Book: BOOK OF LIVES: A MEMOIR OF SORTS
Author: Margaret Atwood
Published by: Chatto & Windus
Price: Rs 1,999
“I appeared in the Ottawa General Hospital on the 18th of November 1939.” Despite being a Scorpio, Margaret Atwood names the chapter describing her own birth as “Gemini Rising”. With that, as with several other startling revelations, we realise that she likes to dabble in astrology. (She provides a picture of her birth chart, which indicates that while her birth sign is, indeed, Scorpio, her rising sign is Gemini.) Atwood’s Book of Lives is hardly as forbidding or stiff as autobiographies can be. Instead, she spins her life-story deftly, candidly, with healthy interjections of humour, sarcasm and literary splendour. As the “idea of a memoir acquired a lurid phosphorescent glow”, she started rifling through her “horde” of photographs because memoirs need photographs. There are several photographs in this book, quite a few in colour, as well as renditions of sketches she made herself, acting as useful keys to the topic discussed.
Born to an entomologist father and a dietician mother, Margaret, or Peggy, had an adventurous childhood. Given the occupation of her father, Carl, they spent a large chunk of every year in the northern forest of Ottawa. She fondly names the chapter introducing her elder brother, Harold, “Bush Baby”. Bush babies they were indeed, and most of the pages dedicated to her growing-up years are about their time in the forest — her father building their cabin; a fearsome episode with a bear that suffered an unfortunate death due to its misdemeanour; the summer when Harold was “almost killed by lightning”; and making friends with children of other families and forming the group, “The Big Five”. Other parts of the year were spent in various parts of Ottawa as Carl often changed jobs and had to move around the country. Amidst all this, Atwood grew into a young girl who excelled in her studies and wrote several poems, stories, and scripts for extremely funny skits. Her Grade Twelve and “all-important Grade Thirteen” English teacher, Miss Bessie Billings, wrote that Atwood had “… a feeling for words and an observant eye” in a note that she received only after her teacher had died. Atwood also sketched quite well and had a keen eye for sewing and knitting; many of the clothes she wore throughout her life were made by her. She also was an accomplished cook, a master of icing cakes with figures and patterns.
Her school life introduces her to the realities of both warm friendship and unexpected bullies. She manages to wade through the “gaslighting” inflicted upon her by the “fatal three”, though after quite a number of days of torture. After a brief stint on a television show, Atwood had a boyfriend, the first in a list of many. During her time in university, she spent three consecutive years at a job at a summer camp called Camp White Pine. Here, by virtue of the nature programme she designed, she was nicknamed Peggy Nature, a name befitting her life as a forest-dweller and, later, as an efficient handler of her farm. After university, during which the first of many of her poems was published, Atwood acquired a Woodrow Wilson fellowship that allowed her to begin graduate studies at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. Her professors, including Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye, left lasting impressions on her and inspired many of her creations. Her anthology of poems, The Circle Game, brought her the first Governor General’s Award, one of the most prestigious national literary awards of Canada.
Atwood manages to include all her encounters with a surprisingly large number of people, some of whom go on to become lifelong friends. Her accounts of these rendezvous are closely spun with the conception, composition, and publication of each of her works. Her angst at the failure of her first marriage with the American writer, Jim Polk, pales in comparison to the bliss and the elation she feels during her days of courtship with her lifelong partner, Graeme Gibson. Gibson fuels her passion for nature; together, they purchase a farm where they spend a significant part of their lives together. She also fondly recalls their time together with Graeme’s two sons and the daughter they had together. As she moves swiftly into the world of fame punctuated by book tours, interviews, reviews and publishing, she keeps a firm hold on her reality, never quite indulging in the “alcoholism, debauched parties, drug-taking, flagrant sexual transgressions” expected of artists during her time. She spends more time discussing the amusement she felt at missing the Booker than the actual win for her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin.
Book of Lives takes us through all of Atwood’s eighty-six years but the account is neither tedious nor sluggish. Infused with the brisk sharpness that is a signature facet of her own character, Atwood’s autobiography is exciting and pacey. While the grief she experiences while trying to deal with the deaths of her father, her mother and, subsequently, of Graeme is tangible, she doesn’t drown her readers in a pool of gloom. Full of delightful excerpts from interviews, letters, lectures, and hauntingly beautiful poetry, Book of Lives glides like a canoe smoothly cutting through the river towards the deep green tranquillity of the forest.
