She favors text as explicit creation: in The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred is recording tapes in The Blind Assassin, Iris includes pieces of a novel she has passed off as written by her dead sister and writes the parallel narrative to her granddaughter in Alias Grace, Grace is telling her story directly to her would-be shrink. (I even had the anxiety-provoking pleasure of interviewing her for this venue some years back.) Like any devotee, I thrilled to find certain patterns at work in her fiction and thereby her brain, noting the commonalities she circles around across her body of work.įor starters, Atwood has long been interested in her novels as documents-or “testimony”-by her characters. Soon, I began devouring earlier Atwood and I’ve read every new novel she’s released since. Like Myerson, I read The Handmaid’s Tale on its original go-around it was, as for so many readers, my “gateway drug” to Atwood. But some critics, including Julie Myerson in The Guardian, have noted issues with the sequel that differentiate it from the rest of Atwood’s oeuvre, ranging from an excessive reliance on fast-clipped plotting that lacks subtext to its pre-determined “happy endings,” presented, as Myerson states, “like a straight antidote to The Handmaid’s Tale.” The Testaments has met with an overwhelmingly positive critical reception and even co-won the prestigious Booker Prize in October. “It put wind in my sails, let’s put it that way,” Atwood has said of the Trump administration. The Testaments, then, which has broken sales records in Canada and sold more than ten thousand copies the week of its release in the UK, can be seen as one of the largest-scale “response pieces” in history: to both the Hulu series and its fan base, yes, but also to the cultural zeitgeist at large. At eighty, she remains tech savvy and fascinated with new media platforms. What finally pushed her to write The Testaments was widespread public curiosity, spawned in no small part by the Hulu adaptation of the novel, over “how Gilead falls.”Īs venerable as any writer working on the planet today, Atwood has never shied away from direct engagement with fans. Still, Atwood kept her creative focus elsewhere for more than fifteen years.
“Instead of going away from Gilead, we turned around and started coming back toward Gilead,” she said. She first began considering the possibility after 9/11, when, as Atwood told The Current, the political climate radically changed. For years, Margaret Atwood resisted the notion of writing a sequel to her feminist classic The Handmaid’s Tale.
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