I can’t tell whether I enjoyed “Airborne” for its own sake—hanging out with these older women who’ve been friends for so long—or because it resonated so strongly for me with the new memoir by her longtime friend, Canadian writer Susan Swan, which I read this summer, Big Girls Don’t Cry.
MA contributes the introduction to this book she could never have written: “Because I’m short,” she elaborates. (Swan was born in 1945, just six years after MA.)
Their “unlikely friendship” was struck in the later 70s, when Swan was a “hotshot arts reporter” and interviewed Atwood after she’d published a new book. “She remembers me in a black cape, looking like something out of a Victorian melodrama; I remember her as a blond bombshell, reminiscent of a prima donna in a Wagnerian opera.” A tall bombshell. (These quotes are from the introduction, not MA’s memoir, just to be clear.)
Swan reflects on how her younger-self’s opinions align and diverge from her present-day thinking. About privilege and entitlement, access and boundaries. “Rereading the diaries… I’m touched by our longing to have what we thought all men had—power and authority and the freedom to act without restraint along with the ability to escape consequences.” [Her ‘our’ is expressed about women in general, not any one woman.]
But reality was not that simple, she says: “An idealization if ever there were one. How many men really feel capable of this? Isn’t this idealization dependent on a specific concept of maleness: wealth, whiteness, health, and heterosexuality?”
MARM 2025 PLANS
Launch (November 1)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Death by Clamshell” (November 4)
The Blind Assassin Parts I-IV (November 6)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Freeforall” (November 11)
The Blind Assassin Parts V-VI (November 13)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 86th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Metepsychosis” (November 18)
The Blind Assassin Parts VII-IX (November 20)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Airborne: A Symposium” (November 25)
The Blind Assassin Parts X-XV (November 27)
Wrap-Up (November 30)
In “Airborne” Leonie looks back too. She comments on behaviours that characterized that era which seem unthinkable now. “So many offers to give us what we needed, which was a good raping,” she says.
And women faced condemnation and judgement that men eluded. Publishers and critics dismissed and attacked Leonie’s book about the French Revolution (a topic which figures prominently in MA’s Substack) for instance. Her subtitle was removed (too academic) and an exclamation point was added (more dramatic). And she got nasty letters too. “Most of the letter-writers hadn’t actually read the book but were reacting to Leonie’s photo, attached to the newspaper reviews.”
Back to her memoir, Swan also writes about the condemnation directed exclusively at women in the wake of divorce:
…the “assumption that the divorce is the woman’s fault, that if she had only been more sympathetic, more sexy and alluring, more generous-minded, more intelligent and far-seeing, if she had only asked for less and give more, if she had only done what women do, which is manage the emotional labour of relationships, there would be no separation and the children would have been spared the hardship of divorce.”
Swan being Atwood’s contemporary makes it extra interesting to read, in connection with not only MA’s own memoir, but also in relationship to this story about how friendships endure and evolve over time. (The title story in OBitW also fits brilliantly in this mix, but that will be part of next year’s MARM.)
Although I absolutely love the Nell and Tig stories, I’d also have been happy to read an entire collection (and further additions) of stories about the women in “Airborne” (which read a little like the women of The Robber Bride in orthopedic shoes), although I wouldn’t choose this one as a favourite in the context of this particular collection.
Margaret Atwood
Q “Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?”
A “If I got it done, would I do this?”
|Memories from 1972 book tour, recounted in Book of Lives (2025)|
The Robber Bride was my first Atwood and I also thought this story was the women from TRB forty years later. Hopefully I will get some time this afternoon to write up my thoughts on it, although not much more to add to it than what you have covered here, I guess. Maybe something will come to me as Mr Books and I hang the last few paintings that have been stacked in a corner ever since we moved 18mnths ago and build a new shoe rack for the laundry and hang some coat/hat hooks….(it was meant to be a gardening day but we’re having a wild, dirty weather kind of day, so much more sensible to do some of the outstanding inside jobs).
It does feel that way, but I wonder if, had we read The Robber Bride more recently, we would think so, as the friendships in TRB are also quite strained/fractured, and in this story we think more about the friendships having endured, as though those bits have either fallen away or been set aside. In any case, I liked this story and it felt like a nice variation on the Old Babes theme.
You’ll be so happy to get some more little finishing touches like that done, even if the weather is poor: they make such a difference with day-to-day comfort and ease! We officially missed our last chance to cut back some of the season’s weeds last week: the snow is here to stay now.
That much snow for so long is something I cannot even imagine! There is something cosy sounding about it (as long as you can be safe and warm inside) but the thought of being stuck inside would also make me go stir-crazy very quickly!
How do you cope?
We are still outside quite a bit, so and it’s very refreshing (if Anne sees my comment, she will volunteer quite another word, even though she is all about the warming-hacks with gel-mitten-packs and the like hehe). But if you are thinking of my mentioning that I stop my weekly library visits, that’s only because the walk doubles in time and the sidewalks aren’t reliably plowed; if we lived even a little closer, I would keep it up.
I didn’t realize Swan and Atwood were such good friends, but that makes total sense. It would be fun to read their memoirs one after the other and review them both! Hmmmm possibly a good project for me in the future…
It does, doesn’t it! I quite liked Swan’s memoir, and I think you would too, but if I’d read it closer to MA’s I’d’ve felt like Swan’s should have been waaaaaay longer and more detailed.
At this end of my life I wonhat I did with all that “power and authority and the freedom to act without restraint along with the ability to escape consequences”. Though I will say I often acted let’s say unilaterally within my family – hence the divorce (for which I’m sure no one blamed Milly).
I don’t think I’ll ever read the short stories but next year my slow exploration of MA takes me to The Robber Bride (I wonder if Helen Garner has a similar book about old friends).
I wonhat – I wonder what ..
Much more efficient! Will adopt…
It sounds like you’ve reached similar conclusions, but I suppose it’s easier, when one’s in one’s twenties, to think that everyone else has more agency than you do (let alone amidst systems that afford various groups privilege where you lack that privilege personally).
I think there is a tendency to assign a certain sort of blame to any woman on the other side of a fractured longterm relationship/marriage, even with a clear precipitating incident; there’s the implication that that wouldn’t have come about in the first place, if only she had been more ‘x’ and less ‘y’. But I do wonder whether this kind of instinctive blaming is only expressed/implied between women.
Big Girls Don’t Cry sounds really interesting and I hadn’t heard of it at all – thank you for alerting me to it!
I seem to have had a minor collisions of memoirs in my stacks the second half of this year!