The Challenge of Margaret Atwood
Early last month, I crossed the international border from the United States to Canada—a relatively simple act that also feels a touch more fraught these days than it used to. During the final phase of the third security checkpoint at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, so close to the end that I could see Lake Ontario sparkling through the large windows, a stern border guard had some questions. Why are you here? For work. What do you do? I’m a journalist doing an interview. Who with? Margaret Atwood.
With that, the dark-haired guard fixed me with a look that was almost like disappointment. “Oh, her,” she said, waving me through. “Everybody always comes for her.”
It’s funny to imagine, but not improbable: hordes of brash reporters storming polite Toronto hourly demanding not Drake, not Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, not even an erstwhile Raptor or Maple Leaf, but Atwood, the 79-year-old author and high priestess of Canada’s literary arts. A lovely idea, but it’s not true, Atwood told me later, when we were settled in a hotel suite, after she’d raided the minibar for salted cashews and quizzed me briefly about the iniquity of the new British prime minister, Boris Johnson. You can’t write and do press at the same time; it’s too distracting. And Atwood is almost always writing. It isn’t that she minds doing interviews—she prefers it now to when she first started doing press, in the 1960s and ’70s, when reporters “couldn’t quite get their heads around female people writing, and also Canadian people writing,” and seemed fairly hostile to the idea of both. And now it’s different because—?
She tilted her neck upward regally, fluffing her gray curls so they sprung outward, an imperious, septuagenarian Orphan Annie in the gentle afternoon light. “Because”—her eyes twinkled at me—“I’m venerable.”
Queen Margaret, soothsayer, poet, sometime fan, historical encyclopedia, Booker Prize winner, is indeed venerable. Thirty-four years ago she published , a work of speculative fiction imagining a repressive theocracy in the United States, and ever since she’s been name-checked virtually
