This is a book of surprises. And it’s not at all the book I anticipated from the reviews and the media coverage, which alternated between highlighting Atwood’s take-downs of various enemies and effusing about her literary output.
But the reviews didn’t convey that Atwood, while occasionally grinding axes (and I would really rather not have learned some of the things about Dorothy Livesay that she conveys) is also warmly appreciative of everyone who helped her along her literary way, especially in her youth. Jane Rule and her partner Helen get a nice tribute; various Canadian male poets pass in and out of Atwood’s life, and there’s some good gossip about Ondaatje and a fellow writer’s wife.
But this is mostly not a salacious literary tell-all. And despite Atwood’s insistence that as a Scorpio she is bound to be avenged on her enemies, relatively few people, including fellow writers (or perhaps more to the point, literary critics and reviewers), are treated with contempt.
Much of the attention has gone to Atwood’s portrait of the late and rather fascinating Shirley Gibson, her life partner Graeme Gibson’s wife of many years, who blamed Atwood for the break-up of her marriage. While there may be some truth (and Shirley’s not here to counter Atwood’s narrative), it seems more like two unhappy marriages (the Gibsons’ and Atwood’s to Jim Polk, an American writer and literary critic she met in grad school at Harvard) crashed into each other.
For Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, the consequences were only positive: it became her biggest supporter, and while he was no slouch as a writer, as his first novel, Five Legs demonstrated, his career seemed to be secondary to hers. But they happily raised a daughter (Atwood confesses that she very much wanted a second child; Gibson, who had sons from his first marriage, wouldn’t concede). And they spent many, many decades together. So this is very old gossip, at this point, and mostly of interest because it may have fuelled aspects of, for instance, Atwood’s Life Before Man.
The best parts of the book, however, consider how Atwood’s life fuelled her writing in more direct ways: her childhood experience of bullying, captured so brilliantly in Cat’s Eye; the physical locations in Boston that she brought into The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood describes herself as a magpie at one point, and as a con artist (of sorts) at another.
Well, that’s not quite right. This is what she says, and it resonates with me in a complicated way, because of a very odd scenario I encountered a decade ago:
“There’s a set of emotions familiar to anyone who has been the victim of a con artist. First, anger at the perpetrators: Why have they been so mean? But also anger at oneself: Why have you been so stupid? You ought to have figured it out sooner. Also again: Being conned has been a violation of your trust, and trust is a thing you will never extend so easily again. Possibly you will never entirely trust anyone. You will be endlessly wondering about hidden motives and secret agendas. You will know that there are likely to be at least two stories: the one you’re being told, and the other one.
You might become a detective. You might become a con artist yourself. Or, a blend of the two: you might become a novelist.”
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 