Using What You’re Given: An Interview with Margaret Atwood

From the Archives is a column that looks back on the highlights across the magazine’s history. In this edition Robert Rea discusses an interview with Margaret Atwood.

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Last week Margaret Atwood announced there’s a sequel in the works to her dystopian bestseller, The Handmaid’s Tale. “Dear Readers: Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book,” she said in a statement released by her publisher. “Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” The Testaments takes place fifteen years after The Handmaid’s Tale and will hit store shelves in September 2019. For those of you who can’t wait until September for your Atwood fix—us included, of course—SwR has you covered.

The interview was conducted by Jo Brans in 1982, one year after Atwood published Bodily Harm and three years before The Handmaid’s Tale became an instant classic. Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Donald Barthelme are just some of the high-profile writers Brans interviewed as a regular contributor to the magazine. Using What You’re Given appeared in our autumn issue from 1983.

—RR

Using What You’re Given

An Interview with Margaret Atwood

by Jo Brans

MARGARET ATWOOD of Toronto, Canada, has earned wide critical acclaim for her fiction and poetry. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry, her first, The Circle Game (1966), winning the Governor General’s Award. Of her four novels (Bodily Harm being the most recent), Life before Man became a No. 1 best seller in Canada. In 1981 she received the prestigious Molsom Award and was given the honorary title of Companion of the Order of Canada.

Jo Brans, assistant professor of English at SMU, is well-known in the Dallas area for her distinguished teaching, lectures, essays, and interviews. Named Outstanding Professor at SMU in 1981–82, she is a contributing editor for D Magazine and has recently served as director of the SMU-in-Oxford Adult Seminar. Her work has been reprinted in two important anthologies. The following interview, her fifth for SwR, took place on the campus of Southern Methodist University in 1982 during the university’s eighth annual Literary Festival.

BRANS: Are you a feminist writer?

ATWOOD: Feminist is now one of the all-purpose words. It really can mean anything from people who think men should be pushed off cliffs to people who think it’s OK for women to read and write. All those could be called feminist positions. Thinking that it’s OK for women to read and write would be a radically feminist position in Afghanistan. So what do you mean?

BRANS: Let me try again. What I meant by asking that question was whether you think that you espouse a feminist position or propaganda in your writing.

ATWOOD: I don’t think that any novelist is inherently that kind of a creature. Novelists work from observations of life. A lot of the things that one observes as a novelist looking at life indicate that women are not treated equally. But that comes from observation. It doesn’t come from ideology. I started writing in 1956. There wasn’t any women’s movement during my writing life until 1970. That’s fourteen years of writing. Now, on the other hand—and you have to try to define this very clearly—I’m not one of those women who would say, “Well, I made it; therefore, anybody should be able to do it, and what are they whining about.” That’s not the point. Nor am I against the women’s movement. I think it’s been a very good thing and I was happy to see it. But it’s very different from saying that what you write is embodying somebody’s party line. It isn’t. And none of the women writers that I know, including ones who are regularly defined as feminists, would say that they are embodying somebody’s party line. It’s not how they see what they’re doing.

BRANS: You have gotten crossways with some feminist groups, particularly with Surfacing, where a woman character wants to undo the effects of an abortion.

ATWOOD: To me that is just what that character would do. The abortion was coerced—it was forced. That’s not an “antiabortion” stand. It’s an anticoercion stand. I don’t think even women who are in favor of freedom of choice would say abortion is a good thing that should be forced on everyone. And if they’ve read the book—you sometimes feel these people haven’t, or they don’t know how to read—that is what they would see. The negative effects that happen to the character are connected with the fact that the thing is forced on her by the circumstances.

BRANS: What does pregnancy mean in your writing? There are so many places, for example, in Life before Man, and then the little story called “Giving Birth,” where pregnancy seems to mean something profound and various.

