Margaret Atwood on Optimism for the U.S., AI, and the Surprising Side Hustle She Invented
At 86, Margaret Atwood has built a legendary decades-long career spanning nearly every genre—from speculative fiction to poetry to children’s literature, often drawing raw, intimate material from her own relationships and life experiences. But never before has the iconic author turned her full lens onto her own life—until now. In her recently released memoir Book of Lives, Atwood traces her journey from a childhood roaming the Canadian wilderness, through years of quiet, under-the-radar early writing work, to the long-overdue settling of old scores (a pastime she can now enjoy freely, she notes, since nearly everyone involved is no longer living).
Long ago, Atwood outgrew the label of “just a writer.” In the years since her dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale experienced a searing, timely resurgence during the first Trump administration, she has evolved into a trusted cultural and political voice, called on to weigh in on everything from rising authoritarianism to reproductive rights to the harms of social media. Her takes are consistently sharp, thoughtful, and remarkably steady—and that steadiness was on full display during my wide-ranging conversation for The Big Interview podcast. Back in 2023, Atwood told WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs she still held out optimism for the United States, and that position hasn’t shifted, even amid the chaos of the second Trump era.
As a Canadian, the child of a writer, and a person of no religious faith, interviewing Margaret Atwood is about as close to a spiritual experience as I’ll ever get. Atwood was sharp, unapologetically funny, and generous with her time—even leaving her constantly ringing landline off the hook to keep our conversation flowing. We covered everything from the unexpected benefits of bouncing between gig work to the nuances of modern political resistance, the habit of doomscrolling, and much more. What follows is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Margaret Atwood, welcome to The Big Interview.
MARGARET ATWOOD: Thank you so much for having me.
KATIE DRUMMOND: We always kick off these conversations with a few quick warm-up questions to get your brain moving. Ready?
MARGARET ATWOOD: I’m always ready.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Typewriter or computer?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Right now, computer.
KATIE DRUMMOND: But spiritually?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Spiritually, typewriter.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Pierre Trudeau or Justin Trudeau?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Whoa. What a loaded question. Can I choose neither?
KATIE DRUMMOND: Yes, neither is totally an option.
MARGARET ATWOOD: OK. Unfortunately I can’t actually vote for “neither” because no candidate is named that. But I don’t belong to any political party, and I always vote based on what the individual is actually likely to do.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Fair enough. What’s the best and worst part of literary fame?
MARGARET ATWOOD: The best part is you don’t have to work for a university, and you can’t get fired.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Love that.
MARGARET ATWOOD: The worst part is selfies.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Do people ask you for selfies all the time?
MARGARET ATWOOD: In the most random places, like the ladies’ washroom. Do I allow them? We’re not going to answer that, because I’ll just get a million more requests if I do.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Fair. If Gilead took over Canada, which province would rebel first?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Quebec?
KATIE DRUMMOND: I figured you’d say Quebec or Alberta.
MARGARET ATWOOD: Either works, take both if you want. I’m not so sure about Alberta, though. They’ve had some pretty on-the-nose Gilead-adjacent rhetoric lately.
KATIE DRUMMOND: You’re not wrong. For anyone who doesn’t follow Albertan politics, it’s basically the Canadian version of Texas.
MARGARET ATWOOD: Not that Texas. It’s just like a lot of places: deeply divided between rural and urban outlooks.
KATIE DRUMMOND: If you could live one year inside any book, which would you pick?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Do we want peace and quiet, or excitement?
KATIE DRUMMOND: That’s up to you—you said excitement.
MARGARET ATWOOD: It also matters if you get to be the main character, right? People who claim to remember past lives never remember being a ditch digger, they always remember being Cleopatra. For peace and quiet, I’d pick Anne of Green Gables.
KATIE DRUMMOND: That sounds lovely. I’d take that.
MARGARET ATWOOD: It’s before World War I. None of the terrible 20th century stuff had happened yet.
KATIE DRUMMOND: What’s a misconception about you that you secretly enjoy?
MARGARET ATWOOD: I’d point to the rumor that circulated back in the 1960s and 70s that I used to dress up in pre-revolutionary French court garb—wig and all—and prowl the streets of Toronto at night in that outfit.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Why on earth would that rumor exist?
MARGARET ATWOOD: I have no idea, and I have no clue where it came from. But it was a widely spread rumor. The only theory I have is that it implied I’d been alive since the 1780s, still wandering around in my old clothes looking for prey.
KATIE DRUMMOND: That’s such a good rumor.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Name something humans will still be arguing about in 100 years.
