BIG INTV: Margaret Atwood on Doomscrolling: ‘I Want to Keep Up With the Latest Doom’

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1:32From WIRED, this is The Big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond. Just before the holidays, I sat down with the beloved author and poet Margaret Atwood. We were supposed to talk about her latest book, Book of Lives, a memoir of sorts. But when she popped on my screen, I had to tell her that I'm also Canadian. From Calgary to be specific. Apparently, she had just been in my hometown. We had a lovely, fun, big, screaming time. Did you really? in Calgary, Alberta? Well, you know, Albertans are actually happy to see you, unlike some people in Toronto. They're going to be used to you, you know? Who cares?

2:09Oh, yeah, so I was in Calgary, and then I was in Edmonton. Okay, the lesser of the two Alberta cities. I beg your pardon. I'm just saying. That's how I was raised. I can't, sorry. Yeah, all right. Well, Calgary has certainly grown a lot. Have you been back there lately? After we caught up on all things Calgary, Alberta, She asked me how I got into journalism. You got into Wired through technology somehow or through writing? Well, no, let me tell you. My mom was a poet and she published three books in Calgary, in Canada. And so I grew up wanting to be a writer. I mean, I wanted to be like my mom.

2:49You mean poor and unknown. Yeah, poor and unknown, which she was. But she died when I was 18. Oh, no. And I had thought, you know, maybe I'll be a lawyer, maybe I'll be a writer. And she died, and it was like, well, obviously I'm a writer. That's what I have to do. You have to carry it on, right? Yeah, and you sort of, you know, I realized at that young age, oh, I get one chance at this. So I intended to be a writer, and then yada, yada, yada, I'm a version of that. I mean, I was a reporter, and now I'm a published writer. So they hired you for the job. But I only had an hour with the literary legend, so we had to get on with it.

3:40Margaret Atwood, welcome to The Big Interview. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here. Now, we always start these conversations with some very quick questions, like a warm-up for your brain, although I don't know how smart these are. Like a first questionnaire. Are you ready? I'm always ready. Typewriter or computer? Right now, computer. Spiritually, though? Spiritually, typewriter. Love it. Trudeau Sr. or Trudeau Jr.? Oh, whoa. What a question. That is very loaded. Sorry. Do I get a choice of neither? Yes, neither is an option. Do you elect neither? I, unfortunately, cannot elect neither because nobody's called that.

4:32But I don't belong to a political party, and I usually vote on the basis of what the person is likely to do. Fair enough. Best and worst part of literary fame? The best part of literary fame is you don't have to work for a university, and you can't get fired. Love that. Okay. The worst part is selfies. You are asked for selfies. In very odd places. And do you participate? Such as the ladies' washroom. Oh, no. And do I allow selfies? Yeah. Do you do it? We're not going to go there because then I'll get just so many more requests for them. Okay. If Gilead took over Canada, which province would rebel first?

5:20Hmm. Quebec. I thought you would say Quebec or Alberta, but... Yeah, either one. I mean, you can have both if you want. I'll take Alberta. I don't know about Alberta. They've had some Gileadian signs recently. No, you're not wrong. And for those unfamiliar with Albertan politics, I would describe it as the most Texas of the provinces politically. Well, yeah, but not very Texas. I think it's another one of those places that's very divided between rural and urban, like a lot. Yeah, no, that makes sense. If you could live for one year inside any book, which book would you live inside? Do we want peace and quiet or excitement?

6:03Well, that's up to you. But excitement. Well, and you have to say whether you'd be the maid, whether you'd be the central character. It's pretty specific. It's like past life. People think they've had past lives. They're never a ditch digger. They're always Cleopatra, are they not? So, any book that I would like to live inside? Well, no. What a question. For peace and quiet, how about Anne of Green Gables? Oh, that sounds lovely. I think we can do that. Yes, it's before World War I. No bad things had happened. No bad 20th century things had happened yet. There you go. You're just hanging out. What is a misconception about you that you secretly enjoy?

7:00What's the misconception about me that I particularly enjoy? Yeah. Oh, I think I would offer up the rumor that was going around in about 1960. When was that? Approx 1970 that I dressed up in pre-revolutionary French court dress, including the wig, and prowled the streets of Toronto at night in this getup. Why would you be doing that? My question. I don't know, nor do I know where this rumor came from, but it was a rumor. That's a really good one. Name something humans will still be arguing about in 100 years. Gender. Mmm. I like that. Now, let's go back to the beginning, because we are, of course, here on the occasion of you publishing a book all about your life, about your 86 years on planet Earth, which I just finished reading over the weekend.

