Sixty Years at the Desk: Margaret Atwood on Nesting a Story

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.

Margaret Atwood

Thank you. I am told I am here to talk about writing rather than prophecy, which is a relief.

Nora Ellis

For anyone who has not read it, what is The Blind Assassin?

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.

Nora Ellis

You still write longhand.

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.

Nora Ellis

People call you a prophet. You resist that.

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.

Nora Ellis

What did you want this particular book to do?

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.

Nora Ellis

And the reach? Do you think about the size of the audience?

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.

Nora Ellis

One piece of advice.

Margaret Atwood

Write the next sentence. That is the whole method. Everything else is furniture.

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.