MARGARET ATWOOD: Gender.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Let’s go back to the start—we’re here today because you just published a memoir covering your 86 years of life, which I finished over the weekend. It’s an incredible read. You wrote your first story when you were 6, and you say there wasn’t much else to do up in the Canadian wilderness. As a fellow Canadian, I totally agree with that…
MARGARET ATWOOD: No, only when it’s raining! You have to add that qualifier. When it’s not raining, there’s tons of other stuff to do.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Fair enough. What stood out to me that I didn’t know before was how much of your childhood you spent in such a remote part of the country, far outside Ottawa…
MARGARET ATWOOD: It was much further north than Ottawa. We were up in the Canadian boreal forest—either up the Ottawa River on the Quebec side, or over in Sault Ste. Marie, at the eastern end of Lake Superior. My dad was a forest entomologist, so we’d head up there from when the ice melted until the water started freezing again, that’s when insects are active and can be studied. We’d spend winters in a city where he could write up his research.
KATIE DRUMMOND: You spent months at a time in the wilderness. How did that shape who you are as an adult?
MARGARET ATWOOD: It taught me to be ready to improvise, because things break all the time up there. You can’t call a repair person—there’s no phone, there isn’t even a road. So you improvise. And never throw away a bent piece of wire. You will need it. Trust me. If you want to get lost in the woods, come with me. My dad was a scientist, but he was also one of the old “bushy guys”—the old-fashioned woodsman type that used to be common in Canada, but you don’t see much anymore.
KATIE DRUMMOND: You see them on Toronto streets now, with big beards and flannel, but they’re just cosplaying…
MARGARET ATWOOD: Those aren’t the real thing. No, those are hipsters now.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Another thing that surprised me was how many years, even decades, you spent in relative financial instability. Your story doesn’t skip from writing your first story to being a best-selling author with dozens of books under your belt.
MARGARET ATWOOD: No, that never happens for any writer.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Right. After Harvard, you took a job at a marketing research firm, bounced between gigs: lecturer, teacher, writer-in-residence, all while publishing your early books. More people than ever bounce between gig work now, that’s just the economy we live in. Looking back, would you have rather settled down to just write full-time, or do you think moving between different roles actually gave you real value?
MARGARET ATWOOD: I think it’s incredibly valuable, especially if you write novels, to see how people actually live when they aren’t in “creative writing school.” Creative writing programs didn’t even exist when I was starting out. An older established female poet said to me back in 1961, “If you want to be a writer, you have to drive a truck.” Good luck pulling that off as a woman back then. Yeah, it was impossible for a short woman in the 1960s to do that. But the core of the advice translates to other jobs, I think she was right.
KATIE DRUMMOND: When did you realize that your own life, your experiences, your parents and the people you met, would become source material for your stories and characters? Did it happen organically?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Totally organic, for sure. Both my parents were great storytellers. My mom told endless stories about her big, eccentric extended family from Nova Scotia. Back then, it was pretty standard for Nova Scotia families to be big and eccentric. She had so many funny stories about her youth, back before cars and TV even existed. My dad was funny too, but his stories were different—usually about terrifying adventures he had in the backwoods. It wasn’t so much the material they told, it was that they told stories at all. Stories don’t have to be about dwarves or Cinderella, they can be about people you actually know.
KATIE DRUMMOND: I noticed you reference your dreams more than once in the memoir, including some really moving passages about your parents’ deaths. Dreaming is still such a poorly understood thing, a real medical mystery. How do you think about dreams, and what do they mean to you?
MARGARET ATWOOD: It’s a universal human experience. We think even dogs dream.
KATIE DRUMMOND: I have two dogs, and they definitely dream. They twitch, they make little yipping noises. It’s wild.
MARGARET ATWOOD: It’s such an interesting area. Lots of cultures have paid a lot of attention to dreams for thousands of years. Most dreams are just emptying out the trash, little bits of this and that. But some feel really significant, right? Why do those feel significant? Because they connect to something going on in your real life. If you have a problem—say a creative problem, or a scientific problem—and you go to sleep, you often wake up with the answer, because your brain keeps working on it while you’re out. Going to sleep or going for a walk is the best way to get an answer that comes out of left field.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Do you write your dreams down?
MARGARET ATWOOD: I have, sometimes. People say if you keep a dream journal, you remember them better in the morning. You recalled a nightmare you had when you were 13 in the book. I thought to myself, “Either she wrote that down, or she has a terrifyingly good long-term memory.”
MARGARET ATWOOD: I have a terrifyingly good long-term memory. Sorry about that.
KATIE DRUMMOND: I’m very impressed.
