Margaret Atwood has ‘always found snivelling in public embarrassing’. Light on introspection, even lighter on confession, Book of Lives is thus only a memoir ‘of sorts’: a 600-page chronicle of her life and times, in which one of our most celebrated novelists, just turned eighty-six, is determined not to take herself too seriously. 

Rolling your sleeves up and getting on with things – appreciating what’s around rather than inside you – are family traits. The Atwoods ‘didn’t have a bean’ but they did have adventurous spirits. Peggy, as she was always known, and her two siblings were raised between Toronto and the wilds of northern Quebec. Her beloved parents – a conservationist, entomologist father and athletic, tomboy mother – moved frequently, building their own rural cabins and fending off bears. At eleven, Peggy had her own pocket knife, complete with a fish scaler. She fed her romantic imagination with Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Coleridge, Byron and the mythological writings of Robert Graves. 

As a teenager she was, by her own description, short and flat-chested, with horn-rimmed glasses, frizzy hair and a snaggle tooth. This ‘nerdy brainiac’ began to think of herself as a poet, adopting bohemian clothes and winning scholarships, including one to Harvard, where she started a doctorate on Victorian literature in the hope that academia would finance the writing of poetry. She dug into the weirder corners of the 19th century: metamorphoses, ghosts and searches for the Holy Grail. Later, she learned astrology, palmistry and Tarot. 

The Peggy who emerges from these formative years is part Girl Guide, part witch: a Gothic dreamer with a work ethic; Madame Sosostris meets the persona Atwood calls ‘Ms Fixit’. She marries a fellow Victorianist because it makes practical sense but yearns for something else. She makes her own clothes but also fancy-dress costumes and puppets. Itself a mix of competence and eccentricity, Atwood’s voice is relentlessly, scrupulously self-deprecating. Cheerful and sardonic, she is always good company but constantly giving us the slip. This makes her early literary reputation hard to gauge. She began to earn recognition as a poet with Double Persephone in 1961 and The Circle Game in 1964, for which she won Canada’s Governor General’s Award. She published novels from 1969, starting with The Edible Woman, which was quickly optioned by Oscar Lewenstein (no film was made, and the rights were recently bought by Margot Robbie’s production company). Along the way she had lunch in London with Jean Rhys and took working holidays in France with Tony Richardson. The glamour is punctured by Atwood’s sense of herself as an ingenue with uncontrollable hair.

Atwood sees such self-deprecation as a national characteristic. She is wry about Canadians’ refusal to get too excited about anything, and about their underdog mentality. She situates her career in the context of the Canadian literary scene, which she helped to create in the 1960s when ‘most Canadians felt there wasn’t any Canadian writing, and even if there was some, it was bound to be second-rate’. Although she flourishes in that burgeoning literary culture (about which she loves to gossip, including a bit of score-settling), supporting the writing of others through her work with House of Anansi Press and later PEN Canada, something of a scrappy, minor-league attitude persists. Atwood insists that for a long time she was ‘world-famous in Canada’, in Mordechai Richler’s memorable phrase. 

The deflections may also be a symptom of novel-writing. Atwood characterises novelists as ‘kleptomaniacs’, but in her own case ‘magpie’ might be nearer the mark: here is a novelist who has hoarded pieces of the exterior world rather than look too deeply at herself. Every event she remembers is an opportunity to excavate offbeat small details: a very nice boyfriend (‘VNB’) whose housemate had a monkey called God; the embossed silver telephone receiver cover she received as a wedding gift; the huge cow’s tongue she once cooked. 

In fiction she might transform these glinting pieces into something larger (The Edible Woman turns food and useless consumer products into a satire on capitalism and femininity). But Atwood thinks biography is for real-life truths not aesthetic ones. She has written many novels about the tricksiness of testimony, from Alias Grace and its slippery accounts of the convicted murderer Grace Marks, to The Testaments, in which secret, subversive documents bring down Gilead. But real-life testimony, it seems, should be more straightforward. Does this distinction hold up? Atwood’s writing has always blurred the lines between fiction and reality. Most famously, The Handmaid’s Tale – based in part on Atwood’s experiences when visiting East Berlin in 1984 – is now read for its foreshadowing of new repressions in our own era. 

It is tempting to look for a political position in the memoir’s emphasis on the ordinary, particular details of individuals’ lives. Atwood is a fierce and high-profile liberal, defending individualism over any collective movement, apart perhaps from environmentalism. Those who saw The Handmaid’s Tale and its television adaptation as feminist manifestos will be disappointed to find very little feminism in Book of Lives. Atwood pushes back against expectations that she will ‘do the Right Thing for women in all circumstances’, defending instead the broader civil rights of all individuals.  

There is one aesthetic pattern in Book of Lives: the theme of doubles. Atwood separates her writer self from her regular self, and even those selves are multiple. Her novels often combine the voices of several first-person narratives, and Peggy sees herself as divided between frivolous Gemini and tenebrous Scorpio. It’s another deflection, this time a set of disguises. But deep feeling does emerge when Atwood writes about her partner, the writer Graeme Gibson, with whom she built one of her lives – around food, friends, family and birding – and whose death in 2019 shattered her steadiness. Emotion also pierces the affable surface of the book through Atwood’s poems, printed in full at intervals. In ‘Lucky’, she channels her Scorpio self as she contemplates Gibson’s death, and perhaps wonders about her own: ‘Who knows its name, this darkness?/It’s merely there, a condition/for stars…’