ATWOOD: Well, girls can have babies and boys can’t. The fact has been noticed by more people than me. In the story “Giving Birth,” giving birth is wonderful for the woman from whose point of view the story is told, but she mentions this other shadow figure for whom it’s not wonderful, it’s awful. I think one of the things the story says is that there is no word for forced pregnancy in the language. We don’t have that concept, although the fact itself exists. So, there again, I wouldn’t say that pregnancy is wonderful for everybody. We know that it isn’t. It can be wonderful for a person who wants to go through it. But you could say that of every act in life.

BRANS: What about a girl like Lasha, for example, in Life before Man, who becomes pregnant in order to prove a point?

ATWOOD: Once upon a time a lot more women than we would like to admit got pregnant to prove a point. In fact, they got pregnant to get married. Remember shotgun weddings?

BRANS: Sure. And they were really calculated.

ATWOOD: They were very calculated. I’m sure that still happens. I don’t think it’s tiptop for the children who are involved.

BRANS: It’s a tremendous gamble. I could never understand a girl getting pregnant in order to get somebody to marry her, because suppose he just refused, or went to Texas.

ATWOOD: Many have done it. It would depend on the social attitudes of the community that you were trying it in. But certainly that was a time-honored technique.

BRANS: Yes. But Lasha doesn’t have that in mind.

ATWOOD: No, no. She’s tired of being put down for not being the mother. You can’t say that pregnancy is one thing. It’s many things, like making love. I mean, it’s not just one thing that ought to have one meaning. It’s one of those profoundly meaningful human activities which can be very multifaceted and resonant. It can have a very positive meaning for some people and a very negative meaning for others.

BRANS: Which is the point of the extra woman in “Giving Birth.”

ATWOOD: Remember that I’m old enough to remember the time when women were told they had to get pregnant and have babies in order to “fulfill their femininity.” And I didn’t like that either. Nor do I like women being told that they oughtn’t to get pregnant, they can’t get pregnant, that it’s antifeminist to get pregnant. I don’t like that line either.

BRANS: So you’re really defining your feminism for me, I think, right now.

ATWOOD: Yes, I’m defining my feminism as human equality and freedom of choice.

BRANS: What do you think an ideal relationship between a man and a woman would be?

ATWOOD: A happy one.

BRANS: Thanks a lot, Margaret. I was thinking of your poem “Power Politics.”

ATWOOD: That talks about all kinds of different ways in which marriage isn’t happy. You may often define a positive by defining negatives.

BRANS: I think what I like most in “Power Politics” is the wit. It is the sharpest and wittiest poem. There’s a lot of anger in it, and frustration because of the impossibility of communicating.

ATWOOD: But there again, that doesn’t rule out the opposite pole. I’ll read some love poems in the reading tonight, to show it can be done. I’m not a pessimist. People sometimes read the stuff and think, oh, this is a pessimist.

BRANS: Anyone who thinks that should read “There Is Only One of Everything.” I love that poem, and it is a love poem—wonderful. But it’s not only a love poem; it’s also a poem about observing the world, and the particularities of the world, I guess. What effect has being Canadian had on your writing? That’s a terrible, big question.

ATWOOD: There’s a funny poem in Canada called “Recipe for a Canadian Novel” in which it’s recommended that one take two beavers, add one Mounty and some snow, and stir. I’m not in favor of anybody consciously trying to be the great anything, but every writer writes out of his or her own backyard. I give you William Faulkner as an example. There’s a genre of writing we call “Southern Ontario Gothic,” which is something like Southern Gothic. The South has often had problems of making itself felt as something other than a region—it so often just gets called regional, doesn’t it?—whereas in fact Southern writers are doing what all writers do. They’re writing out of what they know.

BRANS: Right.

ATWOOD: There’s a story you’ll appreciate. When I first met our mutual friend Charles Matthews, who, as you know, is from Mississippi, I said, “Oh, I so much admire William Faulkner. He was so inventive, and he made up all these funny and grotesque things.” And Charles said, “He didn’t make anything up. He just wrote it all down.” That just proves my point. That’s what writers do, and Canadian writers are no different from other writers in that respect. They write about what they know. Some of what they know is Canadian. When they travel, or when they think in other terms, then the terms become larger. But the base, the way of thinking, remains Canadian, just as for the Southern writer, the way of thinking remains Southern. So to me it’s not a question which is particular to Canada; it’s a question that’s about all writing and all writers.

