Margaret Atwood - ( 1939 - )

Her Life:

Atwood began writing at age sixteen. She graduated from Toronto's Leaside High School in 1957. In the fall of 1957 she began studying at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French.

In 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately-printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard. She then taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967-68), the University of Alberta (1969-79), York University in Toronto (1971-72), and New York University, where she was Berg professor of English.

In 1968, she married Jim Polk, whom she divorced in 1973.

She married fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto. In 1976 their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born. (Graeme Gibson had two sons, Matt and Grae, from a previous marriage.) She returned to Toronto in 1980.

Today she divides her time between Toronto and Pelee Island, Ontario.

About living with Graeme Gibson, "We seem to have managed togetherness for 28 years. We have, altogether, 3 children, mostly grown up now, and a cat."

Most frequently asked question, of both of us: What’s it like living with another writer?

Margaret answers: "Better than a dentist. At least another writer knows why you are being so strange. And you can take long vacations." Graeme answers: "Not another writer. This other writer."

Her Books:

Her concern for strong female characters is clear in her novels, particularly in The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Life before Man, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid's Tale. These novels feature female characters who are, "intelligent, self-absorbed modern women searching for identity. . . . [They] hunt, split logs, make campfires and become successful in their careers, while men often cook and take care of their households."

Like her poems, Atwood's novels "are populated by pained and confused people whose lives hold a mirror to both the front page fears--cancer, divorce, violence--and those that persist quietly, naggingly--solitude, loneliness, desperation,"

Quotations:

"Never pray for justice, because you might get some."

"If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary."

tells the story of Marian McAlpin, a young woman engaged to be married, who rebels against her upcoming marriage. Her fiancee seems too stable, too ordinary, and the role of wife too fixed and limiting. Marian's rejection of marriage is accompanied by her body's rejection of food; she cannot tolerate even a spare vegetarian diet. Eventually she bakes a sponge cake in the shape of a woman and feeds it to her fiancee because, she explains, "You've been trying to assimilate me." After the engagement is broken off, she is able to eat some of the cake herself.

These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple and universal. Clear, direct, wry, unrelenting -Atwood's poetic powers are honed to perfection in this important early work. Atwood can capture human relationships, romantic relationships, conflict, love and the play for power all in a single stanza, line or even individual word. this collection is page after page of language so outstanding that you wish you were born from atwood's mind; no one else has the piercing insights and the flawless word choice to describe them that this woman does.

Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface. This is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole.

Joan Foster is the bored wife of a myopic ban-the-bomber. She takes off overnight as Canada's new superpoet, pens lurid gothics on the sly, attracts a blackmailing reporter, skids cheerfully in and out of menacing plots, hair-raising traps, and passionate trysts, and lands dead and well in Terremoto, Italy. In this remarkable, poetic, and magical novel, Margaret Atwood proves yet again why she is considered to be one of the most important and accomplished writers of our time.

This splendid volume of short fiction testifies to Margaret Atwood's startlingly original voice, full of a rare intensity and exceptional intelligence. Her men and women still miscommunicate, still remain separate in different rooms, different houses, or even different worlds. With brilliant flashes of fantasy, humor, and unexpected violence, the stories reveal the complexities of human relationships and bring to life characters who touch us deeply, evoking terror and laughter, compassion and recognition--and dramatically demonstrate why Margaret Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today.

In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian (Gorge Orwell wrote 1984) vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred's persistent memories of life in the time before and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood's devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaids Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.

This excellent book of short stories by one of Canada's best-known authors glitters with vivid characterizations and examples of finely crafted story telling. Atwood's dramatic range is impressive. She opens with humorous, gently satirical stories about childhood and adolescence. Her title story skillfully portrays a woman's fear and grief as she begins to question her husband's faithfulness and her own perceptions, while other stories show the despair of characters who are trying to salvage lost relationships or to establish new ones. Many of these stories have the pacing and tone of spoken tales, stories told on front porches or repeated between mothers and daughters. This entertaining book by a gifted writer is highly recommended.

Margaret Atwood charts the psychological process from memory as compulsion to memory as a healing act through the character of Elaine Risley, an artist who returns to her home town of Toronto for a retrospective of her work. Elaine's visit triggers thoughts of her childhood with all the urgency of a bad rash. Dominating her reflections are her childhood "friends," three girls who wreak havoc on Elaine's self-esteem. Having spent her early childhood on the road with an entomologist father, a less than traditional mother, and a brother more concerned with snot and snakes than the intricate behavior codes of girls, the young Elaine is vulnerable to the indirect aggression of Cordelia, the ringleader of the group who seeks to improve her. Through Elaine's experiences, Margaret Atwood turns a keen and ironic eye on the training of females in North American culture.

In this newest collection of ten short stories, Atwood looks back over three decades that have wrought great changes in women's lives. The impacts of death, disease, deception, and disappointment are explored; Atwood's characters, with their tenuous personal relationships, always endure a terrible aloneness. The loss of trust in others is a recurring theme. In one story a betrayed woman plays a grisly practical joke on her married lover; in another, a man settles for second choice in love and work and lives in apathy thereafter. An art collector's priceless landscapes only serve to remind her of a tragedy in her adolescence. Atwood's stories are unsettling but unforgettable.

