Interview with Margaret Atwood from emagazine

Margaret Atwood – an interview
Margaret Atwood would like to clear a few things up from the start. She is not a murderer (this in spite of writing as a murderer in Alias Grace). She was not bullied to within an inch of her existence by her childhood best friend (unlike the narrator of Cat’s Eye). She is not a femme fatale about to steal your man (The Robber Bride), she does not have an eating disorder (The Edible Woman), and she is not a woman whose lover committed suicide (Life Before Man), nor a woman searching for her lost father (Surfacing). People often think she lives the lives of the characters in her books, she says. But they are not her.
All we know and read about Margaret Atwood is that she is "frosty" and "scary" and "witch-like" and "remote". She’s the "high priestess of pain". She’s the "authority on malevolence". She’s Medusa, Boudicca and the Queen Bee. Canadians, who know her better than anyone, warn that she’s a ferocious interviewee: if she says you can have an hour, you’ll get spot-on 60 minutes. She’ll fight you, ridicule you, chew you up and spit you out and make you sorry you came. One writer ended an interview saying that if she ever saw her again, she’d run in the opposite direction.
Sometimes when she speaks she puts on the voice of a child; sometimes when she’s standing and asking a question she bends one leg inwards, at the knee, like young girls do when they want something. A sweet sort of intimacy. Why do people find her scary? When she started writing there was no literary tradition; one year in the early 60s, only five Canadian novels were published. (In 1972, Atwood tried to draw some themes and conclusions about the limited number of writers in Canada’s history in her extraordinary book of literary criticism, Survival.) But the fallow was fertile for her. "I didn’t feel all those genius men hanging over me," she says. "Canada was a wide open prairie."
Today, there’s a fiction boom – Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, Alice Munro – and Atwood has been at the heart of it since The Edible Woman, her first novel, was published in 1969. (She had written it four years earlier, but the publisher lost the manuscript.) Her work since has been a roll-call of gleaming successes; novels at once intellectual and popular, emotional and neatly-plotted: from Surfacing, her 1979 novel about a woman’s investigation into her father’s disappearance on a remote island, which has an emotional impact on all who read it, to the million-selling The Handmaid’s Tale, perhaps her greatest work and certainly a classic, a feminist sci-fi horror story in which fertile women are turned into breeding machines; to Cat’s Eye, the best novel ever written about how girls can bully each other. Three of her books – The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye and Alias Grace – have been nominated for the Booker Prize. Atwood is taught in more than three-quarters of British universities.
She is a writer who revels in suffering, who describes pain so that it hurts, so that the reader feels it. One night, after reading The Robber Bride, I was awake until dawn, so deeply upsetting was her portrayal of Charis, who changed her name from Karen to try to obliterate the horrors of an abusive childhood. When, in Toronto, Atwood drove me to the bridge featured in Cat’s Eye, the location of a hugely distressing incident of childhood torture in the novel, it was an overwhelming experience. In a way, I suppose I’d been there before – through her fiction, she’d already taken me.
So what about this "high priestess of pain" label? "I’m not responsible for other people’s metaphors," she says. "What that means is that I’m good at describing certain kinds of emotions. That’s all it means. I also can do other things. I’m good at writing fake newspaper reports. High priestess of fake newspaper reports." But she describes pain so that it’s unbearable, which is a shock when we think we see pain every day on television news, dramas, chat shows and Oprah.
"There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good. It’s one of the things writing can do. Then there’s another thing, which is just as difficult, and just as honourable, and that is to be able to evoke joy. There are some people who do that very well, Carol Shields, for example. Some do rage. Others do a disjointed kind of melancholy."
But what is it that makes a particular writer good at a particular emotion? Why is she so good at pain?
"We don’t know it. If we did, we’d package it and sell it. You can never tell anybody else how to do it. Let’s put it this way," she says. "Who knows which daffodils Wordsworth wrote his poem about? Perhaps there weren’t any daffodils. But who cares? What does it matter? All kinds of people have all kinds of really interesting things happen to them, and they don’t write books about them. And all kinds of other people sit there in their rooms and you can’t tell if it’s real, you the reader can never actually know. A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book."
