Beyond ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: Margaret Atwood on Memoir, Grudges, & Getting Older

21:03This was back in the days when I could drive no longer with me. We told each other stories of our lives. Oh, my God. And one of the stories of the lives that she told me was El Salvador and what was going on there. And I said, well, can you write about this? No, no, no, nobody will publish it. They're all too scared. I said, well, why don't you publish it in Canada? Oh, my God. Why don't you break the story in Canada, which she did.

21:29Kara Swisher:I can't, for people who don't know, Karen Forshee wrote a beautiful book of poetry about El Salvador called The Country Between Us. And I can't believe you're the reason. Well, thank you. Let me just say. I'm not the reason. Well? I'm just, I'm not the reason. I'm just the fix-it person. Well, it works for me. It's one of my most important books I've ever read, actually. Sue, especially The Colonel. Of course, everyone knows The Colonel, but I like the entire book, actually. Carolyn, I hope you're listening. Carolyn. We'll be back in a minute.

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24:42Kara Swisher:Finally, you can enjoy your favorite foods without the pain. Just go to ICanEatAgain.com slash Cara. So let's pivot to your career in some of these books. The duality is a theme that runs through a lot of your work, including this memoir. And you say every writer has at least two beings, the one who lives and the one who writes. But you say in your case, there are more than two, as you said on the cover of Book of Lives. That comes through with these two parts of your identity. There's the Peggy nature side, the nickname you earned as a teenage camp counselor. Then there's the author, Margaret Atwoodside, who's maybe a little more serious, maybe not.

25:22Kara Swisher:So how is Margaret the person distinctly different from Margaret the writer? Margaret the person? Yeah. Well, is there a Margaret the person? I don't know. No, we don't know. Maybe there's just Peggy the person and Margaret the writer, which would be very neat. so people say, well, what's the connection? And I usually cite Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So I'm the Dr. Jekyll person, and Margaret is the Mr. Hyde. Well, explain that, please. I can't leave that there on the ground. You could. I could, but I'm not going to. I should have just picked it up, and I'm asking you what it means. I know you are.

26:09Okay, so Mr. Hyde, and we're not going to push this too far because Mr. Hyde is unequivocally evil, but let us say that the writer's side of people is usually somewhat more intense, and it's usually somewhat darker in its imaginations, in its imaginings. especially if you're writing in the 20th and 21st centuries when carefree social comedy is harder to write than it was in, say, 1820.

26:52Kara Swisher:Yeah, because those are the fun days. Well, no, it's that social classes were isolated and you could write about them as if nothing else existed. Right, as things weren't linked to each other. So you think the writer is darker than the person? I would, it's, what's very interesting, I've seen you speak at a number of things, I never had the guts to come up and introduce myself, but your humor really comes through in your memoir in a way that I have seen you in public at speeches and various book readings. And you're very funny, which is something I was caught off guard by. I think many people are.

27:29Kara Swisher:I had someone sitting next to me, and they were like, she's hysterical. Like, how dare she be? She wrote The Handmaid's Tale. How can she be not dire? The Handmaid's Tale has a number of jokes. I agree. But when you think about yourself and your presentation, because you do carry around the seriousness part of it, right, and the darkness part as a public figure. Yeah. What can I say about that? Somebody said to me, why do you always write these gloomy dystopias and you're so pessimistic? I said, I'm not really because I didn't kill them all off at the end. You know, some people have. So that's the hopeful part.

28:10Kara Swisher:They're not all dead, correct? They're not all dead, yeah. They're not all dead. And as for The Handmaid's Tale, we know by the historical note at the end that this regime did not last. Right, exactly. Which I think, I actually tend to argue when people are talking about your books that they're actually quite hopeful because they're about the fight, the existence of a fight that continues despite. Yeah, there is always a resistance and that can go either way. Yeah, so for my characters, I write the year of their birth and then all the years across the top and I write the months down the side. and that allows me to pinpoint what is going on in their lives when they are a certain age.

28:55So we all are part of our own time and place and I cannot escape the fact that I was born in 1939, two months after World War II began. So the whole Hitler trajectory, the whole World War II trajectory was part of my growing up And so was the Stalin trajectory, which was somewhat different. But it, too, eventually fell apart. The question that always occurs when these things fall apart is, what happens then? What replaces it?

