the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt eleven)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Notwithstanding the political posturing, right-wing extremist violence not only persisted but accelerated. Indeed, the amount and degree of such violence offers a hidden history of the Obama years. The roll call of such acts runs into the dozens. Days after the 2008 election, a Marine corporal at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina was arrested and charged with planning to kill Obama as a “domestic enemy” in “Operation Patriot.” In January 2009, a Boston white supremacist raped and shot an African immigrant and then killed her sister when she tried to intervene. He then killed a homeless African immigrant, and he was arrested before he got to a synagogue for a planned mass shooting. In May, a member of the right-wing vigilante group Minutemen American Defense in Arizona murdered a man and his young daughter during a home invasion to steal funds for his anti-immigrant activities. Also in May, a “sovereign citizen” (which Terry Nichols also claimed to be) named Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who provided abortion services. In June, a white supremacist attacked the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., shooting and killing a security guard. This was all in the first six months of the Obama presidency.

The pace of extremist violence never slackened in the Obama years. A tax protestor burns down his home, boards his private plane, and flies it into the building that contains the IRS offices in Austin, Texas. A pipe bomb at an Islamic Center in Jacksonville, Florida. A handgun attack on security guards at the Pentagon. Firebombs at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Madera, California. (Among other attacks on Planned Parenthood operations.) Four “sovereign citizens” in Alaska plot to murder state and federal employees. Another “sovereign citizen” in Texas tries to hire a hit man to kill a federal judge. A Georgia militia plot to poison employees and bomb offices of the ATF and IRS in Atlanta. A different Georgia militia plot to kill a onetime accomplice whom the perpetrators feared would become an informant. In Spokane, a white supremacist’s bomb at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade malfunctions at the last minute. Another white supremacist kills six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Militia operatives in Minnesota plot to bomb the local police and (in a separate scheme) steal military IDs for use in militia operations. A shooting rampage aimed at Transportation Security Administration officials at Los Angeles International Airport. A plot to bomb government buildings in Katy, Texas. Three North Carolina extremists assemble bombs to fight the federal government. A plot to bomb the federal courthouse in Elkins, West Virginia. A man in New Hampshire tries to buy rockets and grenades “to bring forth the original constitution.” A white supremacist named Dylann Roof guns down nine parishioners in a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof leaves behind a manifesto that reads like updated McVeigh: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well, someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt ten)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Despite these obstacles, the extremists persisted. In July 1995, three months after the bombing, Michael Gray, who was a longtime friend of Randy Weaver’s (the central figure in the Ruby Ridge saga), was arrested in Washington State for plotting to bomb the federal courthouse in Spokane. He had stolen blueprints to the courthouse and planned to build a fertilizer bomb like McVeigh’s. In September 1995, Charles Polk was arrested after trying to buy large quantities of C-4 explosives to bomb IRS buildings throughout Texas. Two months later, Willie Lampley, who was a leader of the Oklahoma militia, and three others were charged with conspiracy to bomb gay bars, abortion clinics, and an Anti-Defamation League office in Texas. Georgia militia members were arrested for stockpiling bombs. Militia members from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were charged in a plot to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint center. On April 12, 1996, a white supremacists named Larry Shoemake shot eleven Black people, killing one, in Jackson, Mississippi, before dying in a fire he had set. (The Turner Diaries “was like an eye opener for him,” his wife later said.) On July 27, 2996, Eric Rudolph, a white supremacist, set off a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the Olympic Games. Over the next two years, he detonated three more bombs, at gay bars and abortion clinics, and then disappeared into the woods. (He was caught in 2003.) On June 7, 1998, three white men killed James Byrd Jr., a Black man, by dragging him behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early,” one of the killers was reported to have said during the assault. Apart from the Olympic bombing and the Byrd murder, these investigations drew little national attention, largely because they took place far from big cities, with their concentrations of media outlets. It was not a full-fledged national rebellion, as in The Turner Diaries, like McVeigh wanted, but he did set off a string of attacks on his enemies.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt nine)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

“If you leave the site of the Murrah Building at 9:02 a.m. and drove the posted April 1995 speed limit on interstate highways, where would you be at 10:17?”

“It would put me at the same spot of the arrest between Mile Marker 202 and 203,” Hanger testified. In other words, if McVeigh had set off the bomb and then driven north at the speed limit, he would have been exactly where Hanger found him on April 19.