BRANS: And how to transcend region somehow?

ATWOOD: I don’t think you transcend region, any more than a plant transcends earth. I think that you come out of something, and you can then branch out in all kinds of different directions, but that doesn’t mean cutting yourself off from your roots and from your earth. To me an effective writer is one who can make what he or she is writing about understandable and moving to someone who has never been there. All good writing has that kind of transcendence. It doesn’t mean becoming something called “international.” There is no such thing.

BRANS: No. Makes sense. So you don’t think then that there are national literary qualities, even though you wrote a book about Canadian literature?

ATWOOD: I think that in any transaction involving a book there’s the writer, there’s the book, and there’s the reader. Now, the writer can write the book and make it as good a book as he or she can, and it can be a pretty good book. That doesn’t mean the reader is going to understand it, unless the reader has a receiving apparatus that’s equal to the product. I’ll give you an American example—Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick was not recognized as a great American classic until the 1920s. When it was first published, it was rejected by the American reading public, which at that time was divided into two camps, the Anglophiles, who wanted it to be like English writing (it wasn’t), and young Americans who were looking for the great American genius, but didn’t think it was Melville. Those are the two groups that reviewed the book. It sank like a stone, Melville died a broken and disappointed man, and Moby-Dick did not come into its own until seventy years later. So that’s what I mean when I say that the receiving apparatus has to be there as well.

I write for readers. I write for people who like to read books. They don’t have to be Canadian readers. They don’t have to be American readers. They don’t have to be Indian readers, although some of them are. I’m translated into fourteen languages by now, and I’m sure that some of the people reading those books don’t get all the references in them, because they’re not familiar with the setting. I don’t get all the references in William Faulkner either. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the books, or can’t understand them. You can pick up a lot of things from context, even though you may not understand that it was that family in Oxford, Mississippi, that was being talked about.

BRANS: But as an educated reader you still would have this human rapport with the book.

ATWOOD: An educated reader has a rapport with all books, depending on taste to a certain extent, but an educated reader would never not read a book because it wasn’t by somebody from his home town, right? or because the person was a different color, or because the person was a woman or a man. I’ve had women say to me that they just don’t read books by men anymore. I think that’s shocking. I’ve had that said to me by several people within the last couple of weeks.

BRANS: Does that mean then that you cut yourself off from the whole literary tradition in English?

ATWOOD: If you’re a reader, that’s what you’re doing to yourself.

BRANS: If some women have difficulty reading books written by men, can’t even bring themselves to do it, do you have any difficulties in portraying a character of the opposite sex in your writing?

ATWOOD: It’s a little bit harder.

BRANS: What sorts of problems?

ATWOOD: The same problem I would have portraying an English person, or somebody that was just enough different from me that I’d have to do research. So, with men, it depends on what kind of man you’re doing, of course, but just to give you an example, writing Life before Man, I showed the manuscript to a man (I showed the manuscript of Bodily Harm to a West Indian, and that was helpful, too) because I wanted to just have a read on the details—the accuracy of the details—and he caught me in one major mistake, which a man would never have made. He said you cannot shave a beard off with an electric razor. It doesn’t work.

BRANS: You have to use something …

ATWOOD: You have to use a straight razor. An electric razor will just get all clogged up if you’re trying to shave long hairs with it. It’s only suitable for shaving stubble.

BRANS: That’s fascinating.

ATWOOD: Little things like that. I think men have often portrayed women characters, and sometimes they slipped up on those kinds of details. Unless they go do the research on how you put on panty hose, they aren’t going to know.

BRANS: But you don’t think there’s anything … intrinsically different in the mind of a man and a woman?

