Behind the Book, Episode 124
Sixty Years at the Desk: Margaret Atwood on Nesting a Story
Nora Ellis in conversation with Margaret Atwood
Recorded August 5, 2026 · 02:46
https://behindthebookfm.com/episodes/the-blind-assassin

This interview is a voiced dramatisation written by our team, drawn from the
author's publicly documented remarks on craft.

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[00:00] Nora Ellis:
Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis, and today I am joined by Margaret Atwood: poet, novelist, twice a Booker Prize winner, the author of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments and the novel we are discussing, The Blind Assassin. Margaret, welcome.

[00:17] Margaret Atwood:
Thank you. I am told I am here to talk about writing rather than prophecy, which is a relief.

[00:24] Nora Ellis:
For anyone who has not read it, what is The Blind Assassin?

[00:30] Margaret Atwood:
Three books wearing one coat. An old woman remembering her sister, a novel inside the novel, and a pulp science fiction story being told in a rented room. Put together they are about who gets to tell the story of a family, and what a woman had to trade in nineteen thirties Canada to survive it.

[00:51] Nora Ellis:
You still write longhand.

[00:54] Margaret Atwood:
First drafts, yes, in whatever notebook is nearest. The hand is slower than the brain, which is exactly the point. And I stopped waiting for a good mood sometime in the nineteen seventies. Waiting for the mood is how people produce nothing for thirty years and call it perfectionism.

[01:11] Nora Ellis:
People call you a prophet. You resist that.

[01:15] Margaret Atwood:
It is not prophecy, it is filing. Everything in my speculative books has already been done by somebody, somewhere, usually to women. I keep clippings. The invention is in the arrangement, not the horror.

[01:31] Nora Ellis:
What did you want this particular book to do?

[01:34] Margaret Atwood:
I wanted the reader to be complicit. You spend six hundred pages believing one version, and then the floor moves. That is not a trick for its own sake. It is a way of showing how families and countries agree on a comfortable story and repeat it until it hardens.

[01:54] Nora Ellis:
And the reach? Do you think about the size of the audience?

[01:59] Margaret Atwood:
I think about the reader, singular, and then I am delighted when there are a great many of them. Television took Gilead to people who would never have picked up the book, and I have no snobbery about that whatsoever. If a young reader arrives through a screen, they still arrive.

[02:16] Nora Ellis:
One piece of advice.

[02:18] Margaret Atwood:
Write the next sentence. That is the whole method. Everything else is furniture.

[02:24] Nora Ellis:
Margaret Atwood, thank you for this. Listeners, we do not stop at the interview: every guest gets a month of promotion from us, so The Blind Assassin is featured on our promoted books page and going out to the whole mailing list. Follow the show, leave us a rating, and pass it to a friend who is stuck on chapter two. I'm Nora Ellis, and this was Behind the Book.