29:36Kara Swisher:What becomes it? Right. It's an interesting idea because one of the things, I have a relative, even though I sort of rail on tech and billionaires and things like that, Everyone's like, you're rather hopeful. And I said, well, to me, all dictators end up dead in a hole. That's been my historical just observation. But so does everybody. Right. But there's a dead in a hole and then there's— Yeah, there's a dead in a hole. I mean, killed by their people or strung upside down or the Chachascus. Well, a lot of them. Not Stalin. He died with his boots on. He did. I lived in Germany right after the wall fell.

30:12Kara Swisher:I covered stuff there. And it was really interesting. It was a real— What part of, were you in Berlin? I lived in Berlin, and the wall had just fallen, and I lived in Kreuzberg, which was right next to the wall at the time. Cheap at the top. Yeah, and it was still there, pieces of it had been broken down. But what was really interesting is when I went into East Germany, and they had never been taught about the Holocaust that much, or that it was their fault, or anything else. And so they had a whole different history. Completely. It was riveting. And, of course, the West Germans had been very much taught about the Holocaust and their culpability.

30:50Kara Swisher:And so the difference between them, and I was covering race riots about immigrants. They were anti-immigrant in Rostock. And I'll never forget, it was the birthday of Rudolf Hess. So these neo-Nazis went and had a march, and you couldn't do it in West Germany. So they wandered all over East Germany. I followed them in a small car. And I kept thinking, God, Rudolf Hess is the worst Nazi to celebrate, but all right. And all these people in East Germany were celebrating this, which was really interesting, except for one woman who stood in front of the march and said, Schade, which is shame, of course.

31:28Kara Swisher:And I wrote about her, but it was something else. And you wrote part of The Handmaid's Tale while you were in West Germany and visited East Germany. Yeah, West Berlin. Yeah, but you also went there before the wall fell, correct? Oh, yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. Well, it was very tight. In fact, it was the tightest probably of those East Block countries. And people didn't really want to interact with you as adults. So they were quite happy to say, oh, decline an angle about your child. That was safe. Yeah. But obviously everybody was worried about who else was watching them, and rightly so, because we now know that at least one in every 50 East Germans was spying for the regime.

32:16Kara Swisher:Through those files that came out, right? You probably know this book called Stasieland. So, yeah, so that was East Germany with terrible ice cream and awful chocolate and not much you could spend your converted money on, which you then couldn't convert back. So there was always a cash grab at the border. You had to change Western money into their Deutschmarks, and you could not reconvert it. Right, so you had to keep their money. I assume it was formative, seeing that, presumably. Well, it was very interesting. And then we went to Czechoslovakia, also very interesting and pretty tight, but not as tight.

32:56And then we went to Poland, which was very loose, even in 1984. So I thought to myself at that time, it's going to crumble here first, which it did.

33:07Kara Swisher:Yeah, and then Czechoslovakia and then East Germany. But Poland had a big opposition, namely the Catholic Church. Yeah. And it was huge, and it was so big that they couldn't arrest and shoot everybody, although they arrested and shot some people. Right, they did. So like we're talking about your lived experiences are a big influence in your writing, though in your memoir you revealed that you were bullied by a group of girls when you were nine, and your experience inspired Cat's Eye, which again is my favorite of your books. And you're right. Everybody has a Cordelia, I feel. Not everybody. Some people were Cordelia.

33:43Kara Swisher:Oh, right. Fair. There's an imbalance there if everybody has one. Well, everyone who writes about a Cordelia had one, and Cordelia doesn't write. Yeah, sometimes Cordelia does write, but she writes different things. Yeah. Could you read a little bit from the part of the book for us? Yeah, so I'm talking about Cat's Eye. But despite its universality, it was true that parts of the novel were autobiographical. I avoided saying so then because the chief perp was still alive. She'd become a teenage friend, and we'd kept in touch. But now, she and her immediate family are all dead. While writing the novel, I came to realize that she was a damaged person, that she was a lot unhappier than I'd ever been, and that she would be hurt if I identified her.

34:35Did she even remember what she had done to me? In some way, probably, though for her it had been a sort of game. For me, on the other hand, it had been serious. Anyone who thinks that females are perfect, that girls are nicer, that every sadistic thing girls and women do is the fault of the patriarchy, has either forgotten a lot or never been a nine-year-old girl at school. The desire for power is a human constant, though the ways of demonstrating this desire change according to circumstances. Amazing.