The story of Hanger’s arrest of McVeigh had a revealing postscript. Though McVeigh remains a reviled figure in Oklahoma, his views about the Second Amendment have been ascendant in that politically conservative state. In 2019, the state changed its laws to allow individuals twenty-one and older to carry guns without permits. If Hanger had stopped McVeigh under the new law, he could not have arrested him, because he was now allowed to carry his gun. All Hanger could have done was give McVeigh a ticket.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt eight)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Jones, Coyne, and others on the defense team indulged McVeigh for months regarding the necessity defense. They researched the use of the defense in the United States and even around the world and wrote detailed memos on the subject. They all reached the same conclusion. As Coyne put it in one memo, “there was no way a court would allow the issue to go to the jury to balance the evils” between Waco and Oklahoma City. Amber McLaughlin, one of Jones’s Enid firm alums, wrote a thirteen-page memo that concluded, “The limitations of the defenses of necessity and duress will prevent us from being able to assert either one of them at trial.” The handful of cases where the defense had been successfully used explained why it was a nonstarter for McVeigh. For example, in a South Carolina case from 1991, a defendant was convicted of driving with a suspended license when he went to call for help for his wife, who was pregnant and experiencing intestinal distress. He had no telephone at home. The appeals court overturned his conviction because the trial court forbade him from raising a necessity defense. To invoke the defense, the court said, the defendant must reasonably believe that there was an imminent threat and that he had no realistic alternative to the action that he took. Moreover, the defendant’s behavior must create no more substantial danger than the situation he is attempting to address.

No lawyer could, with a straight face, argue that McVeigh had a “necessity” to bomb the Murrah building and kill 168 people in order to prevent future violence by the federal government. The argument was worse than nonsensical; it was offensive. The idea that Jones and his team even deigned to research the issue demonstrated the way they coddled and indulged McVeigh. The “necessity defense” episode illustrated how the intense public focus on the case invested McVeigh with a kind of celebrity status; as a result, his opinions, even on legal issues, had to be taken seriously. The vast number of lawyers on his team meant that every silly idea could be explored. In a normal case, even one involving the death penalty, a defendant raising such an idea would have been told to stop wasting his lawyer’s limited time.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt seven)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

During his rambling sessions with his attorneys, McVeigh heard an idea that gave him hope: the necessity defense. The defense applies when a defendant violates a criminal statute in an emergency situation to prevent greater harm. This was it, McVeigh decided. Clinton’s federal government had created an emergency with Waco and the assault weapons band, so McVeigh had to take action. He instructed his lawyers to research the necessity defense and prepare to present it to the jury at trial.

James sent more than a dozen lawyers and investigators on visits to the prison, but McVeigh bonded most closely with one of them—Randy Coyne. They were an unlikely pair. Coyne was a hippie of sorts, whose great passion in life was jazz drumming. (He majored in music in college and spent a couple of years as a band instructor in Massachusetts before going to law school.) After a clerkship in Washington, he found a job teaching at the law school of the University of Oklahoma, where he developed a specialty in the death penalty, which he passionately opposed. In light of his background and politics, as well as his shaggy looks, Coyne never fit in very well in his adopted state. His alienation from his surroundings was reflected in a macabre sense of humor. For years Coyne represented Roger Dale Stafford, a notorious Oklahoma outlaw, who had been convicted of killing six people at a Sirloin Stockade restaurant in Oklahoma City. Two days after Stafford was finally executed, Coyne sent the prosecutor a five-dollar gift certificate to Sirloin Stockade.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt six)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Jones was born in 1940 and raised in the Houston suburbs of the post-World War II boom in Texas. When Jones came of age, Texas was still a one-party Democratic state, but his town was a harbinger of the region’s future—a Republican stronghold. A high school debater, Jones wrote fan mail to Richard Nixon, who had just lost the race for governor of California and moved to New York to practice law. The former vice president flabbergasted young Jones by writing back with an offer: come to New York to work as a researcher as Nixon plotted his political comeback. Jones spent about a year with Nixon before toiling for the next three as an aide to various Republican congressmen on Capitol Hill.

