“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
Partly because the humidity makes it hard to inhabit my own skin, this summer was a tough one for me. It felt like I started to read a dozen different collections of short stories—but never finished one. I’ve written about Carleigh Baker’s Last Woman (2024) and the Russian stories
Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards (2021) came to me via ILL (thanks to the Forest Hill branch of the Toronto Public Library) because Susan, Mme Bibi, Kaggsy and Simon all loved it; so I was expecting to enjoy it, but I was not expecting to find summer in it.