35:14Kara Swisher:You're absolutely right. Right, you're absolutely right. So your Cordelia was a girl named Sandra. How did that experience of being bullied play into your views? Because I think that's a very nuanced view of feminism, right? And your willingness to criticize some aspects of the movement. I find it to be, again, factual. Yeah, so if you look on Wikipedia, at least last time I looked, there were 75 different kinds of feminism. So when somebody says, are you a feminist? I always say, what kind did you have in mind? Because there are many different kinds, and I saw it during the 70s, and there are factions, sub-factions, differences of opinion, arguments, all of this stuff goes on while feminism is actually achieving some successes in the 70s.

36:07The right to have your own credit card, even if you're married. and a lot of other things actually got achieved. But there was always factionalism, and you do find that whenever something new hits the ground. I'm quite interested at the moment in the Cromwellian Revolution in England in the 17th century. So I'm reading about it, and I did not realize it was so factional. It doesn't mean that the movement has no value. It doesn't mean that the people in it are not serious people or anything like that. It just seems to be something that happens at these moments in human history when things are in serious flux.

37:01Kara Swisher:So you have a reputation for writing stories that do speak to women, though, and the issues they face. But on a personal level, many feminists idolize the fact that you never married your longtime partner, Graham Gibson. and you didn't take his name. You had one daughter, but that's not what you actually wanted reading this. You wanted to get married and have more kids. It was something he apologized to you for toward the end of his life as you write. But talk about the disconnect between your personal life and how people perceived you. Well, you kind of get stuck with these things, which you can't contradict without sounding like a complete idiot or just unbelievable.

37:36So the reason Graham didn't want to get married, which is quite funny, from this perspective, from my age now, it's quite funny. He said he already had known three Mrs. Gibsons, and he didn't want to create another one. So his mother, his stepmother, and his ex-wife were all Mrs. Gibson. Don't you think that sounds quite strange? It does.

38:05Kara Swisher:But wait, so you just don't correct people, like, in that regard? Well, I can correct them now because all those people are dead. Right, that's a fair point. But I couldn't correct them at the time without causing real trouble with the stepmother and the ex-wife who were still alive and still, you know, joined at the hip in some way with Graham's life because he had two sons. So you can see the dilemma. Well, actually, it's not my decision not to get married. It's Graham's because he dislikes the other members of Gibson. You know, that would not have added to tranquility and general peace of mind.

38:44Kara Swisher:That's true. And what's good about this book, I have to say, there's definitely, I like score settling myself personally. But you do score settle with Gibson's ex-wife as there is in any good memoir. One of your friends is quoted in one of the first pages as saying, don't piss her off or you'll live forever, which I love. But you also draw, you know, but you do draw in history extensively to shape novels that are set in the future, like The Handmaid's Tale. Well, what else do you have to draw? Right. Because you can't actually time travel to the future, much as we would like to believe you can.

39:15You cannot do it.

39:16Kara Swisher:Right. But how do you marry the personal with the historical to write what you call speculative fiction, which is what you call it? Other people think you're some kind of clairvoyant or, look, she was right, et cetera. I know. Well. You reject that, correct? Yeah, I reject the prophetess because, in fact, there isn't any one in the future. There are lots of possibilities for the future. And then there are completely unexpected things that alter it a lot. So a volcano blows up. So the bubonic plague hits Europe. All of those things you could not necessarily have predicted. In fact, you couldn't have predicted them at all.

39:58Kara Swisher:Right, but you are prescient. I would say prescient profit probably is too much. I mean, the rise of authoritarianism, the financial collapse, the pandemic. But you say you are just pointing out things that could happen and that we should be on the lookout for. Absolutely. But you certainly are putting things together. You're almost like one of those CIA agents who figures out scenarios, right? That's what you're doing is scenario building. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, and I read a lot of murder mysteries as a child. I also read a lot of sci-fi as a child. So, yeah, how will it work out? What is the what-if scenario?

40:36What if? So what if America were to become a totalitarian dictatorship? What kind of totalitarian dictatorship would it be? And for that, of course, you always look at a country's past history see what it has been. So under the Tsar, Russia was an absolute estate with an extensive secret service and a gulag archipelago. A communist revolution happens, everything's going to be wonderful. These things always come in as utopias, you know that. And then bingo, it's a totalitarian regime with an even bigger secret service and an even larger Gulag archipelago.