8:00It was a remarkable book. But you wrote your first story at six years old. You say there wasn't much else to do in the Canadian wilderness. I, as a Canadian, am inclined to agree. Tell us more. Only when it's raining. You have to put it when it's raining. Or when it's raining. When it's not raining, there's lots of other things to do. Well, you can have fun outside. Not in the rain. No, fair. But I think what was particularly interesting to me and what I didn't know about your history was that you spent very, very large portions of your childhood in a very remote part of, I mean, outside of Ottawa, sort of Ontario, I think.

8:38Well, much further north than that. Yeah, so up north in the Canadian boreal forest, either up the Ottawa River on the Quebec side or over in Sault Ste. Marie, which is, as you know, at the eastern end of Lake Superior. And what was I doing there? My dad was a forest entomologist, and those were the months after the ice went out, approximately, until it was freezing up. That's when insects are active and can be studied. And then in the winters, we would be in a city where he would write up his research.

9:21And so you are spending months and months at a time in the wilderness. When you look back at that, to be fair, yes, an extended period of your life, how did that shape you as an adult? Be prepared to improvise. Because things break, right? Yeah, yeah. And you can't call the repair person because you don't have a phone. Never throw out a bendy piece of wire. You will need one. Absolutely. What else? If you want to get lost in the woods, come with me. I'll see you right. My dad, in addition to being a scientist, was also what I called one of the old bushy guys. So one of the old woodsman type of people that used to be fairly common in Canada, but probably aren't anymore.

10:20I mean, you see them on the streets of Toronto. They have big beards and flannel shirts, but they're cosplaying maybe as an earlier version. Those are not the same. No, I know. They're called hipsters. Now, the other piece sort of that surprised me, although it shouldn't have been surprising, as I mentioned, you know, my mom was a poet, fantastic writer in my biased opinion, made zero dollars. But I was surprised reading at how many years, decades, you spent in what sounded like relative financial precarity, right? I mean, you don't just fast forward to having written dozens and dozens of books.

10:55No, not at all. No writer does. Right. And so you got a job at a marketing research firm after leaving Harvard. You jumped from gig to gig, right? You were a lecturer, a teacher, a writer in residence while you were publishing these early books. Yes. And lots of people, obviously, I think now more than ever, jump from gig to gig. That's the economy that we live in. Would you rather have just been hunkered down writing books? Or was there real value for you, in hindsight, in sort of moving from role to role to role? I mean, reading the book, and people will read it themselves. You're all over the place.

11:30You're all over Canada. You're in the United States. You're traveling abroad. Felt like you were in constant motion. Was that valuable? It was for those years, for sure. And I think it's very valuable, particularly if you're writing novels, to have some kind of experience of how people actually live when they're not at, quote, creative writing school, which didn't exist when I was doing those things. So I did have a poet, an older non-female poet, say to me very early on in about 1961, if you want to be a writer, you have to drive a truck. Good luck with that as a woman in the 60s. It wasn't possible, but translating that into other things, like other types of jobs, I think that's right.

12:34But how could you go from just being a teenager to hunkering down and writing? I'm not sure how I would do that. I think people do. They go to creative writing school, and they used to get immediately jobs at teaching creative writing, even though they hadn't published anything. Right. or really seen much of the world at all. And when did you realize that your own life and those experiences and the people you met and your parents and so on and so forth would be a source of storytelling and characters and inspiration? I mean, did that happen organically? Can you just sort of like not imagine another way?

13:13No, I think organically, for sure. My parents are both big storytellers, and what they told stories about were. My mother told a lot of stories about her family, which was extended and eccentric and from Nova Scotia, which was the norm in those days to have an extended eccentric family if you were from Nova Scotia. Sure, yeah. So the conversation there, unlike in the West, goes, oh, you've got Nova Scotian roots. Who is your mom? Who is your dad? Who is your grandfather? Who is your grandmother? And on the other side, and you go on like that until you figure out that you're related to the person or else you probably are but you can't figure out how.

13:56Yeah, so it is like that. It's quite clanny. And she had lots of stories about her youth, which took place before motor cars and television or any of those things and were pretty interesting and funny. So she was very funny. My dad was funny too, but his stories were about other things. They're usually about horrifying adventures he'd had in the backwoods. So you had a lot to work with right away. Yeah. Well, I don't think so much the material that they were telling as the fact that they were telling it. So stories don't have to be about dwarves and cinderellas. They can be about people you've known.

