Before we move into the final week, do enjoy these recent MARMers’ posts:

Bill’s of The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970),
Bron’s of “Freeforall” from Old Babes in the Wood (2022), and
MmeBibi’s of Dearly (2020).

I’ve started to reread Lady Oracle, so I enjoyed reading in Book of Lives about the rented Italian apartment, “built right into the rocky hillside” where the bathroom’s “raw stone ceiling” was also a rental of sorts. “While you were having a bath, little scorpions might drop out of it into the tub. You fished them out quickly.”

Enjoyed learning that after Edible Woman was underway. accepted for publication, it was “lost” for five years, on the floor of a well-known Canadian publisher’s office, and he was persnickety when MA expressed her frustration. (Related letters were previously published in a compilation of his exchanges with now-famous Canadian writers, so this is not news, but interesting to have the other perspective.)

Years later another publisher, a woman, asked him what he thought of MA’s then-recent story collection. The memoir names both figures, but doesn’t specify the short story collection, date, or context. But, even so, we have a clear answer.

“I think there’s a wide divergence of quality in the stories although they are all well written; they all have the Atwood trade-mark and could be written by no one else. She is incredibly good on detail and incredibly good in terms of human sensibilities. The only problem that I had with any of them is that her people all seem to be semi-mad—at least in my terms—but that is undoubtedly the way Peggy is herself and that’s probably what makes a great writer.”

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)

But we also have new questions. Why not name the collection? It might have been 1991’s Wilderness Tips, because this fellow died in 2004—and there was quite a gap between Wilderness Tips and Moral Disorder in 2006. Why not outline the context? It might have been complicated politically. The woman worked at this man’s publishing house for a few years, before she founded her own in 1979 and then bought Doubleday Canada in 1986 after Bertelsmann acquired Doubleday in the United. Both houses are now under the Penguin Random House umbrella (she is still alive and published as recently as 2022).

Anyone keen on Canadian publishing can identify both figures with that alone, but most readers likely don’t care. And I don’t either, except I’ve also been reading The Blind Assassin and, just as I have had to rethink how Iris told her story there, and what she left out, I am thinking about what’s left out of this 600-page-long memoir too.

Only now, two-thirds of the way into Book of Lives, I am seriously contemplating its cover. The unexpressed “shhhhh” and the idea of what’s left unsaid. It’s none of my business, whose floor in publishing is the messiest, or who was so annoyed that their short stories weren’t anthlogised that they organised a smear campaign. But am I curious? You bet.

Any plans for the final week of MARM?

MARM Quote-of-the-Week

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)|