41:24Kara Swisher:Yeah, you are talking about DNA or things going back to their shape. No, no, no, no, just patterns that people are used to and that they tend to fall back into. So the Aztecs, when they wanted to build a new pyramid, didn't knock down the old one. They built a new one on top of it, and that's what countries are always doing. So the old regime in China was an extensive bureaucracy, and so was Mao's once things got settled. Got settled down. So we don't sort of move out of our shape is what you're saying. Well, we can move out of it temporarily, but we have a habit of falling back on a shape that we already know.

42:10Kara Swisher:Right, right, right. So, communist regime goes down in Russia, goodbye authoritarianism, it's all going to be wonderful, in comes capitalism, hooray, hooray. You can get Kentucky fried chicken in Moscow, I'm not sure if that's true, but you can certainly get burgers. And then along comes you-know-who, Mr. Putin. And basically, he wants to restore a combination of the Tsar. He does. And Stalin. Yeah, old Russia. Yeah. Well, old Russia, you know, in his mind, obviously, Stalinist Russia was pretty much the same as Tsarist Russia. Yes. So you change the flag, you change the statues, but really the structure is pretty similar.

42:56Kara Swisher:So are you essentially saying you're a good guesser based on historical observation? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So we go back to the 17th century in America. The answer to our question, what kind of dictatorship would it be, would not be a communist dictatorship. It would not be the French Republic during the revolution. It wouldn't be anything like that. It would not build a cardboard mountain and have a festival to the divine being, although you'll notice on the American money, there is that eye in the triangle. I saw a national treasure. I know. Anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, the Masons got in there pretty solidly in the 18th century.

43:40you would have a group of elect elders running what is essentially a dictatorship. They got to say what people were going to do. But you could not become one of those elect elders unless you had a personal conversation with God, according to whom I put in parentheses. So it's much less likely to be a one-person dictatorship and much more likely to be a top group of people like the commanders in The Handmaid's Tale.

44:18Kara Swisher:Or say the billionaires in front row at the inauguration. Yeah, like that. But I'm not sure he was actually running the American government at this time, and neither is anybody else. That is correct. One of my favorite parts of American history is the chaotic nature of it, which is why it won't last. We'll be back in a minute.

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45:16Kara Swisher:Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high-achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week on the show, clinical psychologist and founder Dr. Becky Kennedy and I unpack what it really means to raise kids today. I think parenting is the most important job in the world and the one that has the most impact on your world and the world. It is non-stop. Check out Pretty Tough, new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app.

45:53Kara Swisher:In the span of a decade, Ben Shapiro built The Daily Wire into a conservative media empire. He produced hit podcasts that bit at liberal excesses and documentaries and lectures about the founders, the genders, the gospels. He peddled polos, hats, candles, provided a home for deplatformed conservative stars like Matt Walsh and minted stars like Candace Owens. Let's put a pin in that. The Daily Wire even has kids programming a judgmental puppet named Zoodles, who shares Shapiro's load-bearing eyebrows. This year, though, the empire showed signs of collapse. The Daily Wire's YouTube videos are down from millions of views to the lo-fi figures.

46:30Kara Swisher:Web traffic is plummeting. And recently, Shapiro laid off 13 percent of his employees. Asked by The Washington Post what had happened, Shapiro accused other conservatives of click-whoring by embracing radical Islam, theorizing about the evils of Winston Churchill and mocking the widow of Charlie Kirk. The kids still got it. On Today Explained, the fall of Ben Shapiro. Today Explained drops every weekday afternoon. Let's move on to the current state of politics for a second. Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Yours comes from Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

47:03So, Margaret, I am a big fan, and I wanted to ask you a question. In The Handmaid's Tale, one of the first things the government of Gilead does is strip women of their economic rights, from closing bank accounts to firing all-female employees. That's the canary in the coal mine before Gilead rips away the rest of their rights. So flash forward to now. Women have lost a disproportionate number of jobs since Donald Trump took office. Women, small business owners, are feeling the strain of Trump's chaotic tariffs and skyrocketing costs more acutely. In short, women are bearing the brunt of an economy that's flattening just about everyone.

