For much of her long, illustrious career, Margaret Atwood looked at the idea of a memoir with suspicion. Lives, she suggested, resist coherence; memory is unreliable and narrative tidies what experience leaves jagged. This is precisely what makes Book of Lives so compelling. It does not attempt to impose order so much as sit with an accumulation of scenes, habits, institutions, and losses. The ‘memoir of sorts’ allows them to coexist without insisting they resolve into meaning.
The book is no key to Atwood’s fiction, but it subtly rearranges how one reads her work. It restores the conditions under which her novels were written without attempting to explain them. In this effort, Atwood is a woman looking back to notice what shaped her attention in a life alert to precarity, sceptical of authority, and deeply wary of moral certainty, especially the kind that institutions reward.
Book of Lives does not ask to be read as an origin story. It does something more interesting: restore contingency. It reminds us that Atwood’s work was shaped by adjustment to institutions, education, public scrutiny, and the slow realisation that stories, once released, stop belonging to their maker.
Silence as containment
Much of the memoir lingers on Atwood’s early years, though never sentimentally. Her childhood, shaped by movement between forests, temporary homes, and long stretches of intellectual solitude, produced more vigilance than nostalgia. The memoir returns repeatedly to the ways environment—and later, education—trains attention. Safety is provisional, systems are not neutral, and knowledge is never free of consequence.
That watchfulness would later take institutional form. Atwood came of age just as elite universities in the UK and the US were opening their doors wider to women. Women were encouraged to learn, but couldn’t claim intellectual space with ease. Education offered access while tacitly demanding adjustment—a softening of certainty, a calibration of ambition. Atwood’s latest does not narrate this as a grievance but records it as atmosphere, the low hum beneath achievement.
Seen in that light, Surfacing (1972) no longer reads like an exercise in symbolism. It feels closer to an emotional register—a record of withdrawal that’s less mystical than practical. The protagonist’s turn toward wilderness, and her abandonment of language and social obligation, have long been interpreted as breakdown or purification. The memoir suggests another way of understanding that withdrawal is a learned response to intrusion. Silence here is a form of containment, a way of staying intact when participation begins to feel corrosive.
The instinct to step back rather than confront runs discreetly through Atwood’s early work. It belongs to a writer who had not been made public property, who still understood disappearance as a viable tactic. For women educated in systems that promise emancipation while disciplining dissent, withdrawal can become a form of self-preservation. It’s neither heroic nor pretty, but intelligible.
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A calibrated womanhood
In her twenties, Atwood did not think of herself as a feminist. And at the time, the idea of absolute equality had not entered the mainstream. But the constraints on women made the young writer take notice and later register a protest through her work.
By the time Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), withdrawal was no longer an option. What Book of Lives makes clear is how attentively she has always watched process rather than spectacle: how rights erode incrementally, how authority becomes routine, how knowledge is managed long before it is banned. The book’s power lies in its plausibility. It does not predict, it recognises.
The memoir also does not claim prescience. It insists on pattern recognition that Atwood learned inside universities, publishing, and public debate, where legitimacy is granted selectively and withdrawn swiftly. Education, in this world, sharpens awareness as much as it confers power.
That awareness grew more complex in The Robber Bride (1993), a book that unsettled readers precisely because it refused moral comfort. Its women are educated, articulate, professionally accomplished and yet entangled in rivalry, vulnerability, and betrayal. Feminism here is not solidarity as a slogan but survival under conditions of scarcity.
Zenia, the novel’s most divisive figure, survives through narrative agility. She understands how stories circulate, how sympathy is produced, and how identity can be refashioned faster than it can be fixed. She is often dismissed as anti-feminist. The memoir allows a colder reading: Zenia is what emerges when the demand for moral purity is made only of those least protected by the system.
Atwood writes candidly in the memoir about public life—about being read reductively and about reputation becoming a contest. In that context, The Robber Bride looks like the work of someone who understands that visibility itself is a form of vulnerability, and that adaptation can look indistinguishable from duplicity.
What links Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Robber Bride is not a neat feminist argument so much as a shared attentiveness to survival. Atwood’s women are rarely liberated. They are calibrated. They learn when to withdraw, when to comply, when to perform, and when to resist—silently. Those choices are never presented as pure. The memoir’s refusal to tidy Atwood’s own life into a moral arc mirrors that fictional refusal.
Book of Lives complicates Atwood’s fiction and strips away the reputation of her work for prophecy and polemic. What remains is Atwood as she has always been: a writer attentive to how women learn—often belatedly—the second curriculum of power, survival, and adjustment inside systems never designed to be neutral.
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(Edited by Prasanna Bachchav)