ATWOOD: Sure, lots of things. But I know a lot of men. I talk to a lot of men. They’re not foreigners. They really can be conversed with.

BRANS: You wouldn’t agree with the poem by Adrienne Rich, “Trying to Talk to a Man,” where she says you’re talking across vast distances in a desert area.

ATWOOD: You’re still talking, and of course it depends partly on what you’re talking about and what your attitude is and who the man is. That does make a difference. I don’t think that all men are the same, any more than I think all women are the same. And there is such a thing as an intelligent, cultivated, well-read, and sensitive man. I find it just absurd these days that I’m having to stick up for men. I find that such an absurd position to be put in.

BRANS: To have to tell a woman that she should go and read a book by a man.

ATWOOD: It’s ridiculous. I’ve been doing the other thing for years, I mean telling men that they ought to read books by women. Here I am, suddenly feeling, out of a sense of fairness, that I have to say not all men are pigs, some of them write good books.

BRANS: Do you get attacked when you have a character like Nate, for example, in Life before Man, who’s sort of wimpy, as a man?

ATWOOD: I don’t think he’s that wimpy.

BRANS: You don’t? You don’t think he’s just dreadfully wishy-washy and too …

ATWOOD: He’s having trouble making a decision, but that’s a decision a lot of men have trouble making—namely, whether to leave their kids because their marriage is rotten, or whether to stay with the marriage for the sake of the kids. Any man leaving kids and a wife is going to have residual guilt feelings which he’s going to have to work out and expiate and get rid of. And Nate is observed at the time during which he’s caught in the process, but it doesn’t mean he’s a wimpy man.

BRANS: Well, I’m glad to have you defend him.

ATWOOD: There again, people, even women, expect men to be better than they are, and better than women. Now, notice what you did. You came after me for Nate, who’s actually the nicest person in the book. You didn’t come after me for …

BRANS: You think he’s nicer than Lasha?

ATWOOD: Yes, he’s lots nicer. Now, Lasha is a wimp. Nobody even mentions her because she’s a girl—girls are expected to be wimps. Nobody ever attacks Lasha for being unrealistic and wimpish and so on, because they expect girls to be like that.

BRANS: I thought she was a child.

ATWOOD: Yes, but nobody ever comes after me for that. Hardly ever at all has anybody ever said that. Nobody comes after me for Elizabeth being a bitch.

BRANS: Well, I would have come after you for that.

ATWOOD: Next? It’s always Nate. And I think the truth is that people expect men to be supermen. Even women—even feminists—take points off them when they aren’t. They don’t take equal points off the women for having failings, because women are expected to be imperfect.

BRANS: Well, I thought of Elizabeth as having a bad childhood, and of Lasha as being young, and so I was willing—you’re right. That was prejudiced of me.

ATWOOD: Women are supposed to be imperfect, but they are also expected to be supermoms, so you can’t win, either way.

BRANS: What did you have in mind about the dinosaurs in Life before Man? Do you think we’ve lost something by becoming overly civilized?

ATWOOD: I don’t like to close my symbolisms.

BRANS: But you were suggesting something about a sort of purity of action and motive in the dinosaurs?

ATWOOD: No, they’re Lasha’s escape fantasy, among other things, but I don’t like to explain and pin down things that I’ve put in my books. They have multiple meanings. One of the meanings is that all kids love dinosaurs and I was no exception.

BRANS: You have such diversity. All of the novels are very different from each other, and then of course I love your poetry, which is quite different from the fiction. Do you consciously put on different hats? Do you set out, say, to write a comedy of manners (and I think those terms are too constricting)? Are you consciously doing a particular kind of thing with, let’s say, The Edible Woman or Lady Oracle?

ATWOOD: Yes, both of those, definitely.

BRANS: Were you working for a genre, or did you start with an image that lent itself to that sort of treatment?

ATWOOD: I start out with an image and the book develops around it. Yes, I always start with images, and the tone of the book comes later.

