“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.
“Last night I dreamt about today’s talk,” Delaney said. “The festival was saying we’d both been picked because our recent books were so zesty and tangy.” His joke set the tone for a conversation about mortality that was neither dark nor morbid, but rather an exploration of what becomes of us when we lose a loved one.
“When I started writing my book, I knew Henry was going to be its star,” Delaney said, “But I was struck by how the process of writing made me fall in love so much more deeply with his mother and his brothers: how integral they all were to his life, and still are to mine.”
Eager to render the rawness of his experience, Delaney revealed he “deliberately” avoided research: “I wanted my book to tell a visceral story.” He described his son’s illness as “brutally humbling”. “There’s nothing you can do,” he sighed, “neither money nor the best doctors in the world could save him. All that my wife and I could do was love him.”
“You get heavier and hairier with age,” the comedian added, “but nothing equips you at any point to deal with the death of a child.” Atwood took on a maternal tone. “It’s much more of a tragedy,” she said soothingly. “Graeme checked out at 91, so we’d had time to prepare.”
Atwood grew up at a time when child mortality was far more common. “I had four little cousins who died of diphtheria,” she revealed. “The polio vaccine didn’t exist until the 1950s.” For decades, leukaemia was the most common cause of death among children; today, it is brain tumours.
“Henry was too young to really understand what was happening to him,” Delaney revealed. “But his brothers were four and six, so they knew.” The eldest took on a parental role where he could, the actor revealed. “He’d take care of me and my wife for about an hour, and then he’d have a tantrum, discharging the energy he’d got from us,” he smiled.
Atwood commented on the universality of the experiences that are often the most personally felt. Both authors shared their thoughts on the importance of dying with dignity, and the power of literature to memorialise the dead.
Delaney drew on Atwood’s own anthology, reading from her poem, Invisible Man, in which her late husband’s presence is bravely re-envisaged as absence, “like hanging a hat/on a hook that’s not there any longer”.
Atwood, meanwhile, drew on the personal story of discovering a manuscript which her father, an entomologist, had left in his study for his children to find. “Had it not been for a large green caterpillar, I would never have been born,” Atwood quoted from her late father’s pages.
“Literature allows you to learn things about those who’ve passed away which you would otherwise have never known,” she reflected. Delaney agreed. “One day, I imagine my boys will read my book and I hope they see how amazing they were with their brother,” he smiled.
Delaney noted the medical and technological progress being made today in areas like longevity and anti-ageing, but revealed that immortality is of no interest to him. “I don’t want to live forever,” he said.
He described death as the process of being “absorbed back into the universe.” “It’s frightening to me,” he added, “to think there’s any kind of physical paradise where I exist in the form I do now.
“I want to be obliterated, in a nice way,” he concluded, “and become part of the sea and the sky.”
Atwood, for her part, wants to come back as a “fairly benign ghost”, though she admitted to feeling more naturally inclined to return as one with more vindictive intent. As she laughed about haunting her enemies, she pondered which animal she’d have chosen for reincarnation. “A raven,” she and Delaney concluded, drawing on her late husband’s Beside Book of Birds. “They’re the smartest.”
