Margaret Atwood doesn’t just tell you what happened—she shows you how a life turns into literature. Book of Lives traces the strange, intimate wiring between memory and invention: a childhood spent half-wild in remote Canadian forests, the sharp lessons of playground cruelty that later fed Cat’s Eye, and the charged atmosphere of Cold War Berlin where The Handmaid’s Tale began to take shape.
Along the way, Atwood unpacks a writer’s “multiple selves”—the public persona, the private observer, the shapeshifter who can be kind one page and menacing the next. She’s funny, unsentimental, and candid about the creative trance: sometimes it’s meticulous control, sometimes it’s risk and disorder, and sometimes it’s just caffeine.
If you’ve ever wondered where stories really come from, this summary is your backstage pass.
