the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt seven)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

I didn’t undergo a McClelland & Stewart sea-to-sea Kill an Author tour, but I did do some media in Edmonton. The interviewers—all male—were either apprehensive or hostile. “I haven’t read your book and I’m not going to” was a snappy radio opener. “Tell me in twenty-five words or less what it’s about.” The stringer for the Canadian edition of Time magazine asked whether men liked me (The answer: Why don’t you ask some men?) and what did I do about the housework (The answer: Look under the sofa). This gent was wearing white cotton ankle socks with dress shoes, which immediately disqualified him in my eyes. Thus began my reputation for eviscerating interviewers. It’s only partly deserved. I never eviscerate interviewers unless they attempt to eviscerate me first.

I did my first official book signing in the men’s sock and underwear department of the Edmonton Hudson’s Bay Company. The theory was that this site was near the escalator, and shoppers going up and down would see me sitting at my little table with copies of The Edible Woman and would rush over to buy some. This didn’t happen. Instead, I stampeded herds of men who’d wandered in to pick up some Jockey shorts and were spooked by me and my alarming title. I could hear the sounds of their winter overshoes galloping away into the distance. I sold two copies.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt six)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

During the interval—the two-hour seminar was divided in half—the female graduate students were expected to prepare and serve tea and cookies for everyone. There have been several scandalized comments on this practice since, but at the time nobody, including me, gave it a second thought. My Grade Five teacher, Miss MacLeod, had done the same. Betty and Veronica in Archie comics also dished up the cookies, minus the tea: it was no doubt cocoa in their case. Serving up the tea and biscuits was what women did, especially in a crisis such as the Blitz; and graduate school was always a crisis, in a slow-moving kind of way. When The Handmaid’s Tale was published, Jim is said to have quipped, “Hasn’t anyone said that The Handmaid’s Tale is about the Harvard English graduate program?”

Another memorable seminar was called “Literature of the American Revolution,” taught by Alan Heimert, a disciple of Perry Miller. Professor Heimert began by saying that there wasn’t any literature of the American Revolution, since everyone had been too busy revolting, so we would study the literature leading up to the revolution and the literature that immediately followed it. Thomas Paine, Franklin, and political pamphlets before the revolution, and then, after the revolution, various bemused essays in the equivalent of small literary magazines. The writers of these essays were wondering—now that the utopian New World vision was in full swing—when the Great American Painters and the Great American Novel were going to show up. These worries were so much like the despondent musings about Canadian identity that were going on in my country in the early 1960s that I was fascinated by them. Of course, when the Great American Novels did show up—Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter—the critics of the day didn’t applaud or understand them. This too was not lost on me.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt five)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Every weekday I went to my job. I put on my office clothes, which included a skirt, a blouse, a garter belt, two stockings (pantyhose not having hit the scene yet), and medium-high heels. I then clopped over to Bay Street and took the bus. Downtown Toronto was still filled with sooty Victorian-looking brickwork, and Canadian Facts was in one of these solemn and ponderous office buildings. It did not have air conditioning—large fans were suspended from its high ceilings—but it did have an elevator, and it was in this elevator, coming back from lunch break, that I learned John Kennedy had been shot. Everyone then alive can remember where they were when they heard the news. This event was the end of something—some dream of America we’d all thought was real.

The work at my job was varied. Sometimes I was revising questionnaires; sometimes I was testing them, either in person or over the phone. People still answered their phones then. Or I might be doing a face count in a supermarket—how many boxes of Brand X noodles were face out at eye level? Or I might be participating in a taste test—we had a kitchen, and were called into it to eat things. We tried out the mini rice puddings in tins. Who would buy these? I wondered, forgetting about school lunches. We deployed the first Pop-Tarts to a housewife panel and had to replace a number of toasters when the Pop-Tarts exploded, spewing hot jam. I thought that would be the end of them, but I was wrong. Their maker added more adhesive, and they went on to become a raging success.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt four)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Founders’ House, since torn down and replaced by the Gutman Library, was to become one of the models for the Commander’s house in The Handmaid’s Tale. In fact, every building in the novel exists in Cambridge, or existed then. Handmaid outfits were to be obtained at the Brattle Theatre, renamed as Lilies of the Field. Soul Scrolls for automated prayers were located in the Harvard Coop. The secret service—the Eyes—had their headquarters in Widener Library, which was appropriate: both organizations gathered and stored information. The Harvard Wall was where the bodies of the executed were displayed. The cemetery mentioned in the book, with the slogan In Spe (In Hope) quoted from a tombstone, is the Old Burying Ground just outside Harvard Square, where I spent many morbid but instructive hours making gravestone rubbings with charcoal: skulls and hourglasses and cherub heads with wings, giving way to willow trees and urns as the seventeenth century segued into the eighteenth.

