negotiating with the dead a writer on writing

It was, Atwood says, definitely harder for a woman to make the choice to write, even for her in the late 1950s when “smoothly run domesticity was the approved trend” (10) and the image of the “doomed female artist” abounded from the late-18th-century through the mid-twentieth century, with all her overwhelming expectations and anxieties. Incest, venereal disease, rape, varicose veins - it was all in there.” (13) Never mind– she certainly had lots of material to write about. For instance, when she’s discussing having learned about the seedier side of life from books, she mentions Grace Metallious’s heroine of Peyton Place: she “wanted to be a writer, but what she had to go through to become one was nauseating in the extreme. And who doesn’t enjoy a chuckle here and there even when the most serious of subjects are being considered. I found myself sticking little plastic flags throughout the book, endlessly pleased with this as my first Women Unbound read and renewedly excited about reading Margaret Atwood, her passion for books and reading and writing infiltrating every page. It’s the sort of book a person who’s been laboring in the wordmines for, say, forty years - by coincidence, roughly the time I myself have been doing this - the book such a person might think of beginning, the day after he or she wakes up in the middle of the night and wonders what she’s been up to all this time.” (xvii) “Let’s say it’s about the position the writer finds himself in or herself, which is always a little different.

I’d been wanting to re-read Negotiating with the Dead for some time anyway, and did so this time with the particular intent of examining what Atwood had to say not only about being a writer but about being a female writer.Įven her attempt to summarize the book indicates her awareness that female writers will have a different experience of the writing life than male writers: I wouldn’t have used the word ‘feminist’ then, but that’s the spirit of the novels which so struck me, even though I didn’t have the words for it at the time.īut when it came to choosing books for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge, I felt kind of like it would be cheating to include her because I’ve read all of her novels and most of her stories.īut there are gaps in my reading of her non-fiction and poetry and this challenge, with its requirement that at least three of the books be non-fiction is the perfect reason for me to mend one of those gaps. I was a teenager when I first read The Edible Woman and Life Before Man and Cat’s Eye, a young woman heading to university with The Handmaid’s Tale. When I put my mind to thinking of Canadian feminists whose books I wanted to explore in 2010, Margaret Atwood’s name came to mind immediately.

Negotiating with the dead a writer on writing