From these ten books alone, anyone might conclude that “we” have a lot of antiques and tigers, typewriters and troubled sisters, and that we all wear sandals with socks in Canada. (I am not a fan: if it’s cold enough for socks, it’s too cold for sandals.) Moving from
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
“Cat’s Eye was risky business in a way—wouldn’t I be trashed for writing about little girls, how trivial?” MA wonders aloud in a 1990 interview. “Or wouldn’t I be trashed for saying they weren’t all sugar and spice?” But this risk is compelling, too. “I sometimes get interested in
“Surfacing changed a lot. Bodily Harm was a pretty fast write. Handmaid’s Tale was a fast write. Lady Oracle took me a long time because there are so many people and it’s complex. I think Surfacing changed the most from beginning to end.” “Freeforall” leaves me craving an in-a-nutshell
“I was big on grit,” she says in an interview* where she describes finding old pages of writing from her childhood and teenagehood. She wrote a novel about an ant, still unfinished. And there were musings on the Hungarian Revolution and despair. “I had an eye for lawn-litter and
