Peggy Who

Margaret Atwood resisted autobiographical writing for years. “That would be tedious,” she says at the beginning of Book of Lives. “You’ve heard the bad joke about the old East Coast fisherman counting fish? ‘One fish, two fish, another fish, another fish, another fish . . .’ So, my ‘literary memoir’ would go, ‘I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book . . .’ Dead boring.”

What changed her mind?

Well, time passed, for a start. And her “sinister alter ego whispered” in her ear: “I could thank my benefactors, reward my friends, trash my enemies, and pay off scores long forgotten by everyone but me. I could spill some beans, I could dish some tea.”

Atwood does all of the above in Book of Lives, some of it repeatedly.

She also changed her mind because “people die, and after they do, things may be said about them that might have been held back before.”

Before her...