47:45So people have called you prescient. How do you view this moment? Okay, the women moment. Well, all dictatorships do this. I can't think of one that has not. Sometimes they have nice slogans at the beginning, women hold up out of the sky, etc. But it doesn't usually play out. It sometimes plays out that a select group of women get fairly high-profile positions, and you can see that in the Trump government. There are a number of cabinet people, and certainly the White House spokesperson, they're all women. But that doesn't translate any more than it did with duchesses into the lives of ordinary women.

48:35And they do seem to be, I mean, even the Soviet, early Soviet state in which it was supposed to have all of these improvements resulted in total chaos for women. They had no security. Yeah, so I have an even more sinister view. I don't think it's confined to women. I think that the powers that be in the United States have decided that there's too many poor people. So all of the changes that they are making in food security and in health care, and particularly in not providing medical care to pregnant women, may run into difficulties. The end result is going to be people dying. So I think it's a plan to get rid of poor people.

49:24Does that sound too severe?

49:25Kara Swisher:No, I think they hate them. I think they hate them. And, of course, they get them to vote for them, too. I just interviewed Beth Macy, who wrote Dope Sick. It's a new book about her small town. And that's exactly what's happening to them. And yet they voted for Trump, which was interesting. Well, he gives the appearance of standing up for the common person. But it's only an appearance, as I'm sure they're going to discover all too soon. I think they kind of have discovered it. I mean, one of the things you said is if you were an American, you'd be worrying a lot about my country right now. that we should pay attention to the patterns of power grabs, infighting, and the disintegration of the rule of law.

50:01Kara Swisher:What are the things you think people should look out for? And what alarm bells do you see? And I think you are actually a hopeful person. What is the antidote to that in the history you've seen of the United States? Oh, you mean, how are you going to get out of it? We opened our last podcast event in Toronto. We sold out immediately, and we apologized to the entire country of Canada on behalf of all Americans, except for the Trump people. I don't think you have to apologize on behalf of all Americans, because half of Americans do. Yeah, I know, but we felt bad. Yeah, well, thank you, but don't apologize for things you didn't do.

50:43Kara Swisher:Right, that's true. Yeah, how are you going to get out of it? Well, I think you will get out of it, but there's going to be an awful lot of repair work. And will it go back to the way it was before? No, because things never do. They don't go back to exactly the way they were before, which is why it was always a pipe dream, make America great again, just exactly what period of history were you thinking of.

51:13So I think what you really have to pay attention to is voter fraud and gerrymandering. what they're going to try next in order to maintain control of the government. But I think it's also not out of the question that there will be a rebellion from within the ranks of, for instance, the army, that there will be resistance. And I think there's already a certain amount of resistance going on with people just not falling in with this plan. not accepting as a given, you know, the patently illegal actions that parts of this government have been doing. Yeah, yeah. So rule of law, we won't talk about the Supreme Court, but general rule of law.

52:07You know, judges who actually know the law.

52:10Kara Swisher:Which they've been very strong here. A lot of them have been very strong. And how far is the current regime willing to go in its defiance of the law? And how many Americans will actually sit still for that? Yeah. I have to tell you, there's a distinct fuck this guy sentiment across the country, more so. How do you know that? I've talked, I traveled just extensively recently and from people. But do you talk to Joe in the diner? I have. They're all my relatives. They're your relatives. They're my relatives. And it's more like, you know, a lot of people, it was interesting, were like, well, I think there's too much immigration, but not like this.

52:50Kara Swisher:Like, this isn't how we feel. But not like this is said by a lot of people. Yeah. Like, I believe in, I don't love trans people, whatever. They hate trans people, but not like this. But not like this enters into every sentence. So they don't like the method, even if they might agree with some of the issues they have. And I think affordability has trumped everything. Yeah. Everything costs more. I think so. Right now, an inexpensive chicken sandwich costs as much as someone makes it an hour. So I think that says it to everybody. Like, what? Yeah. I have a lot of West Virginia relatives, so I pay a lot of attention to them.

53:28Kara Swisher:There's a passage in the book about how you started using Twitter. One of the things that I read about a lot is the impact of social media when it started to become popular. You said it helped you fill some seats for a New York event that hadn't gotten much publicity. No kidding. Helped you recover a laptop you actually left on the plane. This is all good. But how are you thinking about the downsides of social media and the rise of these tech titans alongside authoritarianism in politics right now? Because they're the version of the commanders here alongside authoritarianism in politics. Yeah, and they didn't start out that way.

