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Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts will be released on Nov. 4.
It was the late spring of 1956. I was sixteen, and in the second-to-last year of high school. I was crossing the football field on my way home, thinking of nothing in particular. Because it was Friday, when girls were exempted from wearing the school uniform, I was wearing a favourite dress that I’d sewn myself. It was pink. It had a princess line, cap sleeves, and a shirred bodice decorated with an ornamental gold-toned button. (I still have the button.) This was not the kind of outfit you’d expect a poet to wear – black would have been more suitable, but I didn’t yet know that. Anyway, I hadn’t been a poet when I got up that morning, but by the time I reached the end of the football field I was one. A bad one, true, and the poem I’d composed in my head had only four lines, but I was so intoxicated by it that I stepped off the path I was on – by that time it was leading in the direction of biology – and took another, the one that eventually wound its way, via many twists and turns and detours, to the book you are now reading.
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When asked why I write poetry, I used to say, “All cultures we know of have had some form of poetry,” or “Poetry is something human beings do,” both of which are true; or I would ramble on about my theory that poetry originates in a different part of the brain than prose, the part closer to music and mathematics. (There is no way of proving this without some sort of futuristic poem-detecting device implanted in the poet’s brain, so I am free to ramble.) But that wasn’t the question being asked. That question was, “Why you?”
There is no reliable why, as far as I can tell. Some people write poetry, others do not; or else they do when young but give it up in favour of more lucrative pursuits, such as banking or dentistry. Older civilizations used to say that poets were inspired by a god or a muse, or that poetry was a gift and that those who practised it were gifted, and that is possibly true as well; but gods and muses are notoriously fickle and tricky, and divine gifts are ambiguous and often involve risks and sinister obligations on the part of the receiver.
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I wouldn’t think of any poetic or literary or artistic calling as an unmixed blessing. Artists have been suspect in Western cultures for centuries: shoddy hacks, hired shills, toadies to dominant regimes, treacherous troublemakers, degenerates, mad geniuses, slipshod sibyls (a term coined by Germaine Greer), crazy ladies, mentally unstable ... the list goes on. You create art of any kind because you feel you must: it’s not a sensible way of spending your time, which may be time wasted as far as making a living goes. There are no infallible roads to poetic success, no steady promotions, no pension plans. Talent is necessary, but so is luck, and luck cannot be either earned or purchased. Today’s celebrated artist is tomorrow’s hopeless has-been. We all know that story.
In modern terms an inclination toward poetry might be thought of as a gene, though in my case you wouldn’t know it from my parents. My mother used to say she’d only ever written one poem, which was about sprouting wings and flying away. (Typical of her: she liked rapid motion.) My father used to compose doggerel verse, but only when he had the flu and a temperature. My brother had been quite a good poet in high school, but he’d given it up in favour of more creditable pursuits. Most people do. When my first book of poetry appeared, my brother wrote me a letter that read, “Congratulations on publishing your first book of poems. I used to do that kind of thing myself when I was younger.” And so say many.
Back to the football field. I knew hardly anything about modern poetry at that point – we didn’t study much of it in school. My father was fond of quoting Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel and scraps of Tennyson, but that was about it. However, at our high school those in my English class had been immersed in metre and verse forms. We learned the names of the English feet (iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, and so forth) and the line lengths (dimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, and their kin). We’d been taught scansion, in English, French, and Latin. We’d mastered a number of verse forms, including two kinds of sonnets, ballads, villanelles, and heroic couplets, not to mention blank verse. My favourite poets at that time were Byron, Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe, so it’s not surprising that my first adolescent poems were heavily sensational, sometimes macabre, and written in standard verse forms.
Did I immediately proclaim my conversion to poetry? Not right away. It must have taken some time for this piece of self-discovery to sink in. But I did announce it at various moments, to various people. It seems I dropped it out of the blue on my paper-bag-lunch group in the school cafeteria: just blurted it out. Many years later, one of these girls said to me, “I thought you were so brave.”
“Brave?”
“To just come out with it like that. Announcing you were going to be a writer.”
“That wasn’t bravery,” I said. “It was social stupidity. I had no idea what would actually be involved, and I didn’t even know it was an odd thing to say.”
“Well, anyway, I thought it was brave!”
My parents were less than thrilled when they got the news. I can understand that: a life in the arts is chancy in at least a hundred ways, ninety of them financial.
My mother said, “Well, if you’re going to be a writer you’d better learn to spell.” Spelling was not then, and is not now, my strong point.
“Others will do that for me,” I proclaimed. And so they have. Thanks very much, copy editors.
“How will you make a living?” both my parents asked; meaning they certainly weren’t going to support me. I had no doubts about that either: I would get a job, or jobs. Possibly I would write for a newspaper.
To head me off, they invited a second cousin who was a real newspaper journalist over for dinner. (We had second cousins the way other people had freckles.) He told me that if I worked for a paper, as a woman I’d be writing the obituaries and the ladies’ pages and nothing more. This didn’t sound entrancing. Perhaps I would have to go to university after all – I’d been thinking of skipping that part – so at least I would have a degree of some kind.
But I didn’t intend to teach high school, nightmare of nightmares. Possibly I would write pulp romance stories, since that was the kind you could make the most money from. I knew this from the magazine Writer’s Market, an American publication I’d purchased at the drugstore. The kind of writing this magazine dealt with was the commercial kind, and the markets – pulps and glossies – were all in the United States. I wonder how many copies of Writer’s Market they actually sold in Leaside?
True Romance and True Confessions magazines were both recommended by Writer’s Market as paying well. I bought some and studied them. Writing such stories didn’t seem hard. With my earnings from my tales of weeping maidens and callous youths and titles like “Miss Innocence,” “Mail Order Husband,” and “Forced into Unholy Marriage,” I’d support my serious writing, which by this time had expanded to include novels (proposed) and short stories (attempted).
The stories were quite Gothic: one of them involved a narrator who went crazy, the clue to which was that he strangled a gerbil. I did try to write some True Romance stories, but I wasn’t any good at them. You have to have a knack. Also, you have to believe in the stuff, at least a little, and I was too relentlessly satirical to manage that.
“One of these days that smart mouth of yours is going to get you in trouble,” said my father after yet another of my mean and pointed quips. How right he was, except it hasn’t been just one of these days. It’s been a lot of them.
Extracted from Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 2025 O.W. Toad Ltd. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.