BRANS: How about sitting down to write poems and sitting down to write fiction?

ATWOOD: I’m not a theoretical writer; I’m not a programmatic writer in any way. I don’t set out little things for myself that I’m going to do next.

BRANS: Like poems from two o’clock to three. Nothing like that.

ATWOOD: No, I usually write a lot. A book of poems that you’ll actually read is usually distilled from at least twice that much writing. It only becomes apparent to me toward the end of the process what the form is that’s going to emerge from it.

BRANS: Do you do the same thing with fiction? Do you write vast amounts?

ATWOOD: I write vast amounts. I try to get through the first draft quite quickly, and then I see what it is, and then I work on it and revise it. I’m not one of those people who puts it down on filing cards first and then writes out a filing card a day. I can’t work like that.

BRANS: You’re so caught up with the transformation/metamorphosis/rebirth idea. Does that have anything to do with your having studied with Northrop Frye? Did he shape your thinking?

ATWOOD: No, I think it has to do with the fact that my father was a biologist. I had the kind of reading childhood that Norie Frye would advocate. But he hadn’t advocated it while I was having it. In other words, I read very early Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Greek mythology; I was familiar with the Bible, and so on and so forth. Norie Frye didn’t enter my life until the third year of university, when I had already been writing for four or five years.

BRANS: You started when you were sixteen? I read somewhere nineteen.

ATWOOD: That’s when I started publishing. Nineteen or twenty. No, I started in high school, and my first poetry was a lot like Shelley and Byron, because that’s what I had been reading. But I think that the interest in those topics comes much more from having had really a biological training rather than a training in writing.

BRANS: That doesn’t come in any way from your sex, your thinking of yourself as a giver of life, or … ?

ATWOOD: I wasn’t of the generation taught to think of themselves as women. We weren’t taught anything much about women at all except those kinds of things you read about in the novels of the fifties. We picked up from the culture pointy brassieres and what not to do after the formal, and all of that kind of folklore. Canada was so backward that we weren’t even taught Freudianized psychology. We weren’t even told that we had to have babies to be fulfilled, or that we had to be passive to be feminine. The United States was going in for that. So, in fact, I came from a family that believed I should go on to college, that would have been appalled if I got married too early. So, the whole set of attitudes that implied you had to marry the football player was not part of my thing at all. My interest in metamorphosis may have come from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. People are always having rebirths there. The culture is permeated with rebirth symbolism. It’s Christian, among other things. And it’s an idea that is very much around. If I were in India, they would say, “Do you believe in metamorphosis? Do you believe in metempsychosis? Do you believe in the transmigration of souls?” But it seems to have been a concept in one form or another that has been run through the sausage machine by many different human cultures.

BRANS: But it’s clearly so central to you.

ATWOOD: It’s central to me, but it’s also central to lots of other people as well. I also think it’s central to any novel. Usually in a novel the central character changes. That’s one of the things that happens in novels—the person learns something or they become something more, or they become something less, but they always change. They’re not the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If you did write a novel in which they were exactly the same, you would probably find it either terribly experimental or terribly boring or possibly both.

BRANS: It seems to me all your novels are affirmative, in a sense.

ATWOOD: Thank you.

BRANS: I’m not sure that other readers would think of them as affirmative.

ATWOOD: Some do, some don’t. It depends on the degree of sophistication of the reader, it seems.

BRANS: I was struggling very hard with Bodily Harm, because it did seem to me, with the political satire …

ATWOOD: You made it through to the last page, though.

BRANS: But in the last page, I thought I found this rather guarded affirmation, because she’s “paying attention”—that was a phrase that you used, which to my mind is a very affirmative statement. And then, something like, she’s flying. And, her luck is holding her up. So, it seemed to me that of all the books you have written, this would, on the surface, be the least affirmative, and yet …

ATWOOD: I think it’s actually the most affirmative, because you can only measure affirmation in terms of what it’s set against. I mean, having hope for the human race in India is a really different thing from having hope for the human race in Texas. In Texas you don’t have to deal with massive poverty and people dying in the street and starvation and beggary and so forth. It’s easy to be optimistic here.

