In Canada, you almost would have to be sequestered like a murder trial juror to escape the multimedia attention currently being focused on Margaret Atwood’s long-anticipated BOOK OF LIVES: A Memoir of Sorts. Even the most impartial of us, whether staunch or casual fans, can’t help but be influenced by the recent spate of commentaries, interviews, social media posts and incredibly prompt reviews (how could anyone read nearly 600 pages that fast?).  

The good news is that all this attention, nearly unanimous in praise, is richly deserved. In her 85 years, Atwood literally has done enough living for half-a-dozen industrious people in addition to authoring 70 books. As she has admitted on several occasions, the challenge of gathering oneself together between two covers was daunting --- an admission memorably expressed in the book’s Introduction in which she poses a series of semi-rhetorical questions about the many facets of her personal and professional personae.

But the labor has been worth it. Despite its seeming weight and gravity, BOOK OF LIVES is a compelling and personable read that combines the meticulous detail of a scientist and historian with the intense focus of an outstanding novelist. Atwood is all of these and so much more.

"BOOK OF LIVES is a long-overdue series of intense café conversations in which we experience a consummate author talking about not a controlled and contained selfhood, but a continued journey to discover how her many selves learned to harmonize with, and transform, the world as she encountered it."

Knowing from previous experience that Atwood always builds strong roots into her work before even putting words on a page, I began with the title itself. It's deceptively prosaic, with the added qualifier (like an ubiquitous Canadian “sorry”), A Memoir of Sorts. Now what is that all about? So I looked up the often-interchangeable terms “autobiography” and “memoir.” What I learned confirmed that Atwood chose every word of the title with powerful intention.

An autobiography is most accurately defined as the remembered story of one’s entire life, from earliest childhood to the end. Well, almost; you still have to be alive if you want to write it yourself (that’s the auto part). A memoir is the story of a certain period, or periods, of one’s life and can involve detailed recollections of and about other people, winding up at a time and place of the author’s own choosing.

All this is to say that BOOK OF LIVES: A Memoir of Sorts is exactly that --- an exquisite, gripping and often hysterically funny intermingling of both genres into something truly unique. Atwood seems to be saying to the universe, “I’m not dead yet, there’s much more to come, but this is how it’s gone so far…stay tuned.”

Atwood follows tradition reasonably in form by starting at her chronological beginnings, with parents, family and ancestors. Not merely sketching them in, however, she draws them all as fully and colorfully as her memories and research allowed.

The results are fascinating, as she traces some of the many deep-woods assignments her entomologist father, Carl Atwood, took on during the 1930s and ’40s, often with wife Margaret Killam (followed soon by infants Harold and Margaret) camping right alongside him in the Canadian wilderness. Growing up as a resourceful and imaginative “bush baby” was clearly an ideal education to form the core of Atwood’s distinctive and eclectic vision, not only of the world we know, but of other worlds beyond it.

With her origins vividly assembled, BOOK OF LIVES then takes off on a wild and wonderful romp through some 40 chapters, each very focused and concise in itself, but linked in ways that zig-zag, detour and often backtrack to pick up important items. There were casual acquaintances who became significant in her future, opportunities taken or declined (were they mistakes or bullets dodged?), periods of poverty and despair that were food for thought decades later, relationships that blossomed and faded, until an unlikely “right one” (her beloved late partner and fellow writer, Graeme Gibson) came along.

Each unfolding chapter confirms the old maxim that life’s real substance is found in the significant accumulation of numerous small events, epiphanies and details. Nowhere does it ring with deeper resonance than in Atwood’s mosaic of recollections. And interspersed among those many overlapping lives as a struggling student, undecided young adult, university graduate (Harvard, no less), professor, social and environmental activist, mother, self-sufficient rural homesteader, publisher, editor, world traveler, mentor, etc., there was the emerging author.

At first, Atwood’s poetry, essays, short fiction and articles barely caused a ripple on the Canadian literary scene, not that there was much of one during the 1950s and ’60s, she notes (very frequently). But as title after title emerged --- THE EDIBLE WOMAN, ALIAS GRACE, CAT’S EYE, THE HANDMAID’S TALE and THE TESTAMENTS, to name just a few among her fiction alone --- an ever-growing stream of followers swelled into an ocean of international fandom.

One could say “the rest is history,” but that would be giving Margaret Atwood and the magnificent cacophony of her interconnected lives short shrift. It seems as if BOOK OF LIVES is a long-overdue series of intense café conversations in which we experience a consummate author talking about not a controlled and contained selfhood, but a continued journey to discover how her many selves learned to harmonize with, and transform, the world as she encountered it.

All my thumbs go up for this one.