A sharp, funny and engaging autobiography from one of the towering literary figures of our age
M
argaret Atwood didn’t want to write a literary memoir. She worried it would be boring – “I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book …” Alcoholic excess, debauched parties and sexual transgressions would have perked things up, but she hasn’t lived that way.
In the end what she has written is less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works, 85 years. Where most such backward looks are cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying, hers is sharp, funny and engaging, a book you can warm to even if you’re not fully au fait (and few people are) with her astonishing output, which in the “also by” contents list here fills two pages.
She was lucky in her parents, a foresting entomologist father, Carl, and tomboyish mother, Margaret, both from Nova Scotia. Carl’s work on insects meant that the family spent half the year in the bush, at times without electricity, running water or a telephone. They’d camp in tents or shacks by a lake while Carl cut down trees to build a wooden cabin. Young Margaret – Peggy to everyone – loved the outdoors; she learned to fish, canoe, beachcomb, pick berries, delight in birds, insects, mushrooms and frogs. At summer camp, in her teens, she was known as Peggy Nature.
