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November 4, 2025 
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| Brendan George Ko for The New York Times |
Dear readers,
You’d think that after a decades-long career writing fiction, poetry, criticism, essays and more, Margaret Atwood would have worked in every genre imaginable. It turns out there is one she has resisted until now: personal memoir.
In “Book of Lives,” which she says her publisher had to coax out of her, Atwood revisits the experiences that have shaped her work. “The story of your life is a story, and we’re always rewriting it, whether you’re a writer or not,” as she told my colleague Alexandra Alter in a recent interview.
Though the “Handmaid’s Tale” author is hostile to the idea that she is a prophet — “Calm down, folks,” is how she responded when Alter asked why her writing seems awfully oracular — she does have a longstanding interest in astrology and the occult. (What I wouldn’t give for Margaret Atwood to read my palm.)
She also holds a grudge. Reviewing the memoir this week, our critic Dwight Garner wrote that “this book, more than most literary memoirs, is a vessel of wrath — and wrath is interesting.”
If you are looking for distraction for the news du jour, “Book of Lives” would make for an absorbing companion.
See you on Friday.
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