Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts

By Margaret Atwood

Penguin Random House, November 2025/624 pages

Reviewed by John Delacourt

January 14, 2026

As I write this review of Margaret Atwood’s bestselling memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, The Guardian has just come out with a list of novels – and novelists – who’ve “predicted our present.”

Cited among such luminaries as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Jorge Luis Borges is Canada’s own Margaret Atwood, whose Handmaid’s Tale and MaddAdam Trilogy (Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood; MaddAdam) not only concern “mass surveillance and the control of women’s bodies by reactionary governments” but dramatize “ethical dilemmas concerning bioengineering, pandemics and monopolistic corporations.”

Yet, to consider Atwood’s body of work as solely concerned with imagined dystopias and place her in a pantheon of science fiction novelists as dour clairvoyants of our current unpleasantness does not do justice to a body of work that spans six decades. All in all, 18 novels, 18 books of poetry, 11 books of nonfiction, nine short-story collections, eight children’s books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press issues of both poetry and fiction. Authors usually come with transcendent talent or industrial output; Atwood has both.

I cite all her work as if any Canadian, stubbornly resisting digital post-literacy, wouldn’t already be familiar with Atwood in full. She’s prevailed and shone like the north star over our literary firmament for decades, and her novels have won over a readership around the world, pulling in a hockey bag full of awards, including the Booker (twice), the Giller, the Governor General’s, lifetime recognition awards from PEN USA and the Griffin Prize for poetry here in Canada.

The Book of Lives cover photo has her posed in a magenta ruff collar sporting a coiffed corona of grey curls like a Renaissance monarch, an allusion entirely fitting because generations have grown up with her as an icon intrinsic to their understanding of our national identity, like a CanLit Queen Elizabeth.

And like the late Elizabeth Windsor, Atwood can be an intimidating presence. With journalists, she deploys a rich arsenal of withering irony — like a deadpan comic with a MENSA membership — but is sufficiently quotable that even (or especially) at 86, she is still so pressed for answers that 2022’s Burning Questions: Essays & Occasional Pieces failed to meet the demand.

This writer survived an appearance by her at one of my book launches at Ben McNally’s in Toronto; Atwood approached the table stacked with copies, gave me the once-over like the toughest cop on the beat, asked me where my sister was as she examined the blurbs on the back of my novel and then, with a mischievous grin asked, “Is it any good?” (she bought the novel, thank God).

Book of Lives makes clear that there’s no daylight between Atwood’s public persona and the memoirist, even though, as she has wryly stated in the past, “wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.” The paté here has tasting notes from a Canada rich in the anecdotes of a national identity coming into its own, including its window on a nascent literary culture so inseparable from her contribution as midwife from the breakthrough success of The Edible Woman in 1969 that, if Margaret Atwood hadn’t existed, she’d have been invented.

The iconic white cone hats and crimson robes from the series The Handmaid’s Tale have become as intrinsic to Atwood’s global name recognition as Sherlock Holmes’s deerstalker and calabash have long been to Conan Doyle’s.

But what becomes clear from the opening chapters is that, like most singular talents, Atwood was steadfastly her own creation; she drew herself in one line from the very beginning. From her family’s Nova Scotia roots – she describes her entomologist father and dietician mother as having the “reserve and skepticism of the country mice; yet they had the curiosity of the city mice too” – she says she inherited much of that sensibility. It served her well growing up in both the backwoods of Quebec during her father’s research projects and in Toronto’s Leaside, then taking her undergrad at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, where Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye were teaching.

She was there in the years when the cafés and clubs around Yorkville (one actually called The Bohemian Embassy) featured poetry readings between sets by Joni Mitchell, Neil Young or Sylvia Tyson. In the memoir she looks back on the young poet and budding novelist she was and, both droll and self-deprecating about the imperatives set by her own ambition, she writes of her eagerness to get her name in print rather than lights, comparing herself unfavourably to women novelists who had already published and made names for themselves in their early twenties.

She took Northrop Frye’s advice to go on to graduate work at Harvard, where she’d study Victorian literature, but it was that city mouse curiosity that led her to take an interest in America’s puritan beginnings and the Salem witch trials – the initial spark of inspiration that would slowly kindle over the years into The Handmaid’s Tale. Upon her return to Toronto, fellow poet Dennis Lee, who’d just founded the imprint The House of Anansi, became something of a champion of her work and comrade-in-arms, publishing her poetry and that survey of early Canadian literature, Survival, that became as influential on campuses across the country as Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism.

Atwood goes into rich detail about the Toronto of the ’60s and early ’70s, the boyfriends she “collected,” her ill-advised first marriage to Jim Polk, an American she met at Harvard, the famous and briefly Canada-famous writers, editors and media personalities who were all finding their footing, many of them in the few Toronto blocks that make up Yorkville and the Annex in Toronto.

For those readers who care less about these beginnings, it may be something of a disappointment that Atwood doesn’t get to her years of international stardom until we’re well into the memoir. The author of not just The Handmaid’s Tale but Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, MaddAdam, and many more was vaulted into that realm where the launch of each book is a national event, and ultimately, a multigenerational one from Charlie Rose to Comic-Con. The iconic white cone hats and crimson robes from the series The Handmaid’s Tale have become as intrinsic to Atwood’s global name recognition as Sherlock Holmes’s deerstalker and calabash have long been to Conan Doyle’s.

Atwood gives good value on the hits and the boldfaced names, but her carefully guarded warmth and deep read of character are also there for others who’d be in the periphery of a more conventional memoir; her depiction of one of her co-workers, Beverly Hunter, at the market- research firm “Canadian Facts” stands out for its poignancy because Hunter was more than a colleague with great stories of her own, she was a woman who had what was once referred to as “natural” intelligence, unlimited by the horizon of harsh circumstance.

I think the weighting of Atwood’s early years is entirely right. It brought to mind Martin Amis’s memoir Experience, where Amis wrote of how, prior to a brief halcyon period that began in the mid-eighties and started to peter out in the early aughts, it’s always been hard for fiction writers. Advances were paltry, publishers were chancers (the best of them, like Atwood’s portrayal of the “swashbuckler” Jack McClelland, embraced the upsides of that role) and real readers, that tribe of social isolates who stick with authors beyond one splashy debut, have always been thin on the ground.

Atwood was wise to the house rules from the very beginning, and Book of Lives confirms she’s played her cards like a pro in the CanLit casino from her very first hand. That’s as singular an achievement as everything else in this memoir. But it’s the body of work — the novels, stories, essays and poetry, all so indelibly ‘Atwoodian’ — that will live on for generations to come.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt is Senior Vice President of Counsel Public Affairs in Ottawa and author of the novels Ocular Proof, Black Irises, Butterfly, Provenance, and The Black State. His new novel, The Innocent Canadian, will be published in April, 2026, by Now or Never.