laugh. “I’m going to be dead. My legacy is nothing I have any control over.... You can’t control what other people think.”
But that’s just the point. She makes her readers think for themselves, encourages them to question, consider, or even rage.
Richards says, “With every page, she asks the question: Will we be complacent observers in our world? Or will we stand up and fight for what we believe? Her writing reminds us that even in the darkest moments, there’s hope, joy, community, and purpose to be found—and that, no matter what they throw at us, we can never let the bastards grind us down.”
Come back each day this week to read profiles of the 2019 Glamour Women of the Year honorees and get your tickets to the two-day event here.
Dianca London Potts earned her M.F.A. from the New School. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee, and the former online editor of Well-Read Black Girl. Her words have been featured in the Village Voice, Shondaland, and elsewhere. Her memoir is forthcoming from 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster. She currently resides in Brooklyn.
Hair and makeup: Ronnie Tremblay at P1M. Set design: Caroline Pandeli. Production: Plutino Group.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
