A line from your recent Margaret Atwood interview (‘It is the scariest of times’: Margaret Atwood on defying Trump, banned books – and her score-settling memoir, 1 November) – “She has a reputation for ‘eviscerating interviewers’” – prompts me to write a thank you to her that I’ve been thinking about since September 2000.
Ms Atwood was scheduled to be interviewed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. The person who usually did the literary interviews had heard of this reputation, chickened out, and asked me to replace her. I agreed, though I had never interviewed anyone and was moving house that week. At the time, I didn’t even know in which box my decent clothes and shoes were packed, and had no business agreeing to anything but unpacking.
