In 2019, famed Canadian author Margaret Atwood lost her partner of 48 years, fellow novelist Graeme Gibson, to dementia.
Gibson was diagnosed with the condition in 2012. His death was not unexpected – but it was a devastating loss for Atwood, a two-time Booker Prize winner and the author of more than 50 books.
Even as Gibson's health deteriorated in early 2019, the couple embarked on a voyage by sea aboard the MS Queen Victoria to Australia — the birthplace of Gibson's mother.
"We did know that Graeme was going to die fairly soon, so we did a number of things in the last year or so that he really wanted to do, and that was one of them," Atwood told ABC RN's The Book Show earlier this month.
The author's grief permeates the pages of Old Babes in the Wood, her ninth short story collection, which was released this month.
Atwood, whose career spans seven decades, is best known for The Handmaid's Tale, adapted for television in 2017, and her award-winning novels The Blind Assassin and The Testaments.
She writes both historical fiction and speculative fiction — as well as poetry, non-fiction and the odd libretto — concerned with themes of totalitarianism, the erosion of human rights and the catastrophic effects of climate change.
In her latest book, Old Babes in the Wood, Atwood introduces readers to a typically weird array of characters, including a fictionalised version of influential English writer George Orwell and a talking snail.
She also revisits two characters readers first met in her 2006 short story collection Moral Disorder, Nell and Tig, who are loosely based on Atwood and her late partner.
The role of the widow
The Nell and Tig stories are "autofiction", not memoir, Atwood says.
"They're fairly close to some things that happened in our life. But of course, fiction involves limitation … You don't put everything in."
In a number of stories in Moral Disorder, we see Nell and Tig fall in love and move from the city to a derelict farmhouse in the country, acquiring a menagerie of farm animals in the process. Throughout the book, Nell navigates the complexities of life as a second wife, stepmother, and, eventually, mother.
Old Babes in the Wood offers a sad reunion for readers: we learn Tig, like Gibson, has recently died, leaving Nell to negotiate her new, unwelcome role as a widow.
In the story titled Widows, Nell writes a letter to a younger friend about the raw and unpalatable truth of her grief — a letter that she will never send. In it, she describes how, "Tig still exists, as much as he ever did."
Nell discovers this "curious folding nature of time" is shared by the other widows and widowers who now form her inner circle.
"Anybody who has had a person close to them who has died will have had the same experience," Atwood says.
Nell and her companions gather to discuss the minutiae of widowhood: the obsessively recounted "death scenes", the tedium of "tidying up" a lifetime's worth of clutter, and their feelings of regret.
The story was first published in The Guardian in February and it hit a nerve with readers, says Atwood.
"Widows are passing it around to other widows. In other words, this is [a] pretty accurate [account]."
From the wilderness to witchcraft
Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa to mother Margaret, a dietitian, and father Carl, an entomologist whose fieldwork took the family into the Canadian wilderness for long stretches of time.
At just six months old, Atwood "was backpacked into the Quebec bush," she told fellow author Joyce Carol Oates in a 1978 New York Times interview.
While her peripatetic childhood meant she didn't complete a full year of school until she was in year 8, her education didn't suffer.
She told Oates: "My parents were great readers. They didn't encourage me to become a writer, exactly, but they gave me a more important kind of support; that is, they expected me to make use of my intelligence and abilities, and they did not pressure me into getting married."
Atwood completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto in 1961 and went on to Harvard University, where she finished her master's in 1962.
Speaking on The Book Show, Atwood recalled being barred from entering Harvard's Lamont Library, which housed the university's undergraduate humanities collection, on account of her gender (women studying at Harvard were only permitted to use the library in 1967).
"As a compensation, I went down into the stacks in [Harvard's] Widener Library, where there was an extensive collection of witchcraft and demonology," she says.
The knowledge gleaned in these early research forays surfaces in My Evil Mother, a story in Old Babes in the Wood told from the perspective of a daughter whose mother may – or may not – be the latest incarnation of a centuries-old witch.
A 'downhill skier'
Atwood's first book was a collection of poetry, titled Double Persephone (1961).
Her debut novel The Edible Woman arrived in 1969, and Atwood soon established a reputation as one of Canada's leading and most versatile writers.
Her star continued to rise in the 80s and 90s, when three of her novels — The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Cat's Eye (1988) and Alias Grace (1996) — were finalists for the Booker Prize. She finally won the award in 2000 for historical fiction novel The Blind Assassin.