14:40Yeah. Yeah. This is a bit of a segue, but I noticed in the book that you refer to your dreams more than once. There are a few very moving passages about your parents dying in particular. And when I think about, you know, we cover dreams and the science of dreaming and so on and so forth at Wired, it is a very poorly understood field, right? Scientists don't know why we dream. It is a great medical mystery. How do you think about dreams and dreaming, and what is their significance to you? It's a universally shared human characteristic, and we suspect also among dogs. Oh, I mean, I have two dogs, and they definitely dream.

15:24They go like this, right? Oh, yeah, they're moving, they're making little yipping noises. It's wild, yeah. Yeah, so it's an interesting area, and lots of cultures have been very attentive to their dreams. But in general, and you know this yourself, you have dreams that are just kind of taking out the trash and little bits of this and that, and other ones that appear to you to be quite significant. Mm-hmm. So why do those ones appear to be quite significant? because they connect with something that's going on in your life, of course. And it's also true, and lots of people bear this out, if you have a problem, let's say it's a creative problem, let's say it's a scientific problem-solving problem, and you go to sleep, you often have the answer when you wake up because your brain has been working away at it.

16:22so going to sleep or going for a walk are often helpful when you're waiting for answers to come out of left field do you write your dreams down i mean do you record i have done i've written some of them down and people have said also that if you keep a dream journal you're likely to remember them better in the morning yeah i mean i just i noticed that you recalled one dream in the book from when you were 13, a nightmare that you had. And I thought to myself, she either wrote that down or she has a really frighteningly good long-term memory. I have a frighteningly good long-term memory, sorry. I'm very impressed.

17:05I can't remember. As my brother said after reading my memoir, he's a man of few words. He said, you seem to have an unusually detailed memory. I mean, he's correct. I can't remember what happened to me yesterday morning. Well, that's different. I can't remember what happened to me yesterday morning. But as I say about the memoir, you remember things of significance, not just what you did yesterday morning. Yeah. Not what you had for breakfast. It's things that stand out. So catastrophes, things that are very funny, stupid things you did, all that kind of thing is different from daily routine. Like remembering whether you brush your teeth.

17:59That's quite different. It's significant experiences that you remember. Now, you have had a remarkable career, and in many respects an unlikely one. As we've talked about already, it's not easy to make even a basic living as a writer. Do you think you would make it as a writer if you were in your 20s today instead of 60 years ago? What would be different today for you in your career? A lot of things would be different, but it's a meaningless question because I would be quite a different person at 20. The supposed I would be quite different at 20 now than I was at 20 then. And I remind you that pantyhose had not even been invented.

18:42Right, we were in Stockton territory. When I was 20, it was the dark ages. The dark ages. But when you look at young writers today. Okay, so the real question is what's facing young writers today? That is the real question. Okay. So first of all, in Canada anyway, when I was 20, there was not very much competition. Because only a lunatic would have chosen to be a writer. And there were a lot of lunatics in the bohemian underground writing quotes community at that time. These were not the most able of people. Yes, I often felt quite abnormal amongst them. I wasn't, hey, I wasn't an alcoholic, I wasn't a drug addict, and I didn't want to commit suicide.

19:28So what business have you got being a writer? So now it's been more professionalized, I think, through lots of advice seminars and creative writing schools and people saying, here's what you have to do and this is how it works. We didn't have a clue, not one single clue. I didn't know what an agent was. I had no idea what should be in a book contract or any of those things. So it's more professionalized and more respectable. So more people think they're going to go into it, right? Yeah. And I think they got a certain amount of flim-flam shoved their way. You know, you're going to write a first novel, and you're going to get a six-figure advance, and then you'll be famous.

20:16And that doesn't happen very often. Or let's put it another way. We were in Ireland at a bed and breakfast. And we had a very good breakfast. And we said to the man, this is a really good breakfast. And he said, I used to be a chef. And we said, oh, where were you a chef? And he said, well, I was a chef at named restaurant in Waterford. And we said, oh, what a coincidence. We had dinner there last night. Pause. How was the dinner? Well, we thought it was pretty good. pause, anyone can cook a good dinner once. So, yeah, you have a hit with a book. Now do it again. Yeah. Then do it again. And do it again.

