Margaret Atwood's Wilderness Tips

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,

which is round but not flat and has more colors

than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,

this is what you will

come back to, this is your hand.

—from “You Begin,” Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems (1978)

“It’s just simple,” began prize-winning Canadian author, poet and literary critic Margaret Atwood in a Nov. 19 interview with The Harvard Crimson as she explained the predominance of settings familiar to her in her novels. “If you’re going to send a character to lunch, you’d like to know where. Apparently one of the plusses for people living in Brooklyn is that every single lunch spot—hot dog stands, White Castles—in the novels…people actually eat there. Things are in the right place. For them it’s like, ‘Wow, this is real’…you just want to know that everything’s in a certain place.”

But not everything has remained in its place for Atwood, who studied at Radcliffe as a graduate student in the early 1960s and returned to Cambridge after a significant hiatus to deliver a speech as part of the Radcliffe Institute Dean’s Lecture Series. I asked her how it felt to be back.

“Weird,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “There was no HMV, no Gap-type stores when I was at school. But as for the Yard, it’s exactly the same.”

Life experiences undoubtedly contribute to any author’s work, however, few writers would admit it as readily as Atwood. During her address and in the interview, Atwood liberally provided her listeners with autobiographical anectdotes that have appeared, only slightly disguised, in her fiction. In fact, Harvard provided the setting for her critically acclaimed 1986 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

An audience member asked about the role of Cantabrigian landmarks in Handmaid’s setting, so Atwood provided specific examples: One building in the book is Memorial Hall, another is the Brattle Theater, another Widener Library.

We file onto the wide lawn in front of what used to be the library. The white steps going up are still the same, the main entrance is unaltered. There’s a wooden stage erected on the lawn, something like the one they used every spring, for commencement, in the time before.

“Queen Victoria was not amused,” Atwood told me with glee, recalling the University’s reaction after her novel’s publication.

Atwood returned to Harvard last week to speak give a lecture titled “How I Became a Writer.” She began with her family history, then moved on to her childhood in northern Quebec and later Toronto, a time where she “read everything I could get my hands on.” Atwood placed the “literature” of her childhood into three categories: “acceptable” books read for school, “acceptable” books read out of school and, finally, True Romance novels. Grinning, she told her audience, “I learned many things about the seedier side of life from the printed page.” The odd combination between Atwood’s childhood literary curiosity, teenage titillation and embarrassment at contrived words and situations resurfaced in 1991’s Wilderness Tips, a collection of short stories:

What the [teenage] waitresses are reading is a True Romance magazine…True Trash, Hilary calls them. Joanne calls the Moan-o-dramas. Right now it’s Joanne reading. She reads in a serious, histrionic voice, like someone on the radio…She’s got her sunglasses perched on the end of her nose, like a teacher. For extra hilarity she’s thrown in a fake English accent…

‘I felt myself lifted. He was carrying me to the sofa. Then I felt the length of his hard, sinewy body pressing against mine. Feebly I tried to push his hands away, but I didn’t really want to. And then—dot dot dot—we were One, capital O, exclamation mark.’

There is a moment of silence. Then the waitresses laugh. Their laughter is outraged, disbelieving. One. Just like that. There has to be more to it.

The audience laughed at the prospect of being lured into writing by dimestore novels with shapely, off-color Fallen Women on the cover, but quickly became quiet at what Atwood said next. Her decision to become a writer, she recounted, “simply happened in 1956 while I was crossing the football field on the way home from school [and composed a poem in my head]. From that point on there was nothing else I wanted to do.” There was a moment of silence. Then the audience laughed, disbelieving. Just like that. There had to be more to it.

Atwood spared no detail in recounting her past embarrassments, both personal and public—her Home Economics opera in high school starring Orlon™ and Nylon™ (“Let’s just say that it concluded with the creation of a new synthetic fabric”); her first book signing, which took place in the men’s underwear department of the Hudson’s Bay department store in 1969 (“I sold two Edible Wom[e]n all day”); the scandalous extramarital affair that began her 30-year-strong marriage to Graeme Gibson (“I stole him away”). Despite all her self-deprecating, hilarious, self-disclosure, the mystery of how Atwood became a writer still remained. True, the events of her life play a large role in the content of her fictional works and her poetry, but how she made the leap between the football field and the Booker Prize was left largely undisclosed. She curtailed her story at the publication of her first novel, and finished her speech without instructions, only a warning and a smirk: “Beware…it’s a daunting, shark-filled lagoon out there.” Margaret Atwood knows the end of the story, but she’s not telling.