54:02Kara Swisher:Well, they did. I was there. No, they didn't. Okay. That was not the public face they were putting out. No, but that's what they were like. But go ahead. Oh. Yeah. Okay, sure, any entrepreneurial person is going to want one thing, more market share. Right. And a second thing. You got it. Their share is going up in value. So, of course, they want those things. And it was brought in, same as the Internet. And I remember when that started, it was a bunch of scientists who wanted to be able to exchange information more quickly. And, hey, it was great at the beginning. And so was Twitter at the beginning.

54:44It was a fun place. You could use it in helpful ways. You could share information helpfully. And in my mind, the Democrats won the Obama election because they figured out social media, and the Republicans hadn't. But then they did. so yeah the other rule of military history which i'm sure you know perfectly well is that if you invent a new weapon that's quite successful your enemy's going to get hold of it pretty quickly and against you that's correct so that's always what happens are you still on twitter i had 1.6 million

55:21Kara Swisher:followers i'm not on it i like left i called it a nazi porn bar and i said i just don't like nazi porn bars. Yeah. I'm still on it because a number of people that I follow are still on it. And I did set up a Blue Sky account, but I haven't really figured out how to use it. It's the same. It's the same. Yeah. So threads, they're all the same. They're all the same. No, it's not a Nazi porn bar over there. It's actually, speaking of which, it's very left in that regard. And you talked that you've come under attack more from the left than the right through your career and that the left thinks you should be preaching their sermon, whatever that may be.

56:02Kara Swisher:What has to happen in this retrenchment of the rights that many spent decades fighting for? Because right now, everything is the binary, right? You mean over here, over here? Yes, exactly. Because you're complex, and I think people want you to be something, right? Oh, sure they do, but good luck with that. I can see that. I can see that. But you have said they've been tougher on you if you don't follow through on a right. Well, first of all, they were actually paying attention to me, whereas most people on the right don't. Yes, that's true. That's fair. So when The Handmaid's Tale came out as a book, we didn't get any death threats.

56:37When it came out as a movie in 1990, just as the wall was coming down, we launched it in East and West at the same time. We did get death threats for that. And I said, why didn't we get them for the book? And they said, well, those people don't read. So I must ask the TV series people how they're doing in that department. But it is a conundrum for the right, because why are you objecting to someone portraying what it is you have said you actually want to do?

57:11Kara Swisher:And the answer when you say that to them? Well, I never get a chance to say that to them directly. But that's their conundrum. and also the religious part. Some people think it's an anti-religious book. It isn't. It's about the misuse of religion in these power grabs, and that has happened a lot in history. Especially in the U.S., actually. A lot, yeah. So it has the banner of religion, but it's not Christianity, as anybody who actually reads the New Testament would understand. it. I think a lot about Father Coughlin and a lot of our history. Yeah, we had people like that in the 30s in Canada.

57:58Kara Swisher:Just curious, when you're on the left side, which I assume you're progressive, I wouldn't even be able to describe you. I don't use the word progressive because I don't believe in inevitable progress. Oh, okay. And I don't believe in the right side of history because history doesn't have sides that are inevitable. And we are not on the yellow brick road to the Emerald City of Oz. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Which, of course, was a populist tale about monetary policy. And the Emerald City, I think, was D.C. No, we certainly don't understand that. But the Emerald City of Oz, by the way, when we get there, is a totalitarian dictatorship.

58:40But Never mind. But never mind. It's a benevolent one.

58:45Kara Swisher:Well, the new movie kind of spells that out pretty clearly, right? Yeah. Yeah, you've not seen Wicked? I haven't seen it. No, no, no, no. It's okay. So I should go and see it? Oh, both of them. Yes. Why should I? Because the singing is great. The singing that, oh, I thought you were going to say because it has a profound political message embedded in it. No. Yes, too. That does, too. Yes, yes. No, yes, no. It doesn't hit you over the head with it. All right. But the singing is fantastic. How about that? The singing is amazing. All right. I believe you. They're very gifted. And it's a story about, speaking of, you know, Cat's Eyes is about a relationship between two women or girls and then women later.

59:22Kara Swisher:You talk about that. But it's about a relationship between two women is what it's about. You know? Each with a different outfit. Yes, absolutely. But they're the same, you see. You see, it's a mind fuck. How are they? Oh, well. Oh, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Well, there you go. I think you should see it. There you go. You would laugh your ass off is what I would say. Anyway, I want to end by returning to your memoir and talking about you. Toward the end of the book, you mentioned in passing, you've been doing some Swedish death cleaning lately. This is a practice for people who don't know where you get rid of a lot of your belongings so your children don't have to deal with them, which I think is a very kind thing to do.

