Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts

She writes like a man,” a fellow poet said of me in the early 1970s, intending a compliment. “You forgot the punctuation,” I told him. “What you meant was, ‘She writes. Like a man.

People have asked me over the years, ‘If you could choose another century to live in, which would it be?’ ‘Too general,’ I have replied. ‘What gender, what age, what country, what social class? A princess of the nobility or a ditch-digger?’ I had little doubt, that without the Age of Print, I’d have been scrubbing floors.

In “Victorian Literature”, I taught George Eliot’s great novel Middlemarch. The younger group hated it: the characters in it made the wrong decisions and married the wrong people, and they themselves were never going to make such mistakes. The older group loved it: the characters in it made the wrong decisions and married the wrong people - it was just like real life.

I’ve said that utopias and dystopias are joined at the hip: every utopia contains a little dystopia—the dreadful state of society before the implementation of the utopia

The overriding of ordinary civil liberties is one of the signposts on the road to dictatorship. Terror tactics, such as bombings, kidnappings, and political murders, are another signpost on that road.

Do what you want and live with the consequences.

familiar saying about heroes and monsters: “The hero needs the monster, but the monster does not need the hero.” Quite the reverse: the monster can do without the hero very well. The plus side to being a monster is that you don’t need to care. If those are the only two roles on offer, I’ll take the monster.

If I watched carefully

The Handmaid’s Tale appeared in the fall of 1985 in Canada

The situation was summed up by a pleasant ditty the kids at the school sang: This land is my land

Anyone who thinks that females are perfect

a life in the arts is chancy in at least a hundred ways

Evolution wasn’t a concern among the Catholics—it was just God’s way of making the physical infrastructure of people—as long as you conceded that the soul was created and then stuck in to make the first really human being. Nicely finessed

This was even more baffling. What would that be like? Eighteenth-century mock-heroic couplets? Lo

So here it is at last

I set out to write a book that wouldn’t contradict any of the conflicting accounts. As to whether Grace murdered Nancy or not

The Stratford Festival had begun but was still quite small.

In her mistrust of the writerly me

I did the frying pan up as a frog

I scribbled; he roared. Division of labor.

Here are some of the names from the family shrubbery: Atwoods, Killams, Websters, McGowans,