Harvard was not amused when The Handmaid’s Tale first appeared: they wrote a sniffy review of it. Were they not now a broadly liberal institution? Did they really have to be reminded that they had started life as a Puritan theological seminary? But they came round later.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt three)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

I have a picture of me, aged two plus, watching while Edie feeds an orphaned baby rabbit with an eyedropper. This may have been how my obsession with bunnies and rabbits began. I was particularly fascinated by the Easter Bunny. He was male—that much was clear—but he had a basketful of coloured eggs that he couldn’t have laid himself. Hens laid eggs, rabbits didn’t; but if they did, they would have be female rabbits. Was there a Mrs. Easter Bunny? Was there a concealed hen that nobody had seen fit to mention? It was a puzzle. “Why are there so many eggs in your writing?” I was asked at a literary event. I came out with something about the perfect form, the primal symbolism. But perhaps it goes back to Edie and the baby rabbit and the egg-carrying Easter Bunny.

Or possibly the ur-influence was the bunny cookies. This story was a staple of my mother’s. She had to go to a tea party in Ottawa—not her favourite thing, as she had to put on a dress and a hat and make polite conversation with strangers—but the wives of junior government employees were expected to go to tea parties thrown by the wives of senior government employees. (Babysitters were an extravagance, which is how I got taken to the film of Henry V, with Laurence Olivier, when I was four or five. I am told I sat very still: no doubt I was baffled as well as petrified, as I had never seen a film before. But I remember the archery scene very well.) The senior tea-party wife, knowing there would be children, had supplied a plateful of cookies shaped like rabbits and decorated with icing sugar. I was given one bunny cookie. Wasn’t I going to eat it? I was asked. No, I said. I just wanted to talk to it. (My belief that I could communicate with inanimate objects—including, on occasion, certain people—persisted for years.) Meanwhile, my brother waited for his chance, made off with the rest of the plateful, ate all the cookies, and was sick later.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt two)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Our parents had made a deal about fish cleaning. Margaret was happy to catch fish, but she drew the line at gutting and scaling them. Carl, having fished on Nova Scotia’s Clyde River as a boy, was an expert at fish preparation, and took those jobs upon himself. Entrails were sunk in the lake for other fish or left for mink on a mink rock. You could tell it was a mink rock by the scat with tiny fish bones and bits of crayfish shell in it. Later, when I was nine, I learned to tie trout flies, and I still have a collection of clumsy and unconvincing hooked and varnished imitation insects. Later still—let’s say eleven—I was given my own handy belt knife, with a fish scaler on the back.

Water for drinking came out of the hand pump in the kitchen. Water for dishwashing, and clothes washing, including baby diapers (in a zinc washtub, with a scrub board and Sunlight soap), was hauled up from the dock in pails and heated on the stove. Baths also took place in the zinc tub, but in cold months only; the rest of the time we took baths of a kind in the lake. We used Ivory soap because it floated.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt one)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

My grandmother, who was my grandfather’s second wife, kept chickens and ran a vegetable garden. She had the Rolls-Royce of wood-burning kitchen ranges, with an oven, a warming oven, a hot-water heater, and chrome trim. She smoked her own fish, and made butter in a churn; as a child I helped her make some.

Seeing this way of life, unchanged since the nineteenth century, was very helpful to me when I was writing Alias Grace. My grandmother’s stove was much fancier than anything available to Grace Marks, but the rhythm of the work and the shape of the days was much the same. My father, Carl, was the eldest of five, unless you count Uncle Freddy, son of the first wife. He was already grown up—a mysterious figure, lurking around the barn not saying much, and said to be not quite right in the head. The story we were told was that he’d been gassed in the First World War, but another informant said he’d already been like that. As with so many family stories, you don’t think to investigate them until there’s nobody left to ask.