Margaret Atwood: Conversations

Janet Money is Sports Editor of the Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review.

This collection contains 21 interviews with Canada’s foremost novelist
and poet. Atwood’s reputation for bluntness is borne out in these
interviews. (“The fact is that most writers can’t remember the
answers to some of the questions they get asked during interviews, so
they make up the answers,” she tells Geoff Hancock.) She is not afraid
to disagree, sometimes acidly, with the premise behind a question, and
she steers away from invitations to analyze her own work. However, from
these interviews, much may be learned about her views on poetry and
fiction as forms, on Canadian literature, on women writers, and so on.

Ingersoll has left in some instances of repeated themes, perhaps to
show how strongly Atwood feels about them: autobiography in her work
(she insists there isn’t any), the state of Can Lit in the early 1960s
(dismal), and women’s role in the growth of Can Lit (pivotal).

A valuable research tool and an entertaining read, this book includes
an introduction by Ingersoll about the interview as a literary genre, an
Atwood chronology, notes on interviewers, and an index.