59:58Kara Swisher:It made me wonder if this memoir is also part of that process for you. And if so, what do you feel like you've gained from the experience of writing it? Well, I had a lot of fun. Does that count as gained? Yes, absolutely. It's lightening your load, right? Yeah. So I don't get too profound about my deep inner self. You may have noticed that. I appreciate it. I'm the same way. Go ahead. I'm a Tom Stopper girl. You leave everything behind on the journey, but go ahead. You just died. Yeah. R.I.P. What have I gained?

1:00:40What have I gained? I don't know. I don't think in terms of that. Okay. Gaining things. For me, I think more in terms of have I done the best that I could by the book? No, that's what you want. As a writer, that's what you want to be concentrating on is your relationship with the book. The book then has a relationship with readers, which you can't control and can't anticipate. It's completely out of your control. So you do the best you can with the book. You have a very intense relationship with it while you're writing it. And then you have a very intense relationship with the three editors, one from each of the English markets, the States, Canada, the UK, all of whom have different views about what you should put in.

1:01:34And then when it's done, it's out there.

1:01:37Kara Swisher:It's out. It's gone. Yeah, so what you have gained is the experience of writing, and I suppose you could say that. Then in your real life, what have you Swedish death cleaned recently? What have I Swedish death cleaned? It's a verb now. Is it? I just made it one. All right, thank you. Mostly they're paper objects. So if you don't want somebody doing your thesis on this, throw it out. So out it goes. I like the idea of just destroying it. Yeah, goodbye it. No one need know. Yeah, so I'm getting around to, I always put my novel papers and my, I hate to say, okay, my writing stuff. I put it into the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto.

1:02:30So why do I do that? It would just pile up, would it not? And they will take care of it, and if you need to retrieve something, they can lay their finger on it right away.

1:02:42Kara Swisher:Yeah, and 100 years from now, some lady will be pawing through it. Maybe, but I might be pawing through it myself for some peculiar reason. Right, for going forward, yeah. So finding things in my own house is just— Is that first poem in there? not yet but it will be oh good oh you're not destroying it oh wow good for you so you're you're still writing a lot and you're still traveling you're recently in the arctic circle for a two-week trip you're getting 10 000 steps a day your follow-up to the handmaid's tale and the testaments is being turned into another series i know you hate being asked what's next so i'll ask instead what's what is inspiring you right now and what are you watching or reading and Obviously not wicked, but go ahead.

1:03:24Well, I'm paying pretty close attention to the American political scene because, of course, you know the old saying, Washington catches a cold, Ottawa sneezes. And I'm also watching the Canadian political scene, which is pretty interesting to us right now. So, yeah, I mean, it's get the popcorn. and you don't know from one day to the next what's going to happen.

1:03:55Kara Swisher:Yeah, life is more interesting than fiction right now in a weird way. Well, it's also more terrifying. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that, I'm looking at the situation in Europe as much as I can. And who's going to benefit from all of these shenanigans? Well, I think it will be China. Yeah, agree. I think they're playing a long game. I think they're being pretty smart. and anybody who thinks that you can make a deal with Russia to hand over Ukrainian hoo-ha to anybody in the West is dreaming. Dreaming. You've got to punch them in the nose until they're done. Well, because they're in hawk up to their eyebrows with China.

1:04:39Kara Swisher:That's correct. So the person who's going to get that stuff is China, should Russia get its hands on it. Right. One time I was writing about a tech billionaire, and he said, when are you going to stop hitting me? And I said, when you stay down. So that's how I feel about Russia. Yeah. So the other question people ask me is, what about AI? Is it going to take over the world? And I say, you have a major energy problem. Unless you can solve that, you're just going to run out of electricity. And then they go, nuclear fusion. And I go, it hasn't happened yet. Not yet. But they are reviving the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island.

1:05:17Kara Swisher:I don't know if Microsoft bought it, essentially. They need a source of energy because otherwise all the lights are going to go off in every city in America. Yeah, that makes you feel warm and fuzzy. Let's revive Three Mile Island. Yeah, and also the idea that everybody in the world is going to be plugged into some kind of AI and become walking zombies. There just are not enough resources to have that happen. You don't want an AI Margaret Atwood? Well, people have tried. I know. I've seen it. Yes, they were rubbishy at it so far, but they might improve it. They will. All right, my last question is about something not dead, not AI, not whatever.

