Atwood: Read at Your Own Risk
A member of my writing group arrived last night saying she’d suffered a week of serious doubt: was her manuscript ever going to be finished, would it amount to anything?, would it be published, what was the point of it all?
The rest of us laughed sympathetically; we’d been in that writing slump before, and we will be again.
Later, as we were chatting about the books we were reading (because reading is an integral part of writing; it’s the yin to the yang), the doubting writer noted that she’d recently finished two books by Margaret Atwood, who she’d not read before. After a long period of avoiding Oryx and Crake for her book group, because she didn’t like futuristic fantasy, she finally began it, and was swept away and won over. She followed that by picking up Atwood’s Blind Assassin.
Aha, I said, seeing the connection. “Did you have your writing crisis after reading Atwood?”
“Well, yes, I guess I did,” she said.
“I did the exact same thing after I finished Alias Grace,” I told her.
Atwood is like a goddess of writing. We mere mortals pale in comparison. We should instead admire and learn.
While I haven’t read either of the titles that my friend did, I highly recommend The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, and especially Alias Grace. Cat’s Eye is an embarrassingly longtime denizen of my to-read shelf. To read excerpts of several Atwood books, visit The Daily Book Excerpt at The Sheila Variations.