Description
THE BOOK
How does one of the greatest storytellers of our time write her own life?
The long-awaited memoir from one of our most lauded and influential
cultural figures
‘Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes.
Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they
are not the same.’
Raised by ruggedly independent, scientificaly minded parents – entomologist
father, dietician mother – Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of
northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes
isolated (on her eighth birthday: ‘It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more
forlorn.’), but also thri ling and beautiful.
From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking
seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from
the cruel year that spawned Cat’s Eye to divided 1980s Berlin where she began
The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical
life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning
points, we meet poets, bears, Holywood actors and larger-than-life characters
straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.
As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed
about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of
one of our greatest imaginations