Jones returned to Oklahoma with a singular goal—to win a seat in Congress. He chose to settle in Enid, the eighth largest city in the state, where he had no previous ties, because he thought the area offered him the best chance to run for office. And Jones did run for office—over and over. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Republicans were coming to dominate Oklahoma politics, but Jones never caught the wave. He ran four times, starting in 1974 as the Republican nominee for state attorney general; he lost with 32 percent of the vote. His political career ended sixteen years later, when he was routed, with just 17 percent of the vote, in a U.S. Senate race against David Boren, the incumbent Democrat. The common touch eluded Jones. A regal Anglophile, with a gray comb-over atop a six-foot-plus frame, Jones bought his suits on London’s Savile Row and favored such pretentious expressions as “sanctum sanctorum” for his office. He lived with his wife and four children in a house in Enid modeled on George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The house had a name—Elmstead—rather than an address.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt five)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Two days earlier, on Easter Sunday, Rick Wahl, a sergeant assigned to Fort Riley, had taken his eleven-year-old son fishing at Geary Lake State Park. They cast their lines from the bank, but figured they’d do better if they rented a boat and a depth finder. Thus equipped, they returned to the lake around 9 a.m. on Tuesday, April 18. When they arrived, they noted a curious sight toward the end of the dirt road that circles the lake.

A large Ryder truck was parked next to the water. Right behind it was a GMC pickup. What was a Ryder truck doing there? With a pickup no less? Why were they so close together? It was a windy day, and the fishing was disappointing, so Wahl and his son didn’t stay long. But the sight of the vehicles was unusual enough that it stuck with Wahl.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt four)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

At around 4 p.m., McVeigh swung by the Dreamland Motel to register. The Dreamland was a regional landmark of sorts, with its distinctive sign—a five-cornered red star—visible to motorists passing through Junction City on 1-70. Lea McGown, the motel owner, was a local institution herself. A German immigrant with a strong accent and big personality, she kept a tight rein on her place, leaving the premises for only two days a year, Christmas and Easter. The nearby presence of Fort Riley guaranteed a steady stream of customers, but she had no patience for loudmouths or deadbeats.

The moment that McVeigh registered at the Dreamland was momentous, though it did not seem that way at the time. He had spent at least the previous seven months, since Clinton signed the assault weapons ban, singularly focused on the plan for the bombing. He’d assembled the ingredients and was ready to begin final preparations. But Nichols had told him earlier that day that he would be on his own for the critical moment in Oklahoma City. Now, with a certain weariness, McVeigh accepted the idea that he was going to get caught or die in the process. He wasn’t going to hide anymore. He had planned to use the name Kling throughout the final days and wear a disguise when he rented the truck and checked into the motel. But that plan had already fallen apart when Tom Manning recognized him as he bought the Mercury. At the Dreamland, McVeigh didn’t bother with a disguise, and when Lea McGown asked him his name for the motel registry, he said Tim McVeigh. For his home address, McVeigh listed 3616 North Van Dyke Road, Decker, Michigan—the Nichols family farm. As he told Jones, “I’m sure subconsciously it was like giving up because I know for a fact giving them a composite”—that is, the chance to prepare a sketch of him—“was giving up.”

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt three)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

McVeigh started listening to Rush Limbaugh, who was in his heyday. He was carried on more than five hundred radio stations; he published his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, which became one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time. He also started a television program. Limbaugh’s rhetoric—comparing feminists to Nazis, accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of committing untold numbers of crimes—matched and encouraged McVeigh’s views. McVeigh wrote to his boyhood friend Hodge, “As they say, ‘Rush is right,’ (double-meaning), and many people (opponents) consider his views extreme.” McVeigh also helpfully informed Hodge of the local time and station for Limbaugh’s television show.

Limbaugh’s success persuaded McVeigh that there were lots of people who shared his own worldview. Later, McVeigh would talk about his belief that an “Army” of fellow believers was somewhere out there, but he admitted that he never figured out how to reach them. What McVeigh lacked was something that hadn’t yet been invented. McVeigh needed the internet and social media—places where those of similarly extreme views could convene and plot together, as they did before January 6. Instead, McVeigh tried to use the analog tools of this time. He wrote letters—a handful to his local newspapers and his congressman and many to his friends, like Hodge, where he pressed his views. “What is it going to take to open up the eyes of our elected officials?” "AMERICA IS IN SERIOUS DECLINE. We have no proverbial tea to dump; should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports?” he wrote in a letter published in the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal on February 11, 1002. “Is a civil war imminent?” he continued. “Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that! But it might.”