"The darkness is really out there," she says. "It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world." Of course, she says, there must be some hook-in to something deeply personal if the book is going to work as art; but fiction is never the whole and literal truth. "Take the Brontës," she says. "Was there really a Heathcliff? I doubt it very much. Maybe there was a proto-Heathcliff, or someone like Heathcliff, or someone glimpsed on a street corner one day. The passion was there, but it probably wasn’t lived out in the way of their books. If you did, you probably wouldn’t bother writing."
At school a teacher said she showed "no particular promise", but it didn’t matter: she loved books, Grimm, Poe, then Austen, then reading her own poems at a Toronto cafe called The Bohemian Embassy.
In The Blind Assassin, Iris says of her sister, "Laura was my left hand, and I was hers." In Alias Grace, her 1996 novel, the central character, a murderer called Grace, has amnesiac fits during which, she claims, she cannot be responsible for her actions. It was during one such episode that she committed her crime. Or did she? Nothing is easier to fake than amnesia. What is real, what is true? Atwood never tells us whether Grace has a split personality or is a very good liar – and who knows if the narrator is a reliable one? Zenia, in 1993’s The Robber Bride, is both charming and evil, seductive and dangerous. And all these alternate personalities fit neatly with a comment Atwood once made that "the national mental illness of Canada was schizophrenia" – bilingual, always threatening to split in two.
"Duality particularly interests fiction as a form," she says. "It is particularly interesting from the word go – by which I mean Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus. It’s the structures of siblings. Look at Christianity – having had God, they had to have the Devil. I think it’s the structure of the body and the brain. Two hands, two eyes, two halves of the brain – but one heart. This has been something that has interested people writing about being human. If we were millipedes, had a thousand legs and compound eyes, we’d write quite different books."
In Atwood’s 1988 novel Cat’s Eye, in childhood, Elaine’s girlfriends, led by Cordelia, turn on her in terrifying ways that will affect her forever. Your friend is your enemy, your enemy your friend – and women, as they have always appeared in Atwood’s novels, can be both.
"In real life, the best friend can be the worst enemy, because she can turn on you, ruin your life, steal your man," she says. "It is life. There are mean girls. I think there was a period of time in the 70s when you weren’t supposed to say that, when you were supposed to polarise things so that bad behaviour came from men. And even if some bad behaviour did come from women, then it was the fault of the patriarchy, and if the patriarchy wasn’t there then all women would be nice. Well, I don’t happen to believe that. There are all kinds of things that people do – and people do them, not boys or girls, even though they might do things in different ways. It’s all about their struggles for power, survival, a position, self-definition. Chimpanzees do the same thing."
Of course, the idea that women can be bad, and that women authors can write about bad women without betraying their sex, is commonplace now, and there are a great many serious women writers today, especially in Canada: it is hard to imagine what it must have been like to have been 29 in 1969, having published The Edible Woman, a feminist novel written before women’s liberation kicked in, and have had interviewers ask you, "Do men find you attractive?" as one did. (Her reply, although she now denies it, was recorded as, "Do women find you attractive? Because I don’t.")
"At that stage, you really were seen as a freak," she says. "It was still the cusp of the women’s movement. Reviews of The Edible Woman divided into people who hadn’t caught up with the early women’s movement and said this is a novel by a very young woman and she’ll get more material later, and those who said this is cutting-edge feminism. Well, actually, it was not quite either one."
This is an important point. Atwood is absolutely a feminist – many years of standing up for equality, supporting women workers, writing letters, protesting, testify to that. But that her books are feminist has sometimes been questioned – mainly because it is women who are evil in her fiction, not men. It could be argued, however, that her work is feminist in a much less literal and more mature sense, in that it features women who are good and bad, neat and messy; normal, damaged, whole, human. She does want us to know that her life isn’t completely as painful as the novels. She once said, "Women see me as living proof that you don’t have to come to a sticky end – put your head in an oven, stay silent for 30 years, not have children – to be a good and serious writer." And perhaps there is a deep, dark secret of some terrible pain that informs her most horrifying creations. But I doubt it.
She likes her doubles: "Everything has a positive space and a negative space. So there’s you. And then there’s the space that would be there if you weren’t," she says. "People shouldn’t talk too much with authors, or they destroy their image of the writing." She has also said that "self-definition is a kind of prison".
She doesn’t want you to read her through her books, but she doesn’t want you to read her through her interviews, either. She doesn’t really want you to read her at all. What have you been doing reading this interview? Read her books instead.
This article first appeared in emagazine issue 11, February 2001