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Margaret Atwood has captured the imagination, creeping dread, and defiant spirits of generations across the world with her work—from the near-future dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Booker Prize–winning The Testaments (2019), to the compelling tangle of women’s lives in Cat’s Eye (1988).
“Time is not a line but a dimension,” she wrote in Cat’s Eye. “You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
Today, the Canadian author announces her new work of nonfiction, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, set for release by Doubleday in the US on November 4, 2025. Why now? “My publishers made me do it,” Atwood tells Vogue, a wicked tone to her voice over the phone from a visit to Mexico. “When they first proposed it, I said, ‘Oh, that would be so boring.’ I mean, I wrote a book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book…who’s going to read that?” (So says one of the world’s most prolific authors, who, since 1969, has written 17 novels, as well as 19 books of poetry, 11 nonfiction works, nine short story collections, eight children’s books, and three graphic novels.)
The idea for a memoir became more compelling when her publishers said they wanted a “memoir in a literary style.”
“Simply, a memoir is what you remember, and what you mostly remember—if you think of your own life—is stupid things and catastrophes. It’s not: ‘I went for a walk. I had a lovely dinner. Here’s a picture of my food.’ I thought of my own life, the stupid and the big, and how all of that affected the writing of the books,” Atwood says.
Book of Lives links the golden threads from Atwood’s acclaimed literary works with her own expansive life and cultural impact—from her nomadic childhood through the far north of Canada to her time in East Berlin, where she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, and her long partnership with writer Graeme Gibson (and their rag-tag bunch of bohemian friends) in Alliston and Toronto, Ontario. Sometimes life mirrored art and vice-versa, other times she was writing about snow-capped peaks in Cat’s Eye in the blazing Australian sun. There were times too that she describes as “horrible fun,” finding moments of light and creativity while conservative politics bore down on women, Atwood writing through it all.
Because she clocks this Vogue writer’s Irish accent, we discuss one of the memoir’s scenes: While working on drafts of her 1996 novel Alias Grace, Atwood was living in the rugged and rural West Cork, with no official street address. “This was before the internet, so how was I going to get the paper galleys to correct them? We thought about FedEx; I hung a tea towel on a shrub outside the house in lieu of an address, and that worked fine.”
The back image of Book of Lives features a black-and-white photo of Atwood in the ’70s reading a copy of her second novel, Surfacing, which wrestles with national identity and the marginalization of women, both ambient and overt. She sits cross-legged on a wooden bench, sheathed in a poncho, on the farm where she was living at the time. “There’s a lot about farm life in my book—because what mostly happens on farms is catastrophe,” she says. “We won’t go into the time we tried to incubate our own chickens, and some of our more unfortunate experiments. Or the peacock.”
What was it like to go through the decades and join those narrative arcs? Atwood responds with her own question: “How old are you?”
I’m 31.
“Oh, wow. Oh, well!” She sighs. “You’re not there yet—you probably think you’re old, right?”
Sometimes!
“You’re not, don’t worry,” Atwood says. “Well, Anna, it changes over time. You’ll hear this described by a lot of people. What you find hardest to remember are the middle years. When you’re older, you can catch and remember the early years quite well. You may have forgotten about them when you were 31, because you’re very occupied with your immediate happenings. You don’t know the plot yet. What’s going to become of me? Well, by my age, you know the plot. And you know how it’s likely to end. I have a different perspective now. What happened, why, to who. And now’s my chance to get back at those bad people.”
She laughed, cried, surprised herself, and sweat through writing the memoir. Despite the grimly oracle-like contents of her novels, Atwood describes herself as “a very cheerful person.”
“Which surprises a lot of people,” she adds. “So I would rather write about silly things. Stuff we did that, I suppose, you could call capers, or fun-raisers!”
Atwood has read more memoirs and portraits of notable figures over the years than she can conjure in her mind when we speak, but she points to the late, great Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s James Joyce—it’s a punchy, compact little book that takes you on a fizzy journey through the formidable Irish author’s life, resisting any dense critique in favor of the warts-and-all approach. “It’s short, succinct, funny, interesting. High points, low points,” she says.
Book of Lives’s front cover art features Atwood in a ruffle-necked fuchsia jacket, with matching leather gloves that she holds to her lips with a smile and a shh.
“There was a lot of clothing picked up for me,” she says. “I’d say, ‘I’d never wear that. That would never work.’ The stylist got me to try some things on for fun, but I was turning towards everything black, trying to be serious. I tried the pink and it worked.” She struck the three poses of “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,” and they chose “speak”—apt, for a truthteller once again living through the political strife and social turmoil that she foresaw in her books.
We discuss Trump’s current fixation with making Canada the 51st state. “I think it’s lovely that the United States has recognized its mistake and wishes to join Canada so they can have a king,” Atwood says, dryly, “but it wouldn’t be the 51st state. It would be 10 new states and two territories, which would mean that the Republicans would never get elected again. So he’s welcome to try.”
The sixth season of The Handmaid’s Tale is set for release in April—Atwood has yet to see it—and soon, filming for its follow-up The Testaments will start. “It all feels particularly pertinent right now, I guess,” Atwood says, “but then it was also unfortunately pertinent when we were first shooting The Handmaid’s Tale in the summer of 2016. We have this same, sad framework again: instead of fantasy, it’s reality. I don’t think there will be outfits, but the rest of it…it’s too creepy.” Others seem to agree: Her publisher Doubleday has reprinted 350,000 copies of The Handmaid’s Tale since the US election to meet demand.
While Atwood resists thinking about her vast readership’s reception to her memoir, she wishes you’ll have as much fun reading Book of Lives as she did writing it. “Good luck with the rest of your 68 years,” she tells me.
Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood will be published by Doubleday (US), McClelland Stewart (Canada), and Chatto Windus (UK) November 4, 2025.
