A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: The first thing most people think of when they hear the name Margaret Atwood is The Handmaid's Tale, and that makes sense.
That book catapulted into pop culture when Hulu turned it into a series starring Elisabeth Moss. But to define Atwood by that particular book, that particular story of a dystopian America where women are enslaved, raped and forced to bear children — as provocative as that is — is incomplete. It's just a small part of Atwood's lifework. She has written dozens of books and has a new collection of poetry called Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023, which is a collection of 60 years of her poetry, including some new works.
Other Things to Know about Margaret Atwood: She is a proud Canadian. She knows how to start a fire in the wilderness. She enjoys the company of frogs, snakes and maybe the occasional slug. She is super into weeding! She is usually the smartest person in any room, and I'm pretty sure she could win Survivor if she decided it was worth the effort.
This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.
Question 1: What's a piece of advice you were smart to ignore?
Margaret Atwood: [laughs] Well! Where do I begin with that, since I ignored almost all advice? I’ll pick something meaningful. So when I was at university, we were given faculty advisers to advise us, I suppose, about the direction that our life should take. And by that time I was already writing and publishing poetry and I had a graduate student scholarship and my faculty adviser said, “Why don't you just forget all this writing and graduate student stuff and find a good man and get married?”
So this would be 1961. That was a little extreme even for those days. So my actual way of reacting to people's advice that I didn't agree with was my inner voice saying, “You're an idiot.”
Rachel Martin: Did you keep that as your inner voice or did those words find their way outside?
Atwood: I’m afraid I let it out a bit too much. Maybe I should have kept it as an inner voice, but at that moment it was, “You're an idiot.” And, “OK, is this conversation over yet? Thank you very much. Goodbye.”
Martin: Did all your good advice come from good friends?
Atwood: Uh, I'm not sure that my good friends would have been much use at that time because I was quite a lot different from people of that time. But I did have another person on faculty who did give me a piece of good advice and I'll tell you what it is.
So I really did think this — in the days of existentialists and being artsy at university — that I was going to go to France, work in a restaurant, live in a garret, smoke Gitanes — no hope of that — and write masterpieces while coughing myself to death, as in La bohème. So I thought I would do that.
I didn't share the whole package with this person on faculty, but I shared enough of it so that they said to me, “I think you would get more writing done if you went to graduate school.” And they were right.
Question 2: How do you manage envy?
Atwood: Directed towards me or envy that I feel?
Martin: Envy that you feel.
Atwood: I don't feel envy.
Martin: Do you not?
Atwood: I do not. I mean, apart from envying tall people [laughs].
Martin: Have you had to manage other people’s envy of you? Does that happen a lot?
Atwood: It has, certainly, yeah. So what I said to young writers who had a sudden success, I said, “Within a couple of years you will have three nasty, vicious personal attacks from people you don't know.” As a rule that happens, particularly if you're younger.
So if you're younger, you've come up with the cohort of other writers your age. You make a big success and then your friends divide into, like the Red Sea, people who can handle it and people who can't handle it. And you find that out pretty quickly.
Martin: What were the attacks that were leveled at you in your first couple of years of success?
Atwood: [laughs] Some of them were quite funny. So a lot of it had to do with hair. Medusa hair or frizzy hair, you know. And one of them wrote a satirical fairy tale in which I bit the heads off men and made them into a pile and turned into an octopus. Figure that out.
Martin: So you were a Medusa-haired man hater.
Atwood: Yeah. And a power-mad, ladder-climbing witch.
Martin: I am curious how you manage that. You were just able to just let it go? Or did any of that get under your skin?
Atwood: Oh, no, I'm a vengeful person.
Martin: Are you being serious?
Atwood: Oh, yes, I'm quite vengeful. I can't help it. It's who I am. So I make them into idiotic people in fiction.
Question 3: What's your best defense against despair?
Atwood: I'm not much of a despairing person. I don't do despair very well, at all. I think it's a temperamental thing. Crises, setbacks, very discouraging things, awful events… yes, sure. Total despair? No.
Martin: Then I'm going to take the liberty of changing the word. What is your best defense against sorrow?
Atwood: Oh sorrow. Sorrow. That's a different thing. I think sorrow is natural. And I had a friend once in the age when a psychiatrist thought it was a good idea to give you a lot of drugs if you were going through grieving and sorrow, and then you just wouldn't feel it. What that means is you never get over it, because you haven't had that experience, which is a very human one, and everyone has it sooner or later. It's grief.
And since I'm now in the land of widows, I'm the person that they phone and they say, “Will this ever be over? How do I get through this?”
So one day at a time, but don’t expect there to be no sorrow.
Martin: So there is not a defense against it? The defense is to just move through it?
Atwood: Why is it something that you should defend against? It's something you live through but that's not a defense against it. By defense you mean it's not getting in the door. We're not letting it in the door. Oh that would just be acting. You know, that would be quite fake.
Question 4: Have you ever had a premonition about something that came true?
Atwood: Oh yes. Writing The Handmaid's Tale in 1984 — at which point the critical reaction went along these lines:
In England, where they had done their religious totalitarianism under Oliver Cromwell, they knew they weren't going to do that thing again. So they said, “Jolly good yarn.” So they treated it as completely fictional.
In Canada, an anxious country, where they frequently pose questions to themselves they said, “Could it happen here?”
In the United States it split into two. On the one hand, “Don't be silly. That will never happen here. We're the world's leading liberal democracy, a beacon of hope to countries all around the world. How could you even suggest that we would go along that path?” On the other hand, on the West Coast, where many things begin, they said, “How long have we got?”
Martin: Before the scenarios that you had outlined in The Handmaid's Tale — the oppression of women — became reality?
Atwood: That’s right. Before women's rights got rolled back, in essence. So you could see in the early ‘80s that that was always a possibility. And then the Cold War ends in 1989-90. People said, quite wrongly, “Well, now it's just going to be, you know, liberal democracy all over the place. And, you know, conflict is at an end and now we're just going to go shopping a lot.” So I thought, “OK, maybe this has receded somewhat,” but as you can see, it came back.
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