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt two)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Tim needed work and thought he could parlay his military experience into a job with the U.S. Marshals Service. In a story that he would tell over and over, McVeigh said he did very well on the written test, but was turned down because he was a “white male.” Just as McVeigh felt the Army cheated him out of sniper school because of affirmative action, he thought the Marshals didn’t consider hiring him because they only wanted women and African Americans. (This story is impossible to verify and likely untrue.)

McVeigh found a job in the Buffalo area that was a lot like his last one. With a pistol permit and a security clearance from the Army, he became a supervisor at Burns Security. Making a decent salary with few expenses, he found a new and risky way to spend money. He started betting heavily with a bookie on his beloved Buffalo Bills. He promptly lost $1,000 when the Bills lost their second straight Super Bowl, this time to the Washington Redskins, on January 26, 1992. (At about the same time, the Army demanded that he return, with interest, the $3,000 reenlistment bonus that he received in 1991, because he did not complete his commitment. This damaged his finances and contributed to his bitterness against the federal government and now, the Army.)

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt one)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

It is difficult to overstate the influence of The Turner Diaries on McVeigh. In a letter to his childhood friend Steve Hodge, which was written four years before the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh enclosed a copy of the book and wrote, “Read the book when you have time to sit down and think. When I read it, I would have to stop at the end of every paragraph and examine the deeper meaning of what I had just read …. I am not giving you this book to convert you. I do, however, want you to understand the ‘other side’ and view the pure literal genious [sic[ of this piece.” (Not withstanding some imperfect spelling, McVeigh turned out to be a skilled and forceful writer.)

McVeigh’s gun obsession, as well as his fixation with The Turner Diaries, fed an interest in self-dramatization, which was striking in someone who had led such a circumscribed life. Hodge told McVeigh’s lawyers that Tim “wanted to go out with his finger on the trigger and empty casings all around him. Tim seemed to feel destined for a violent death.” Inspired by Earl Turner, Tim began building primitive explosives, which he stored in the basement of the house in Pendleton. His father indulged Tim’s new hobby, which also became a nervous family joke. “If we have a fire, are we going to blow up?” Bill would ask his son. Tim said yes, adding, “So if the fire department ever comes, we are just going to stand back and watch it go, right?”

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

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

I was flying back from England with Graeme. After making sure he was okay, I opened up my laptop to do some work on The Casements. But my attention wandered to the seat-back screen, and I found myself watching an engrossing film called Captain Underpants. Once back at the house and in my nightie, I realized that I’d left my laptop on the plane, and… it was open.

This was dire. Stomach churning, I refrained from throwing up and shot into action. I sent a direct message to Air Canada via Twitter, and two angelic beings on @AirCanada worked their magic. The plane was still at the airport, they reported. New message: The laptop had been located. If I would drive out to the airport right now, someone would wait for me and meet me at the curb outside Terminal One, laptop in hand. My walking partner Coleen drove me out: sure enough, there was the promised laptop. And that’s how I regained the highly embargoed Testaments, thus escaping a hanging at the hands of my editors.

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

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

For some time, the condition moved slowly or stayed the same. I could notice no change. Graeme cheerfully told everyone, “I have dementia!” as if announcing he had a new puppy. He was curious about the process, as he had been curious about every process. No one could believe that he was afflicted: he seemed to be carrying on as normal.

When he was eighty, he made the decision to stop driving. He’d continued to be an excellent driver. “But,” he said, “if I’m involved in an accident, even if it’s the other guy’s fault, the fact that I’ve been diagnosed will tell against me.” We had to think up other stratagems for getting around. For Pelee, through our friend Rick Masse, we got hold of two four-wheeled electric scooters with roofs and detachable waterproof sides. The batteries were good for getting to the liquor store and back. We rollicked on as before. Still, there was the sensation of treading water.

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

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

Since Canadians are prone to be offended by the success of other Canadians, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone got in the knife. I walked around looking over my shoulder, but the blow came from an unexpected quarter. My Canadian publisher had been agitating for an interview with the national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, and I finally agreed to do one with a female reporter unknown to me. Her name was Jan Wong. I didn’t know that she’d been a student in China during the Cultural Revolution, by her own account had been all for it, and had denounced her roommate to the Red Guards. It’s hard for anyone to get out of the habit of betraying people, overthrowing the ruling class, or stabbing anyone you perceive as an unfairly bloated target, once you’ve had a taste of the sense of power such stabbings can confer.

