“A memoir isn’t about you, it’s about other people,” Margaret Atwood told a packed audience at the Baillie Gifford tent at the Hay Festival on Friday. Together with comedian and writer Rob Delaney, the award-winning author addressed some of life’s big questions: how we grieve; how we write about grief; and after life, where do we go?
Atwood lost her husband of 46 years, Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson, to a haemorrhage in 2019 several days after suffering a stroke. He’d been diagnosed with vascular dementia two years earlier; her collection of poems in his memory, Dearly, was released in 2020. Delaney’s book, A Heart That Works, grapples with the death of his third son, Henry, at two-and-a-half years old from a brain tumour. It was published last year to critical acclaim.