21:12Exceedingly unlikely. Well, it happens. It happens. It does. But not to everybody who decides to do that, whereas with a lawyer, you're usually bound to get some kind of a job. Yes, as my dad reminded me many times when I thought about going to law school. It's very risky. Yeah. It's gambling. Sure. There's a lot of luck involved. Yeah. And also a lot of persistence because you just, you have to keep doing it. So there's only four ways of surviving as an artist. Have money or marry money. Yeah. Have a patron, and that would include everything from the Pope to the Canada Council. Have a job that is not related to writing, like T.S.

21:57Eliot worked in a bank and so forth, or go to the market. So that means selling your books and living off the proceeds. And very few writers can do that in North America. Did you ever seriously contemplate moving to the United States earlier in your career? Well, when I was at Harvard, it was quite tempting. Yeah. Not that I would get hired by Harvard, because Harvard didn't hire women in the English department at that time. But I got a letter from the Canadian government, and it said, we certainly hope you'll come back to Canada because we really need you. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. That's a nice letter to get.

22:44I think so. Yeah. I wonder how many people get letters like that now. You're the first I've ever heard of. Okay, so situated generationally, born in 1939, wartime baby, low birth rate, following depression, low birth rate, followed by the post-war baby boom. and people could see this wave of babies washing towards them and they knew they didn't have enough people to fill the jobs to service those babies. So people of my generation were in demand. It wasn't a question of whether we would have a job. It was a question of what kind of job we would have. And so did the letter do it? It certainly inclined me in that direction.

23:37Plus the fact that my student visa was going to run out. Yeah, I mean, that's a good reason. I mean, again— Plus the fact that from nowhere as detailed, I got these job offers. So that's far different from what happens today, like really, really different. Yes, very different. And I mean, just to provide context to listeners, I ask because growing up in Canada, the prevailing wisdom was, well, if you want to go big, you leave. You go to the United States. That's where you go. It was the prevailing opinion, and people did say that to me. But they said, if you want to be a writer, you need to leave.

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26:44I want to ask you about The Handmaid's Tale, one of your most famous books. It's about Gilead, this dystopian world where women are forced into sexual servitude. They're bearing children for people who cannot. It's, of course, now a Hulu series. The book was published in 1985, and something is distinctly absent from it, technology. So, for example, women are watched by eyes. These are spies sanctioned by the government. So it was very analog. You know, people were executed in these provincial ways. But even in 1985, there was some aspect of surveillance happening. I'm curious why that didn't make it into the book.

27:20There were those things, but there were no cell phones. There was no Internet. and I think it segues okay today because those women would not be allowed access to those things anyway. And as for a dark car driving by, you don't know what's in it. You know that you're being surveilled, but you don't know how. And so was that a concerted decision in writing the book or was it simply a matter of writing in a way that reflected your context? Yeah, we had credit cards, and that certainly makes it into the book because what better way to make women go back into the home than cut off their jobs and credit cards, which is what's happening now in the United States.

28:06There's actually a movement afoot to make it impossible for women to have credit cards in their own names. And that law was not changed until 1974. It's pretty recent. Yeah. Obviously, the piece around reproductive rights and reproductive freedom is incredibly salient today and has been, unfortunately, for several years. When you were writing the book in the 80s, did you sense a backlash to a woman's right to choose? Was that a conversation that you were aware was happening at that time? There was a backlash against women's rights in general, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the so-called religious right as a political force in the United States.

28:56And I did keep a scrapbook at the Fisher Library of what people were saying. Newspaper clippings, remember them. No, you don't. I mean, a little bit. I was born in 86, so. Yeah, just at the edge of newspaper clippings. Yeah. So they were saying that. They were saying women belong in the home, and they were certainly pushing back against women's right to choose. And the 70s had been pretty game-changing for women in North America. So there was a reaction to that in the 80s, and that's one of the reasons I wrote the book. Because what people say they would like to do if they get power is very interesting to me because I think they will actually do it.

29:50Some people say, oh, it's just words. They don't really mean it. I always think they do mean it, and then I think, how would you go about it on a practical level? So here's all these women running around like gerbils having credit cards and jobs and money and apartments of their own. How would you get them back into a male-dominated, controlled space? Well, you wrote a bit of a playbook. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. But it's not new. It's not my playbook. It's what people have done over time. Sure. And I mean, I think what was so interesting to us, among other things, at Wired, covering this most recent federal election here, was that the playbook had been written.