1:05:55Kara Swisher:It's a longtime birder. I want you to explain why you are. And are there any species you're still hoping to add to your life list? I don't have a life list. Oh, you don't? No, we made a point of not having life lists. Explain why you're a birder and what a life list is for people. Yeah, okay. I grew up with birding because my family just knew all that. By the way, nature will kill us before we kill it. 100%. Jeff Vandermeer, I think about him a lot. Well, you know, microbes will survive. Right, right. Along with cockroaches and grass. Cockroaches, yeah. My dad used to say, and this is in the 50s, it'll all be cockroaches and grass.

1:06:38And happy Thanksgiving to you, too. Thanks, Dad.

1:06:43Kara Swisher:That's what he said at Thanksgiving. Oh, well. Oh, well, this was dinner table conversation. Like how many fruit flies multiplying unchecked would cause the earth to be covered to a depth of two miles with fruit flies. Why do you need to know that? Never mind. Well, now you do. Now you do. But we've gotten off the course. Why are you a birder? What is it? Because since you were a kid? Okay. So I grew up with it. My parents were early environmentalists. So back in the 50s, my dad was a systems biologist. This eats, that eats, this eats, that. So I just grew up with it. It's my outlook on life. So Graham got into it in an activist way.

1:07:28And we did for some years. I think it was about 10 years. We worked with BirdLife International, which does very important work internationally. because, of course, a lot of birds migrate. They're not limited to one country, so you have to deal with all of these countries. We worked as the honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club, which means we helped raise money. And that's on the macro level. On the micro level, we set up an organization on Peely Island, which is in the middle of Lake Erie. is the most southerly part of Canada and is on a migration flyway that goes from the Ohio shore, funnels up across Lake Erie, and spreads out into the boreal forest where these birds breed.

1:08:22So we are migration data monitoring among the other things that we do. And we are right now converting in 1928 large liquor store on Peely Island. You get one guess as to why there was a large liquor store on Peely Island in 1928.

1:08:44Kara Swisher:Because people need to drink when you're sitting on Peely Island in 1928. No, Prohibition. Oh. Oh. How much rum running was going on across Lake Erie? Quite a lot. A lot, that's right. So where was the depot? Well, there was certainly one on Peely Island. Right. Right. So yes, we got hold of this building because our previous building where we put our bird banders was sinking into a swamp and there were snakes in the bathroom. And we're converting it right now. That's amazing. So do you still bird? Even if you don't have a life list, is there a bird you want to see? Well, I've never seen an ostrich in the wild and I'm unlikely to see one.

1:09:27Kara Swisher:Why? Because I'm getting a bit too old to go to ostrich land. Well, you seem like you have a lot of kick in you. I don't know. I think so. Ostrich. Why an ostrich? They're big. I can see them. Oh, you don't have to be like, where is the bird? That's a fair point. I'm going to share this with you because you're obviously not ready for it. Your vision may decline a little bit as you get older. My vision's been terrible since I've been four years old. so I'm good. It's going to get worse. I can't imagine it would get worse. I'm almost nearly blind, but I get it. I get it. I get the age. You're going to get cataracts.

1:10:05Kara Swisher:She is undefeated, but you are not, Margaret Atwood. I'm sorry to tell you. You're still kicking. I really love this book. I thought it was joyful, which is really a nice thing, and I recommend it to a lot of people, and they're like, isn't Margaret Atwood depressing? I'm like, no, she is not. Oh, thank you. I'm glad you're not. Well, so many other things are so much more depressing than me right now that I come across as actually quite bouncy. Yeah, you're bouncy. That's how I think of you. Anyway, I really appreciate it. What a delightful interview. The memoir is called Book of Lives. Margot Atwood, thank you so much for your time.

1:10:42Kara Swisher:And thank you.

1:10:48Kara Swisher:today's show was produced by christian castroousel kateri yokum michelle eloy megan bernie and kaylin lynch nishat kurwa is vox media's executive producer of podcasts special thanks to katherine barner our engineers are fernando aruta and rick kwan and our theme music is by trackademics if you're already following this show you're an honorary canadian If not, you're on Margaret's shit list. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.