In recent years, her published works include the MaddAddam trilogy (2003-13), a speculative fiction series set against the backdrop of ecological disaster; Hag-Seed (2016), a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest; and poetry collection Dearly (2020).
In 2019, Atwood won the Booker Prize for a second time for The Testaments, the follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale, sharing the prize with British writer Bernadine Evaristo.
Surprisingly, given her prodigious output, Atwood claims to be "lazy".
"Given the choice … between doing some writing and watching trashy TV, I will take the latter," she told The Book Show.
She explained her methods to ABC Radio Melbourne in 2020: "I write quickly, but then I revise a lot. There are two kinds of writers, generally speaking: those who have to have the first paragraph perfect before they can go on to the second paragraph, and downhill skiers like me.
"The idea is to get to the bottom of the hill and then go back up and do it again, only this time better."
Nothing without historical precedent
Atwood is best known for The Handmaid's Tale and its depiction of the oppressive patriarchal theocracy of Gilead.
When writing the novel, Atwood sought to capture the conservative backlash that followed the gains of the 70s.
"The 70s were a decade in which a lot of laws were changed. A lot of things became possible for women that had not been possible before. Roe versus Wade came in the United States [and] it was possible to get a credit card if you were married without your husband's permission," Atwood told ABC Radio Melbourne.
"Then the 80s came, and that was a decade of pushback. Ronald Reagan got elected, people felt empowered to push back against these gains for women, and that's when I wrote the book."
While she set the story in a near-future dystopia, Atwood famously mined the historical record for its contents.
"I put nothing into the book that didn't have a precedent sometime somewhere," she says.
She had "no idea" how the novel would be received: "I thought the best outcome would be I didn't get a lot of hate mail and death threats."
While Atwood did receive hate mail, The Handmaid's Tale was a critical success, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. Today, it has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide.
A potent symbol
The 2017 television adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale transformed Atwood from a respected and award-winning writer to a global superstar.
The series arrived at a fraught moment in US history, just months after President Trump's inauguration, when the resurgent 'religious right' was intensifying its campaign to rescind reproductive rights.
The handmaids' distinctive costume – a red robe and white bonnet – soon took on a life of its own in popular culture, serving as a potent symbol of sexual oppression in the fight for women's rights.
"It caught on because it's so immediately understandable," Atwood told The Book Show.
Protestors dressed as handmaids have demonstrated against anti-abortion laws everywhere from Belfast to Buenos Aires.
"Women dressed that way … can go into a legislature and cannot be ejected for causing a disturbance because they're not saying anything, and they certainly cannot be ejected for being dressed immodestly because they are covered from top to toe … I think it was very smart, whoever started doing it," she says.
Atwood's prescience was never more apparent than in 2022 when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, permitting state legislatures to ban abortion.
Today, Atwood uses her platform – she has more than 2 million Twitter followers – to call out human rights abuses and campaign for climate action.
So it is no surprise Atwood and her work have become a target for censors in conservative US states.
In February, a school board in Virginia banned The Handmaid's Tale from high school libraries.
"This is by no means the first time that this has happened to this particular book. It's a fairly regular occurrence," she says.
In an essay published in The Atlantic in February, Go Ahead and Ban My Book, Atwood argues there is a stronger case for banning the Bible than The Handmaid's Tale.
She told The Book Show: "There's a lot of sex and violence in [the Bible], and they never seem to get around to [banning] that."
The liberation of old age
Clearly, Atwood, now 83, has not been slowed by old age.
She is currently editing Fourteen Days, a pandemic-inspired anthology, and has even started a newsletter.
In Bad Teeth, a story in Old Babes in the Wood, a character named Lynne articulates the unexpected freedom of growing older:
"Clock up enough years … and you can dance on a table provided you can still clamber up there. You can have sex with the mailman and nobody will care … You don't have to hold in your stomach anymore. You can make six kinds of fool of yourself because you're a fool just for being old. You're off the hook for everything."
It's a view echoed by Atwood, who says being young is "anxiety-producing".
"[Today] there's a lot more pressure and a lot more self-imposed expectation that you have to somehow be perfect, or you have to be beautiful, successful, enviable … It makes people depressed," she told The Book Show.
"Plus, when you're 20, you don't know the plot … When you're 83, you know most of the plot, so there isn't so much suspense."
