Includes index

Farewell to Nova Scotia -- Bush baby -- Gemini rising -- Mischiefland -- Cat's Eye, the prequel -- Hallowe'en baby -- Synthesia -- First snow -- The Tragedy of Moonblossom Smith -- Snake woman -- The bohemian embassy -- Double Persephone -- The Handmaid's Tale, the prequel -- Up in the Air So Blue -- The Circle Game, the prequel -- The Edible Woman -- Alias Grace, the prequel -- The Animals in That Country -- Graeme, the prequel: part one -- Surfacing -- Graeme, the prequel: part two -- The edibles -- Graeme, the prequel: part three -- Survival -- Monopoly -- Lady Oracle -- Days of the Rebels -- Life Before Man -- Bodily Harm -- The Handmaid's Tale -- Cat's Eye -- The Robber Bride -- Alias Grace -- The Blind Assassin -- The MaddAddam trilogy -- The Testaments -- Dearly -- Old Babes in the Wood -- Paper Boat -- Becoming an entomologist / (by Carl E. Atwood)

"Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same." Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents--entomologist father, dietitian mother--Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: "It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn."), but also thrilling and beautiful. From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat's Eye to the Orwellian 1980s Berlin where she wrote The Handmaid's Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel. As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art--and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations

Item is large print