'It is the scariest of times': Margaret Atwood on defying Trump, banned books - and her score-settling memoir

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/nov/01/margaret-atwood-interview-handmaids-tale-author-new-memoir

‘It is the scariest of times’: Margaret Atwood on defying Trump, banned books – and her score-settling memoir

Lisa Allardice
Sat 1 Nov 2025 02.00 EDT

Margaret Atwood is doing her grocery shopping in her local supermarket in Toronto, and it is taking longer than usual. This is not because The Handmaid’s Tale author turns 86 this month, but because she is checking the provenance of every item before it goes in her trolley: California satsumas out; Canada spuds in. Atwood is a passionate environmentalist, but at the moment she is more worried about boycotting anything that comes from over the border in the US than air miles. “Elbows up!” she declares, taking a furious stance in the fruit and veg aisle.

Back in her kitchen she shows me a YouTube skit of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and comedian Mike Myers in the national hockey kit to explain the significance of “Elbows up”, a growing gesture of Canadian resistance. “Oh, they’re angry. They’re furious,” she says of the reaction to President Trump’s proposed plans to make Canada the 51st state of America. “We’ve not got a very big army. If they wanted to invade they could do so. But I don’t think they would. Do they have any idea what it would be like to try to occupy a hostile Canada? It would not be a joke.” Trump would have to deal with Atwood, for starters.

“I think they are worried I’m going to drop dead before the book is out,” she says of her publishers, wielding a large tray, laden with two coffee pots (one decaf), a plate of biscuits and a tin of muffins, down the stairs into her back garden, a late-summer wilderness, surrounded by maples, linden trees and silver birches. Her publishers are doing their best to stop her overexerting herself. It is an impossible task: just the week before my visit, Atwood made headlines by writing a short story in response to a proposed ban on books with “explicit sexual content” in Alberta. The plan was withdrawn. “The Albertans are an independent-minded bunch,” she says. She has recently been fitted with a pacemaker (hence the decaf) and is on medication that will make her turn blue if she goes in the sun. Last winter, her 88-year-old brother Harold was up on his roof with a chainsaw to deal with a fallen tree, she tells me. Their mother was still clearing leaves from the roof in her 80s. I hope you don’t go up on the roof, I say, looking up at the turrets. “Only the flat bits,” she shoots back.

The book in question is her memoir, Book of Lives, a whopping 624 pages edged in shocking pink to match her outfit on the cover. Since 1961, Atwood has published an average of a book a year, including much‑loved novels Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, the MaddAddam trilogy, and the now canonical The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments. She has turned her hand to every genre – poetry, essays, graphic novels, even libretti – except autobiography, always insisting that she had no interest in writing about herself.

The memoir is what you can remember. And what you mostly remember is catastrophes and stupid things…

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