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Book of Lives
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How does one of the greatest storytellers of our time write her own life? • The long-awaited memoir from one of our most lauded and influential cultural figures.
‘Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.’
Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents – entomologist father, dietician mother – Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: 'It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.’), but also thrilling and beautiful.
From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat’s Eye to the Orwellian 1980s of East Berlin where she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.
As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations.
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780385547512
- ISBN-10: 038554751X
- Publisher: Doubleday Books
- Publish Date: November 2025
- Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 2.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.15 pounds
- Page Count: 624
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When someone in the publishing world first suggested that Margaret Atwood write a “literary memoir,” she replied that it would be tedious both to read and write. But as the decades passed, the now-octagenarian author found that the “idea of a memoir acquired a lurid phosphorescent glow. Wasn’t there something appealing in the idea? my sinister alter ego whispered. I could depict myself in a flattering light. . . . I could spill some beans. I could dish some tea.” Delightfully funny, Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts is hardly tedious. Rather, it sparkles with elegance, wit and grace. In lively prose, Atwood moves briskly through her peripatetic childhood and adolescence, exploring the northern Quebec wilderness as her entomologist father and dietitian mother move the family from job posting to job posting. She develops a love of telling stories very early, producing rhyming stories and putting on puppet plays for her brother and her friends. In high school, she sets out to write poetry, in part because poets in Cold War-era Canada were regarded not as subversives but as “harmless lunatics,” though she moves quickly to trying her hand at romance stories for pulp magazines such as True Romance. Linking events in her life to the writing of her books, she explores her relationships with her first husband, Jim Polk; fellow Canadian writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Laurence; her professor Northrop Frye; and her beloved partner, the late novelist Graeme Gibson. Atwood sprinkles observations on her novels, poems and stories through the memoir, reflecting on her writing and life. As she types her early novel The Edible Woman, the landlady who lives downstairs mistakes the striking of the keys as the noise of termites; Atwood wryly reflects, “Novel-writing = termites in the woodwork. Tunneling away in the dark, unseen, unsuspected, until one day the whole structure crumbles and their artistry is revealed.” When she’s stuck on another manuscript, she calls on Hermes the trickster god, “the one you invoke when you’ve slammed head first into a stone wall,” and she picks up a shelved draft that develops into The Handmaid’s Tale. “I move through time, and, when I write, time moves through me. It’s the same for everyone. You can’t stop time, nor can you seize it; it slips away.” At every turn, the enthralling and entertaining Book of Lives exquisitely captures moments small and monumental in equal measure, revealing one of our most brilliant storytellers at work.
When someone in the publishing world first suggested that Margaret Atwood write a “literary memoir,” she replied that it would be tedious both to read and write. But as the decades passed, the now-octagenarian author found that the “idea of a memoir acquired a lurid phosphorescent glow. Wasn’t there something appealing in the idea? my sinister alter ego whispered. I could depict myself in a flattering light. . . . I could spill some beans. I could dish some tea.” Delightfully funny, Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts is hardly tedious. Rather, it sparkles with elegance, wit and grace. In lively prose, Atwood moves briskly through her peripatetic childhood and adolescence, exploring the northern Quebec wilderness as her entomologist father and dietitian mother move the family from job posting to job posting. She develops a love of telling stories very early, producing rhyming stories and putting on puppet plays for her brother and her friends. In high school, she sets out to write poetry, in part because poets in Cold War-era Canada were regarded not as subversives but as “harmless lunatics,” though she moves quickly to trying her hand at romance stories for pulp magazines such as True Romance. Linking events in her life to the writing of her books, she explores her relationships with her first husband, Jim Polk; fellow Canadian writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Laurence; her professor Northrop Frye; and her beloved partner, the late novelist Graeme Gibson. Atwood sprinkles observations on her novels, poems and stories through the memoir, reflecting on her writing and life. As she types her early novel The Edible Woman, the landlady who lives downstairs mistakes the striking of the keys as the noise of termites; Atwood wryly reflects, “Novel-writing = termites in the woodwork. Tunneling away in the dark, unseen, unsuspected, until one day the whole structure crumbles and their artistry is revealed.” When she’s stuck on another manuscript, she calls on Hermes the trickster god, “the one you invoke when you’ve slammed head first into a stone wall,” and she picks up a shelved draft that develops into The Handmaid’s Tale. “I move through time, and, when I write, time moves through me. It’s the same for everyone. You can’t stop time, nor can you seize it; it slips away.” At every turn, the enthralling and entertaining Book of Lives exquisitely captures moments small and monumental in equal measure, revealing one of our most brilliant storytellers at work.