BRANS: I think I was thinking too of her personal trauma, because the loss of the breast seems to be …

ATWOOD: That happens to a quarter of all women over the age of forty. That’s what the statistic is right now, so people better begin to deal with it. But part of what the novel does is set our way of thinking, which is an affluent way of thinking. You know, we can afford to worry about our personal health and our fitness and our personal romances and what we’re eating and whether we’re fashionable, and whether we look good, and personal change and growth and all of those things we read about in women’s magazines—that’s in the forefront of our lives. Move that to a country in which most people don’t have a job and …

BRANS: Don’t have the luxury of thinking that way …

ATWOOD: They don’t think that way at all. They think about what’s coming tomorrow.

BRANS: People are concerned with more fundamental questions.

ATWOOD: But once you don’t have to be concerned with those, then you can embroider, and we do a lot of embroidering in our society.

BRANS: Why are Americans often so hateful in your books?

ATWOOD: I don’t like American foreign policy, in many instances. But neither do a lot of Americans.

BRANS: No. I don’t like American foreign policy.

ATWOOD: Nor do I confuse individual people with decisions made by governments. I think it’s wrong to do so.

BRANS: But, for example, in Surfacing, when the Americans come in and they’re so clearly the enemy. Or the CIA in Bodily Harm …

ATWOOD: All that stuff is realistic. It’s not made up and it’s not my attitude. I’m just writing it down. People sit around in bars and discuss who the CIA is this month.

BRANS: Are you serious?

ATWOOD: Absolutely.

BRANS: You see, I didn’t read Surfacing at all on that level. I thought the Americans were a symbol.

ATWOOD: No, no. No, no, no, no.

BRANS: You see, that’s where being Canadian, or knowing about Canada, would probably help.

ATWOOD: I was just writing down people’s conversations. That’s how people, at least some people, talk about the Americans. But you notice that the guy who talks about them that way the most is also the most spurious person in the book. And the people he thinks are Americans actually turn out to be Canadians, so you have to watch that kind of playing around.

BRANS: And in Bodily Harm it’s the CIA.

ATWOOD: Yes, in Bodily Harm they really do sit around in bars and say, well, you know so and so was the CIA, but they’ve moved. And who is it now? Well, I hear they’re using locals. And there’s a lot of speculation as to just who the CIA is, and the CIA is known for knowing who’s doing the drugs, but not being concerned about turning them in, because that’s not what they’re interested in. They’re only interested in the political stuff.

BRANS: And if they leave them alone, they can find out more.

ATWOOD: And if they leave them alone, they can find out more, that’s right. But a lot of people doing the drugs are Americans as well.

BRANS: Do you have a specific political position?

ATWOOD: Politics, for me, is everything that involves who gets to do what to whom. That’s politics. It’s not just elections and what people say they are. You know, little labels they put on themselves. And it certainly isn’t self-righteous puritanism of the left, which you get a lot of, or self-righteous puritanism of the right, I hasten to add. Politics really has to do with how people order their societies, to whom power is ascribed, who is considered to have power. A lot of power is ascription. People have power because we think they have power, and that’s all politics is. And politics also has to do with what kind of conversations you have with people, and what you feel free to say to someone, what you don’t feel free to say. Whether you feel free during a staff meeting to get up and challenge what the chairman has just said. All of those things.

BRANS: Those are political situations.

ATWOOD: But they’re also social situations, and they’re also observable situations, and they’re also part of everything that a novelist looks at. Jane Austen is a political writer for me. She’s talking about how you get what you want.

BRANS: You don’t belong to a political party? Not any political party?

ATWOOD: Not any political party. I belong to Amnesty International, which concerns itself with torture and political imprisonment. I belong to the Canadian Civil Liberties Union.

BRANS: So you maintain then a kind of writer’s immunity.