Thematically complex, her poetry is difficult to categorize: when she writes about Canada, as in "Four Small Elegies," she goes beyond a regional perspective; and though a feminist, she does not necessarily evoke pacifism. Violence, she discovers, is implicit in human nature, as shown in the snake poem "She": "He's our idea of a bad time, we are his./ I say he out of habit. It could be she. " Fatalistic and mordant, her diction may be post-modern but is neither experimental nor obscure.

Contains seventy-three poems, some of them extensive, drawn from her work since 1975, and it includes a number of poems never previously published in the United States. As in her fiction, Atwood ruminates on oppression and injustice and on the genders and their discontents, but beyond these surface dissonances we hear the music of compassion and fellowship and love.

This novel is inspired by "The Robber Bridegroom," a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood brilliantly recasts the monster as Zenia, a villainess of demonic proportions, and sets her loose in the lives of three friends, Tony, Charis, and Roz. All three "have lost men, spirit, money, and time to their old college acquaintance, Zenia. At various times, and in various emotional disguises, Zenia has insinuated her way into their lives and practically demolished them. To Tony, who almost lost her husband and jeopardized her academic career, Zenia is 'a lurking enemy commando.' To Roz, who did lose her husband and almost her magazine, Zenia is 'a cold and treacherous bitch.' To Charis, who lost a boyfriend, quarts of vegetable juice and some pet chickens, Zenia is a kind of zombie, maybe 'soulless'" (Lorrie Moore, New York Times Book Review). In love and war, illusion and deceit, Zenia's subterranean malevolence takes us deep into her enemies' pasts.

In the first section in her new collection, she returns to the love dance, middle-aged and more experienced if not wiser, and gives us poems as right-sounding, memorable, and pithy as her best a quarter-century ago. In later sections, she turns to goddess myths, history, archaeology, family stories, and dreams--all subjects she has taken up before--and if she is not consistently persuasive, she is always vital, powerful, magnetically readable. Political, too, although never propagandistic. Rather, she is a contemporary, female Whittier or Kipling--technically adroit, imagistically rich, immediately accessible. She is a popular poet of the very first water.

In this astonishing tour de force, Margaret Atwood takes the reader back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. In 1843, at the age of sixteen, servant girl Grace Marks was convicted for her part in the vicious murders of her employer and his mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders. As Dr. Simon Jordan – an expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness – tries to unlock her memory, what will he find? Was Grace a femme fatale – or a weak and unwilling victim of circumstances? Taut and compelling, penetrating and wise, Alias Grace is a beautifully crafted work of the imagination that vividly evokes time and place. The novel and its characters will continue to haunt the reader long after the final page.

Thirty years of poetic output are sampled in this collection, in which the poems are printed in chronological order of writing. This allows you to follow the development of Atwood's poetic voice, which becomes increasingly experimental as time passes. The poetry bears the unmistakable imprint of Atwood's mind - the style will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has read a couple of her novels. These poems concentrate on similar themes to the novels: gender relations, humanity's relationship with the environment, power structures within sexual relationships, Canadian life, the darker undertones of the natural world. The selected poetry complements Atwood's novels as you can watch her explore similar territory in a different way. These poems are short, intense and highly enjoyable to read.

Atwood does not mess around in her riveting new tale: by the end of the first sentence, we know that the narrator's sister is dead, and after just 18 pages we learn that the narrator's husband died on a boat, that her daughter died in a fall, and that her dead husband's sister raised her granddaughter. Dying octogenarian Iris Chasen's narration of the past carefully unravels a haunting story of tragedy, corruption, and cruel manipulation. Iris and her younger sister, Laura, are born into the privileged Canadian world of Port Ticonderoga in the early part of the 20th century. At 18, Iris is the marital pawn in a business deal between her financially desperate father and the ruthless, much-older industrialist Richard Griffen. When the father dies, the rebellious Laura is forced to move into Richard's controlling household, accelerating the tangled mess of relentless tragedy.

In this collection of short works, Margaret Atwood displays, in condensed and crystallized form, the trademark wit and viruosity of her best-selling novels, brilliant stories, and insightful poetry. Among the jewels gathered here are Gertrude offering Hamlet a piece of her mind, the real truth about the Little Red Hen, and a reincarnated bat explaining how Bram Stoker got Dracula all wrong. There are parables, monologues, prose poems, condensed science fiction, reconfigured fairy tales, and other miniature masterpieces--punctuated with charming illustrations by the author. A must for her fans.

The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

"Homer's Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than the Odyssey, especially for the details of Penelope's parentage, her early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumors circulating about her. I've chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The maids form a chanting and singing Chorus, which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of the Odyssey: What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn't hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I've always been haunted by the hanged maids and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself." -- from Margaret Atwood's Foreword to The Penelopiad

A quirky collection of short tales and a few poems that can be read in any order. Although not all of these selections will appeal to teens, some will, especially Plots for Exotics, in which the narrator, who has always aspired to be a main character, has to apply for a job at the plot factory, where he learns he is not main-character material. Others, such as Our Cat Enters Heaven, will also engage teen readers. The pieces are brief and varied in style. The ironic and often sarcastic tone is one that many teens will appreciate. Simple line drawings appear throughout. As a whole, the book should appeal to anyone who appreciates a wry and somewhat biting look at society.

In ten interrelated stories, Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour such common experiences as the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. The stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe.

In "The Art of Cooking and Serving", the twelve-year-old narrator does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. After she boldly declares her independence, we follow the narrator into young adulthood and then through a complex relationship. The last two stories reveal the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.