As soon as we sat down to lunch, Ms. Wong announced that she herself would not be eating. Having read “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” I knew that refusing to break bread with a meal companion was a bad sign. My spidey-sense tingled, but I didn’t need a spidey-sense to detect the hostility radiating from Wong’s every pore. She began asking intrusive personal questions, and I began avoiding them. I refrained from saying “None of your goddamned business,” but it took an effort. “And your daughter?” she asked. This wasn’t a subject I was willing to discuss: children and young people should be protected from the notoriety of their parents as much as possible. I got out of the restaurant as soon as I could.

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

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

Soon after we moved in, Shaughnessy Cohen of the raccoon sanctuary came rushing over. “Guess what the locals are saying?” she asked breathlessly.

“What?”

“They’re saying that Margaret Mead has just bought a place on the island!” Margaret Mead had been dead for ten years.

Once they’d figured out who I was and where I lived, the islanders were very discreet. Tourists would ask them, “Does Margaret Atwood live around here?” “Margaret who?” they would say. Or, “I think she’s way down there at the other end of the island.” I didn’t ask them to fib like this, they just knew. Country manners.

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

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

In February 1985, our old friend and co-founder of the Writers’ Union, Marian Engel, died of the cancer she’d had since the late 1970s. We said farewell to her intelligent, savvy voice. She turned up in a dream to reassure me: “It’s fine,” she said, meaning death. “You just kind of go out, like a television.” In those days the picture shrank toward the middle of the set before turning off. Later I wrote in my journal, “Seeing my piece on Marian in Saturday Night with a wonderful photo of her—jumping—in Paris—made me realize again how much I miss her.”

It was in Tuscaloosa that we met Valerie Martin, a novelist—originally from New Orleans—who was also guest-teaching at the University of Alabama. She and I had daughters of roughly the same age, so a connection was made. Valerie was smart, funny, and forthright, and has remained a friend ever since. In April, I finished The Handmaid’s Tale. I was worried about it: surely I would be accused of being anti-Christian, an evil feminist, and a heretic re: the religion of America, land of democracy. Valerie was its first reader.

“I think I’m gonna get in trouble,” I said to her.

“I think you’re gonna make a lot of money,” she replied.

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

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

“Don’t ride a bicycle here,” we were told. “People will think you’re a Communist and run you off the road.”

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

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

In early 1985, we drove down to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I’d accepted a guest lectureship—creative writing and a course in Canadian literature I called “Southern Ontario Gothic”: Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Marian Engel, Graeme Gibson, James Reaney—all from that region of Ontario we nickname Sowesto, between London/ Stratford and Windsor and the southeastern shore of Lake Huron. PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM highway signs and Black Donnelly Massacre country, at that time. The Alabama students loved these books: twisted secrets, small-town gossip and scandals, ghosts, village idiots, feuds, and murders were old news to them.

We were eager to see the birds of that region: for instance, the large, slow-moving, tasty, and rare limpkin. Graeme found that if we followed the instructions given to us by our colleagues, it was perfectly safe to watch birds. You should park your car by the side of a promising stretch of forest. You should wait. Shortly a pickup would come along. It would have a shotgun in it. The man driving it would ask—politely enough—what you wanted. Once you had explained, he would give you permission. If you walked onto the land without such permission, you’d risk being shot as a trespasser.

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

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

The novel I turned to was one I’d been considering off and on since 1981. I’d tried it out in my writing room on Manning Avenue, but had shelved it because I thought it was too weird, even for me. A future United States that was a totalitarian theocracy? Surely not. However, the book had continued to percolate.

It was initially called Offred. This was the name my central character had been given when forcibly enlisted in the ranks of the Handmaids—fertile, divorced, and therefore Biblically sinful, women assigned to elite older men in order to bear children for them and their wives, just like the handmaids of Rachel and Leah in the Bible. Offred was renamed when assigned to a Commander named Fred. (“ Commander,” as in “Commander of the Faithful.”) We are never told what Offred’s real name is, though readers and television scriptwriters have since decided that her name is June. They made this decision because “June” is mentioned in the first chapter while real names are being whispered among the Handmaids, but the name “June” never occurs in the book again. I’m happy with the readers’ choice: it makes sense.

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.