Margaret Atwood didn’t want to write a literary memoir. She worried it would be boring – “I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book …” Alcoholic excess, debauched parties and sexual transgressions would have perked things up, but she hasn’t lived that way.
In the end what she has written is less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works, 85 years. Where most such backward looks are cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying, hers is sharp, funny and engaging, a book you can warm to even if you’re not fully au fait (and few people are) with her astonishing output, which in the “also by” contents list here fills two pages.
