What Margaret Atwood Would Like You to Know

“Success is never so interesting as struggle,” Willa Cather wrote. “Not even to the successful.” Would Margaret Atwood agree? She once told The New Yorker she had no plans to write a memoir, since “the parts of writers’ lives that are interesting are usually the part before they became a well-known writer.” That was in 2017, and now we have the 624-page Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, nearly half of which covers the decades when Atwood was “world famous in Canada” (to borrow Mordecai Richler’s phrase) and then, thanks largely to the dystopian phenomenon The Handmaid’s Tale, a superstar.