ATWOOD: Nobody’s immune. I don’t endorse political candidates.

BRANS: But, in your books you don’t … you’re not attitudinizing at all? You’re simply showing the world as you see it and sense it and feel it?

ATWOOD: Let me just think about that. I don’t think people are morally neutral, OK? But that does not have anything to do with labels. That is, if you call somebody a democrat, if they say they’re in favor of democracy, you then have to find out what they’re actually really in favor of by asking them a number of specific questions. Only then do you find out what’s under that. If somebody says they’re socialist, well, same thing. You have to ask a whole bunch of different questions to find out what they really mean. The same with the feminist. And what you’re really trying to put your finger on is, how will this person behave in this situation or that situation? Is this going to be somebody who’s going to vote for burning witches, is it going to be somebody who’s going to vote for fair trials, or is it going to be somebody who’s going to vote for shooting people—lining them up against a wall and shooting them? Those are the things you need to note.

BRANS: And those are not the things you learn by looking at a label.

ATWOOD: You don’t learn those by looking at a label. People use labels for their own purposes—either to put on other people so they can line them up against the wall and shoot them, or to put on themselves to make themselves feel good, or whatever, you know. So, that’s why I took you through the mulberry bushes when you asked me about feminism. It’s a label.

BRANS: And again about politics.

ATWOOD: That’s right. I think when you say political writer, you usually mean either somebody who writes about doings in the White House or somebody who has a particular ax to grind in that they think everybody should vote for so and so, or that the world should be such and such a place, and that this is the way to get it. I don’t have any surefire recipes like that. I am, of course, somebody who would vote, as I did recently in the Toronto election, in favor of an East/West nuclear arms freeze. That, to me, isn’t even politics—it’s survival.

BRANS: It’s universal survival, yes, I agree.

ATWOOD: I think all kinds of people who don’t ordinarily pay any attention to politics at all are coming out for that one.

BRANS: You’ve been writing for so long. Apparently there’s a very great need for you to write.

ATWOOD: It’s very enjoyable for me to write. It’s a pleasure. I bet you’ve never heard a writer say that before.

BRANS: Writers say various things, but for a lot of them I think it is sort of a torment, but a necessary torment.

ATWOOD: Don’t ever believe that. If they didn’t enjoy it on some level, they wouldn’t be doing it.

BRANS: What do you think you accomplish for other people with your writing?

ATWOOD: It’s not my business. That’s their business. They are the receivers. They are in charge of their own equipment.

BRANS: So you simply do it out of a love for it.

ATWOOD: Partly. I don’t rule out communication and so on, and reading a book is, according to the neurophysiologists, almost the equivalent of having the experience, on a synaptical level, what happens in your head. In fact, you could think of a human being as an enormous computer that you can run programs through. But if you think of a book as an experience, as almost the equivalent of having the experience, you’re going to feel some sense of responsibility as to what kinds of experiences you’re going to put people through. You’re not going to put them through a lot of blood and gore for nothing—at least I’m not. I don’t write pretty books, I know that. They aren’t pretty.

BRANS: But they’re better than pretty: they’re beautiful. There’s a beauty of structure, and beauty of language.

ATWOOD: But they’re not sweet.

BRANS: No, but the world is not a very sweet place.

ATWOOD: Well, that’s what I feel. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s an armpit, either.

BRANS: No. And always, in your books, there’s this sense of making do. You have a phrase that runs throughout your poetry and your novels. Something like, it’s your life and you’re stuck with it. You have to make do.

ATWOOD: Well, that’s a fairly negative way of saying it.

BRANS: I never read that as a negative line. It just seemed right to me.

ATWOOD: That is a negative line. But there’s another way of putting it, which is this: Some people, by freedom, mean freedom to do whatever they want to, without any limitation whatsoever. That isn’t the pack of cards we’re dealt. We are dealt a limited pack. So I would see freedom more as the power to use what you’re given in the best way you can. It doesn’t mean that you’re given everything. You aren’t. Nobody is.