Sarah Fitzgerald

November 18 marks the eightieth birthday of prolific Canadian author Margaret Atwood. When I was growing up, eighty year old women were haggard, past-it individuals who invariably walked with sticks or some kind of steel Zimmerframe. Atwood doesn’t fit into this stereotype. With her high prominent cheekbones and trademark grey curly hair, Atwood and her work remains as relevant as it always has been throughout her busy and successful writing career.

I was sixteen years old when I first came across Margaret Atwood,  the same age Atwood herself was when she decided to become a professional writer. A friend of mine bought me a copy of Cat’s Eye as a present for doing so well in my Junior Certificate. I couldn’t get into it at first. Having never been exposed to Atwood’s eloquent, elaborate language style, I wasn’t willing as a reader to do the work required to become fully immersed in Atwood’s world. 

A few months later, having nothing else to read, I came back to it, reading each line slowly and carefully. I wasn’t just reading a story; I was becoming acquainted with the protagonist, Elaine, and coming to understand why Elaine saw the world the way she did. It was also my introduction to the introduction of feminism (although Atwood has never been comfortable with being labelled a feminist writer) and the challenges facing female artists who wish to be accepted as equal. Most importantly, however, Cat’s Eye explored the complex relationship between Elaine and Cordelia. Cordelia was a bully, but the girls’ relationship was not as simple as victim and bully. As Cordelia became consumed by mental illness, it becomes apparent that she, too, was an unwitting victim, in Cordelia’s case of her father’s unrealistic expectations of her. As well as exploring the nature of female friendships, Cat’s Eye also explored the expectations facing young women from the early ‘forties to the ‘eighties.  Cat’s Eye would change my life in many ways. Not only did it change the way I navigated my female friendships, reading it encouraged me as a writer to look at the world around me more carefully, and to find my place within it.

In her online writing MasterClass, which I enjoyed earlier this year, Atwood reveals some of the rules she adheres to when writing. For her, writing about a certain theme or issue doesn’t work (which is strange given the myriad of themes critics have identified in her novels, including climate change, oppression of female sexuality, the beginning of the apocalypse to name a few). Atwood instead advises writers to start with a character or an object, and instead to frame a story around that. This is not to say that Atwood does not recognise the importance of reading and research, on the contrary; many of Atwood’s stories, including The Handmaid’s Tale, are drenched in research and biblical references. In writing The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood famously made a promise to herself that she would not include any horrifying incidents or references that had not already happened in real life. This philosophy seems to underpin much of Atwood’s writing, that she would not fabricate situations that had not happened, or that could potentially happen. 

For example, in the post-apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, the main character Jimmy/Snowman is the only human survivor in a world inhabited by artificially created creatures called Crakers, who are the creation of mad-scientist Crake as an alternative to humans. The humans have been wiped out by biological warfare in the form of the “Blyss-Pluss” pill, which Jimmy advertised as a pill promoting health and sexual pleasure, but in fact unleashes a global pandemic which completely wipes out the human race. 

Indeed Atwood, who has always been vocal about issues concerning the destruction of the environment and climate change, explores the ending of the human race in many novels including The Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted for television and stage before Bruce Miller’s adaptation in 2017, but the broadcasting of Miller’s adaptation came mere months after Trump’s inauguration as president of the US, after the president had made inappropriate comments about women and immigration. Atwood’s Handmaid’s Taleforced its readers to question the role of women as reproductive agents and illustrates the oppression faced by women who do not have the right to choose what happens their bodies. Atwood also demonstrates how horrific crimes against humanity can be glossed over through semantics: the systematic rape of the Handmaids is referred to as “the Ceremony”; the stoning of offenders who break the laws of the oppressive regime of Gilead is known as a “salvaging”. Although it was penned in 1985,  just before the deconstruction of the Berlin wall, The Handmaid’s Tale remains depressingly relevant in this era of #metoo.

It is a rare phenomenon for a writer to remain as relevant as they ever have been, and in 2015, Margaret Atwood completed a piece of work entitled Scribbler Moon, making her the first contributor to the Future Library Project. The Future Library Project aims to collect a piece of work each by a popular writer that has never been read before. Readers will not have an opportunity to read the pieces of work until they are published by the project in 2114. 

With a writing career that has almost spanned six decades, and a remarkable ability to stay tuned into the realities of the world around her, new and familiar readers alike continue to read and to be mesmerised by the work of Margaret Atwood. For me personally, Atwood has opened my eyes to the wonderful and terrible things that we are facing in the future. She continually warns us against complacency, as Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale reminds us: “Nothing changes instantaneously; in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

Happy birthday to one of the greatest authors of our time, and thank you for helping us to see the world a little differently.