MARGARET ATWOOD: My brother read the memoir and said—he’s a man of very few words—“You have an unusually detailed memory.” He’s right. I can’t remember what I did yesterday morning, either. But I remember things that matter, not just what I had for breakfast. Things that stand out: catastrophes, really funny moments, stupid things you did.
KATIE DRUMMOND: You’ve had such an extraordinary, unlikely career. It’s so hard just to make a basic living as a writer. Do you think you would make it as a writer if you were 20 today, instead of 60 years ago? What would be different?
MARGARET ATWOOD: It’s kind of a meaningless question, because I would be a totally different person if I was 20 today. When I was 20, pantyhose hadn’t even been invented. It was the dark ages. But looking at young writers now: first, in Canada when I was 20, there wasn’t much competition. Only a lunatic would choose to be a writer back then. There were a lot of lunatics in the bohemian underground writing scene, but they weren’t the most capable people. I was really abnormal among them: I wasn’t an alcoholic, I wasn’t a drug addict, I didn’t want to kill myself. So people basically thought “what business do you have being a writer?” Now it’s much more professionalized, through all the advice, seminars, creative writing programs, people telling you “here’s what you do, this is how it works.” We had no clue. Not a single clue. I didn’t even know what an agent was. I had no idea what should be in a book contract, none of it. So it’s more professional and more respectable now, so more people want to do it. And a lot of people are sold a lie: you’ll write your first novel, get a six-figure advance, become famous. That almost never happens. To put it another way: we were at a bed and breakfast in Ireland once, we had a really great breakfast, and we told the owner “this is fantastic.” He said “I used to be a chef.” We said “oh, where did you work?” He named a fancy restaurant. We said “what a coincidence, we ate there last night.” He paused, then said “how was it?” We said “it was pretty good.” Another pause. “Anyone can cook one good dinner.” You can get one hit with a book. Now do it again. And again, and again. That’s exceedingly rare. It happens, but not to everyone who sets out to do it. Whereas if you’re a lawyer, you’re almost guaranteed to get some kind of job. My dad reminded me of that many times. It’s extremely risky, it’s gambling. There’s a lot of luck involved, but also a lot of persistence, because you have to keep doing it. There are only four ways to survive as a writer: have money, or marry money. People have done that. Have a patron—that includes the Pope, the Canada Council, everything in between. Have a regular job unrelated to writing, like T.S. Eliot working in a bank. Or go to the market, sell your books and live off the proceeds. Very few writers in North America can do that.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Did you ever seriously consider moving to the U.S. earlier in your career?
MARGARET ATWOOD: When I was at Harvard, it was tempting. But Harvard wouldn’t hire women in the English department back then anyway. Then I got a letter from the Canadian government that said “we really hope you’ll come back to Canada, because we need you.”
KATIE DRUMMOND: Wow, that’s an amazing letter to get.
MARGARET ATWOOD: Right? I wonder how many people get letters like that now. You’re the first person I’ve heard of getting one. I was born in 1939, a wartime baby, birth rates were low during the Great Depression before that, then the postwar baby boom was coming. People could see that wave of kids coming, and they knew they didn’t have enough workers to fill all the jobs to support them. So my generation was in high demand. It wasn’t a question of whether we’d have a job, it was a question of what job we wanted.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Did that letter push you to come back?
MARGARET ATWOOD: It definitely inclined me that direction, plus my student visa was going to expire anyway. I ask because growing up in Canada, the conventional wisdom was always “if you want to make it big, you go to the United States.” That was what everyone said to me, too: “If you want to be a writer, you have to leave.”
KATIE DRUMMOND: I want to ask about The Handmaid’s Tale. At this point, your name is basically synonymous with writing that feels eerily prescient, whether you like that label or not. One thing I’ve been curious about is the role of technology in the book—technology wasn’t a central pillar, right? The Eyes are actual people, punishments are carried out in old-fashioned ways, there’s no mass surveillance state like we have in the U.S. today. Even when you wrote it in 1985, there was some government surveillance already…
MARGARET ATWOOD: Yeah, but back then you had to physically go into someone’s apartment to plant bugs. There were no cell phones, no internet. But it still holds up today, because Gilead wouldn’t let women have access to that technology anyway. A dark car drives past your house, you don’t know what’s inside. You know you’re being watched, you just don’t know how.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Was that a deliberate choice when you were writing, or did it just reflect the context you were writing in?
MARGARET ATWOOD: We did have credit cards when I wrote it, and that does make it into the book—what better way to force women back into the home than cutting off their access to jobs and their own credit cards? That’s actually happening in the U.S. right now. There’s a movement to make it illegal for women to have credit cards in their own names. That law wasn’t changed until 19