What’s Missing in Margaret Atwood’s New Memoir

“It’s the job of the body double to take the risks that you yourself are too sedate or chicken or unaccomplished to take,” Margaret Atwood writes in the opening of her 2025 memoir Book of Lives. She then tells us that every writer has a body double, that some writers—like herself—have many body doubles. When a writer enters a piece of fiction, she seems to be saying, they cease to be themselves. Their fascination with this theme or their penchant for that turn of phrase may remain unchanged, but the makeup of their soul is moulded to suit the story and characters. Similar on the surface but entirely different beneath: a body double.

In her Oxford University lecture series “Literature and Form,” academic Catherine Brown offers another, slightly more technical, way to understand Atwood’s body double. She differentiates between three layers of storyteller in a work of fiction: the narrator, the implied author, and the flesh-and-blood person (FBP). The narrator is the speaker of the story, the one telling you what you need to know. The implied author is created by the gaps in the narrator’s story—the perspective implied by the text, regardless of whether or not the narrator shares it. And then there’s the FBP, the actual person who is sitting, scribbling at some desk somewhere, constructing from their mind both the narrator and the implied author. Both narrator and implied author can be thought of as body doubles for the FBP, who rarely—if ever—makes an appearance in a fictional work.

But memoirs are different. They’re supposed to tell us about the flesh-and-blood people behind their creation. In memoir, there is nowhere to hide, no stunt double who can swoop in moments before you’re set to walk across the tightrope.

I first encountered Atwood’s 1983 short story “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” in an undergraduate literature seminar. In the story, a woman reflects on her relationship with her mother, and how it has been impacted by shifting expectations of femininity, domesticity, and caregiving in their respective generations. Discussing the story, I recall students putting up their hands and commenting on “Atwood’s relationship with her mother.” “No,” my professor would correct us. “Not Atwood. The narrator.” The body double.

But now that I’ve read Book of Lives, I can say with certainty that “Significant Moments” does draw at least some inspiration from Atwood’s mother (though Atwood never says so directly in her memoir, despite highlighting the real-life inspirations for several other stories and characters). Her mother once expressed a desire to be an archaeologist in her next life. Her mother received permission to cut her hair from her authoritarian father by asking for it when he was in excruciating dental pain. Her mother loved to tell the story of how Atwood and her brother interacted differently with a plate of rabbit-shaped cookies at a tea party. All details from fiction, all details from life.

This, on its own, is not remarkable. Writers draw from their real lives all the time. It might be tempting, after learning that a few details are autobiographical, to assume the whole story is real. But this would be unfounded. The first rule of fiction, after all, is that no one is allowed to make assumptions about the FBP on the basis of a short story or a novel. We can understand the narrator and infer the position of the implied author, but the FBP is safe from our scrutiny. Certainly, some fiction is very close to life, but writers of fiction retain the licence to lie: they can write stories that are mostly true or almost true without having to add a caveat. Perhaps, even more importantly, fiction offers the gift of the body double: the flexibility to tell the reader things that are entirely true, without having to claim them as your own.

Perhaps this is why, in “Significant Moments,” Atwood is far more willing to explore complicated feelings about mother–daughter relationships. When the narrator talks about her mother’s expressed desire to become an archaeologist in “Significant Moments,” she notes her mother’s rage and questions her own narrow view of motherhood. When Atwood tells the same story in her memoir, it’s simply a passing anecdote. In “Significant Moments,” when the narrator explains that her mother loves to tell the anecdote about how she spoke to her bunny cookie instead of eating it, she wonders what her mother means to convey. Is it that she, the narrator, embodies the feminine ideal through her kindness to animals or simply that she is crazy? When Atwood tells the same story in Book of Lives, it is merely an example of her childhood love of bunnies. “Significant Moments” explores unresolved tensions, gradually shifting gender expectations, the complicated love between mother and daughter, and the process of growing away from your parents into someone they can’t quite comprehend. Questions are raised without being answered. It’s rich.

In Book of Lives, the biographical information about Atwood’s mother serves a single purpose: context. There is no metaphor, no messy interaction between details that don’t quite agree; it’s a story I’ve already read, stripped of its literariness and left with its facts alone.

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Book of Lives, then, emerges relatively unwilling to occupy spaces of ambiguity and messiness—spaces in which literary work typically thrives—even as Atwood categorizes the book as “literary memoir.” In the Introduction, Atwood discusses her initial thought process behind the memoir, writing: “I could thank my benefactors, reward my friends, trash my enemies, and pay off scores long-forgotten by everyone but me.” I was expecting Atwood to subvert this approach in the book—or, at the very least, to attempt to subvert it—in order to give the memoir its “literary” quality. She does not.

By telling a straightforward tale about her life in which she is the unquestionable hero, Atwood leaves little space for truly literary tensions but plenty of space for gossipy ones. Her ire toward journalist Jan Wong receives nearly two full pages, included for, seemingly, no other reason than to deliver a final blow in a long-abandoned fight. It is sometimes beautiful to watch her thank her benefactors and reward her friends—some of the book’s most moving passages are about her final days with her partner, Graeme—but I have little interest in the settling of scores.

She also makes her frustration toward contemporary left-wing politics known, at one point suggesting a moral equivalence between the current hard-right American political climate and the online “cancel culture” of the late 2010s. The idea that the Donald Trump administration learned censorship tactics from left-leaning social media users is ludicrous, particularly coming from someone old enough to remember McCarthyism. But it is also a telling example of the simplified, sweeping narratives that she has created around her life and times in the memoir.

These one-note narratives are precisely the opposite of what I love about Atwood’s literature and about literature in general. In his 1963 book The Sense of an Ending, literary critic Frank Kermode writes that, while the function of theoretical writing is to drive toward a single idea, the function of poetic writing is to open up contradictions, to leave questions unanswered, to drive toward a space of “bright confusion.” While I’m wary of any attempt to define the purpose of literature, I do find myself looking for the feeling of “bright confusion” when I read—the feeling of being roused and disoriented, unable to see a single path forward because you’re being presented with something kaleidoscopic and blinding, something wonderfully impossible to decode. I first read The Handmaid’s Tale as a teenager; I remember the bright confusion of the novel vividly.

The first thing I did upon finishing Book of Lives was to return to “Significant Moments,” armed with new details about Atwood’s mother’s life and keen to reread the story. But, as I read, I wasn’t thinking about Atwood’s mother; I was thinking about the story. New ideas leapt from the pages all on their own, themes I’d missed on the first read: the difficulty of relating across generational lines, the social and emotional function of storytelling, the rapid changes of the twentieth century. After all, a story like this one—with layers and complications and no easy resolution—can be read again and again and again.