THUNDER BAY – Author Margaret Atwood keeps her promises.
The Canadian icon, whose somewhat prophetic 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale is sweeping the awards season after turned into a highly acclaimed television show, on Wednesday said she had a choice to honour her commitment to come to Thunder Bay and speak or hit the red carpet in Los Angeles for the Golden Globe Awards.
“To tell you the truth, it was Thunder Bay or the Golden Globes. My prior commitment was to Thunder Bay,” said Atwood, whose show picked up two trophies at Sunday night’s ceremony, including best television drama.
Atwood, 78, spent more than an hour speaking with fans at Chapters local location, answering questions first from host Lisa Laco and then from the nearly overflow crowd that packed the store, where staff had won an internal corporate challenge by increasing sales of Atwood’s books by 600 per cent.
Not surprisingly, much of the discussion centred around The Handmaid’s Tale, a story of a dystopian future where the Church rules and women with the increasingly rare ability to conceive children are kept as breeding slaves for rich and powerful men.
Atwood, who also shared that in her younger days she helped arrange consumer taste tests for new food products like Pop Tarts and discussed thoughts on how to get rid of her corpse when she dies, said when she wrote her most famous novel she never ruled out the possibility parts of it might come true.
There’s a reason for that, she added.
“Some people think history is a kind of steady progression into a glorious future. I don’t think that because I’ve read too much history. Things go and then you don’t want them to go back, but sometimes they do,” she said.
“When Handmaid’s Tale first came out in 1985, some people said, ‘Margaret, good story, but what an imagination you have,’ and this would never happen. That’s why I was very careful to put into it nothing that had hadn’t already happened – so nothing new on the human smorgasbord. I did not make it up and what people have done they can do it again.”
Atwood said Offred, the main character in the book, is not a heroine, but simply trying to survive the here-and-now, which is an attribute she ascribes to most people in the world.
Given the success of the television adaptation and the need for more material Atwood was asked the inevitable question, if she planned to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, a book she said she wrote as a pushback against the right trying to regain ground lost in the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
“I’m not telling,” she said, the crowd laughing and simultaneously gasping at the same time.
“I never tell what I’m thinking of writing because what if I change my mind? I will be on record here with you and it will be on the internet forever that I said I was doing X and I didn’t do it,” Atwood said.
“We’ll never tell anybody,” Laco said.
“Yes you will,” Atwood replied. “You’ll tell everybody immediately.”
Atwood, whose novels include Alias Grace and The Robber Bride, was also asked which one of her works is her favourite.
Again, she played it coy.
“I would never answer that in a million years. All the other books would rise up against me and be very angry,” Atwood said. “I would never put myself in that position. All you can say about them is that each book is good at its own thing. You can’t all be rocket scientists.”
