Margaret Atwood on reading palms, getting older — and holding grudges

Margaret Atwood is best known as a celebrated novelist, poet, essayist and literary critic — but she can also turn her hand to a spot of palm reading.

“You’re very healthy and you’re going to live a long time,” she told The Current’s Matt Galloway, scrutinizing his hand at a recent interview at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto.

“I don’t say that to everybody,” she added.

Atwood retraces the lines of her own life in Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, which explores how decades of moving through the world have shaped her writing, and how writing, in turn, has shaped her life.

Now 85, Atwood is often described as the queen of Canadian literature. She’s published more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and criticism, with works including The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace turned into major screen adaptations.

For years her public appearances have provoked much excitement and long line-ups, but the 1969 publicity event for her first novel, The Edible Woman, was a much more humble affair.

“It was in the men’s sock and underwear department of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” she told Galloway.

Atwood remembers it was a November day in Edmonton, where everyone was wearing galoshes. She doesn’t know why organizers chose that precise location in the store, but thinks it might have been an attempt to attract people descending a nearby escalator.

“I think they thought people … would see me sitting with my pathetic little table of edible women amongst the jockey shorts and would run over and buy them — which they didn’t,” Atwood said.

“What happened instead was that men — in on their lunch break to buy some socks — took one look at this and and galloped away in their galoshes.”

Margaret Atwood reads CBC host’s palm ‘right in front of everybody’

Atwood was born in 1939, the middle child of entomologist Carl Edmund Atwood and dietitian Margaret Dorothy Killam, both of whom she described as “big storytellers.”

Her father’s research meant that Atwood and her two siblings spent much of their childhood in remote backwoods, both in Ontario and Quebec. They lived in a cabin with no electricity or running water, were homeschooled by their mother and spent much of their time outside exploring the woods.

She said people have always asked her if this unconventional childhood made her a writer, but she points out that “writers are writers for all sorts of different reasons.” 

“You can’t stick a person in the woods and expect them to become a writer,” she said. 

Atwood put together her first collection of poetry in Grade 1: a book called Rhyming Cats, which she also illustrated. By her senior year of high school, she declared in her yearbook that she intended to write “THE Canadian novel.”

“That was when I was thinking of going off to France and living in a garret and smoking Gitanes, although I couldn’t smoke, and drinking absinthe, although I was bad at drinking,” she told Galloway.

She planned to support herself by writing romance stories, having read in Writer’s Market magazine that those stories paid well — “way more than poetry, just tons more.”

“I was going to do that as my day job and then write my works of genius masterpiece at night. But I wasn’t any good at writing true romance stories, sadly,” she said.

It was during her undergrad years at the University of Toronto that Atwood read every piece of CanLit she could find, and started performing poetry at the Bohemian Embassy cafe. The country’s literary scene was still “very underground and quite small,” she told The Current.

In Book of Lives she writes that, “Most Canadians felt there wasn’t any Canadian writing, and even if there was some, it was bound to be second-rate. Real writers came from elsewhere.”

But the 1960s saw a radical shift. Literary giants like Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro made their debuts, as new magazines and publishing companies started to spring up.

“We didn’t think we were part of the creation of something. You see these things in retrospect,” she told Galloway.

“But when you’re doing it, you’re not thinking that. You’re thinking, ‘OK, now there will be a place where we can publish our weird experimental first novels and undecipherable poetry.’”

In the years that followed, Atwood began her relationship with the writer and conservationist Graeme Gibson, who was her long-term partner until his death in 2019. They shared a love of birds and canoe trips. Atwood writes that before they became a couple, Gibson watched her read a friend’s palm — and felt a desire for her to read his too.

“I think he liked me holding his hand,” she said.

Atwood never tells her publishers what she’s working on, including when she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985.

At the time the U.S. was seen as a “beacon of light” in the Cold War struggle, and Atwood feared her publishers would balk at a dystopian future where American women were brutalized by a theocratic dictatorship. When it was published, Atwood remembers many readers and critics saying it could never happen.

“But Ronald Reagan had been elected in 1980 and there was already a push in that direction from the rising religious right-wing,” she said. “So I was looking at what they were saying.”

When U.S. President Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, Atwood was working on the first season of the The Handmaid’s Tale TV show. The day after the election, she knew there had been a shift.

“Nothing about the show changed, but the frame changed and it was viewed differently,” she said. “It was no longer a remote fantasy; it was an approaching reality.”

She said that so far, Trump’s second term reminds her of the history of the 1930s, arguing his administration is trying to “move away from the principles” on which the U.S. was founded.

“These people want to disassemble the United States and put it back together as something else,” she said.

As Canada-U.S. tensions simmer, she thinks concerned Canadians should remember their long friendship with the American people — and pay heed to growing pushback south of the border.

“Americans are ornery. They don’t like lining up and saluting, they don’t like other people telling them what to do or say or think or read,” she said. 

“There is an inherent ‘oh-no-I-won’tness’ about Americans, and that is now coming out.”

Margaret Atwood is finally calling people out in her new memoir

The book was published on Nov. 4, a few weeks shy of Atwood’s 86th birthday. Getting older has given her more freedom to write this memoir, simply because “a lot of people have died.”

“I can actually say these things now without destroying somebody else’s life. Except for the people whose lives I wish to destroy,” she joked.

Does she like holding grudges?

“I don’t have a choice. I’m a Scorpio. We hold grudges,” she said. “It’s not an attractive thing to say about yourself. I struggle against it, but not very hard.” 

She recently visited an audiologist, who said her hearing was remarkably good for someone in her age bracket.  

“I said, ‘Most people in my demographic are dead, so they’re not hearing anything,’” she chuckled.

“He was quite shocked by that … number one, that I said it, and number two that I thought it was a joke.”

But for Atwood — and for many people — having a sense of humour is an important part of getting older. She described meeting friends for what she called “the organ recital,” where they talk about which parts of their bodies are ailing and failing.

“And if you’re lucky and live long enough … it will happen to you,” she said.

What comes next?

“I’m not sure. And I wouldn’t tell you anyway,” she said.

“And I certainly wouldn’t tell you what I’m working on, so don’t even ask.”