Margaret Atwood

"I owe my existence to a large green caterpillar".

After reading this autobiography bulging with anecdotes, portraits of people, trips around the world and nature at her rawest, if not always raw (Atwood once fried and ate a rattlesnake), all from a brain pullulating with ideas - think The Handmaid’s Tale – nothing is a surprise. Except perhaps her childhood.
The caterpillar arises because her father, Carl Atwood, was a Canadian entomologist whose research took his family to the wild north of the country. Daughter Margaret (often ‘Peggy’) didn’t attend full-time school until she was 12, making her supremely independent in thought and action.
She suffered traumatically at one school, when three so-called friends tortured her – ‘left in the snow, buried in a hole, to improve me’. She comments wryly that she had not appreciated ‘the byzantine nature of power politics practised by nine and ten-year-old girls’. The experience left her ‘nervous and depressed’ and deeply affected her ability to trust. It did, however, result in her powerful novel, Cat’s Eye.
Unlike many novelists, Atwood admits to times when life morphed into art. Throughout her book, fans will find explanations – or at least parallels – to even her more far-fetched ideas. At sixteen, she began writing poetry which, although less well-known, she took as seriously as her fiction, clocking up 18 books of poetry, and as many novels.
At university, her wide interests begin to emerge: gender, religion and myth (always important), climate change, social politics, and, inevitably, writing itself, founding the Canadian branch of the international writers’ organisation, PEN. Nevertheless, she did not like labels and resisted the word ‘feminism’, calling herself on occasion ‘a red Tory’.
This does not mean that Atwood, like some dedicated writers, thought people less important than ideas. Her beloved mother lived till she was 97. She remains close to her brother and sister. After an early marriage described as ‘temporary’, she found the love of her life, Graeme Gibson.
Gibson came with two young sons and a difficult ex-wife, but with the intelligence and originality that Atwood admires. He also published novels. Their first house returned her to childhood, real country living, surrounded by dogs, ducks, sheep and chickens. But they had no problem eating the lamb they had reared when it turned into a violent ram. Soon, they had a daughter, Eleanor Jess. Gibson’s death from illness and Alzheimer’s is movingly described.
Finally, Atwood returns to the subject that has never left her: writing. ‘On we sail in our paper boats, we writers. Flimsy enough vehicles, but we don’t jump ship. Or at least I haven’t. Or not yet.’
This autobiography makes it obvious why not. This is a fascinating, close-up account of the life of a writer who has touched readers around the world.