Beyond ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: Margaret Atwood on Memoir, Grudges, & Getting Older

Margaret Atwood is one of the most famous and prolific authors of the modern era. Though best known for her 1985 hit “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her dozens of works span literary genres — poetry, novels, children's books, essays, short stories — and often defy neat categorization. Now, at 86, Atwood has written her first memoir. At roughly 600 pages, it’s an intimate look at the ways her personal life inspired and shaped her writing. Kara and Atwood talk about her lifelong passion for the outdoors, how she decided to become a poet when she was just a teenager, and her reputation for having an eerie prescience about major world events. They also talk about Atwood’s fears about the Trump administration’s use of power, and why she still considers herself to be a hopeful person despite her predilection for dark stories. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've actually been to the Trotsky house in Mexico.

• 0:03Kara Swisher?

  Oh.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Where he got ice picked.

• 0:04Kara Swisher?

  Ice picked.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  And you can also see the tiny little kitchen where poor Mrs. Trotsky had to...

• 0:10Kara Swisher?

  The deal was, you always forget about Mrs. Trotsky.

• 0:24Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood. She's best known for her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, which turned her into a literary star in the 1980s. The book saw another major boost in popularity when Hulu turned it into a hit series in 2017, just a few months after President Trump first took office. It burnished Atwood's reputation as someone who has an eerie prescience, as if she could see the rise of authoritarianism in the religious right in the US long before anyone else could. But Atwood has actually written dozens of other important novels, poems, essays, short stories, and children's books. She's also a two-time Booker Prize

• 1:08Kara Swisher?

  winner, and now, at 86 years old, she's written her first memoir. It's called Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. At close to 600 pages, it's an intimate look at the ways her personal life inspired and shaped her writing. I think it's a must-read, and she's such a legend in so many ways. And my favorite book is not Handmaid's Tale. It's Cat's Eye, about her young life and relationship with another girl who was a bully, but she's a much more complicated tale. This woman, she contains multitudes, let's just say, well beyond Handmaid's Tale, and I was hoping to bring that out in this interview. Before we get to my conversation with Atwood, I'm interviewing Dara Koster Shahi, the CEO of Uber, and Chris Urmson, the CEO of Aurora, live on stage at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center

• 1:51Kara Swisher?

  in Washington, DC on Monday, December 15. These are going to be two really sharp conversations about applied AI and autonomous vehicles. To register for free tickets, Google Hopkins and Kara Swisher. All right, let's get into my interview with Margaret Atwood, whom I'm an enormous fan of, and more so after this interview. Our expert question comes from Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, so stick around.

• 2:26Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 3:10Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them ever talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try it today for free at Odoo.com/kara. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Kara.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And, no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 4:25Kara Swisher?

  Margaret, thanks for coming on "On." I really appreciate it.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  And it's lovely to be here.

• 4:29Kara Swisher?

  So, I have a lot to talk to you about, and as I said initially when we were first talking is, I know everyone asked you about Handmaid's Tale, I'm sure we'll get to it, but I was really delighted that the book covered lots of other things. And the cover was really striking, it's one of the most striking book covers, and I'm sure you had a lot to do with it. You're wearing a bright pink coat with this dramatic accordion-like collar. You also have a pair of matching pink gloves, I have to say, my six-year-old daughter was thrilled with it, by the way. You're looking straight at the camera, and you have your finger on your lips, and it looks like you've either just told us a secret, or you're about to. I was fascinated by your cover, I don't know why, I don't usually pay attention to them, but I'd love you to talk about it, because it communicates a lot, I think.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Okay, so how did it come about? So, you know how these things go, there's a photographer, he brings a stylist, they have a lot of clothes that they want you to put on, and you say, "I'd never wear that, I'd never wear that, I'd never wear that, I'd never wear that." So, you put on the black clothing and do the serious author shot.

• 5:33Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  And, so you do that, and then they say, "Well, just for fun, why don't you try on this big puffy thing that will make you look like a dandelion?" And you say, "Oh, I would never wear that," and they say, "Just for fun, put it on." So you put that on, and you do look like a dandelion, and then they say, "Well, just try on this nice pink one with the collar that looks like a folio." "Oh, I would never wear that," "Well, just for fun, put it on." So you do, because you're weak-spined, like me. And then, and here's the matching gloves, you put those on. And by this time, of course, you're a little groggy, and you start fooling around, and you go, "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil."

• 6:18Speaker 00

  So that is "Speak No Evil" that's on the front of the book.

• 6:21Kara Swisher?

  So you're weak-spined, so it's a weak-spined effort?

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:25Kara Swisher?

  You're not weak-spined?

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Well...

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Yes, we can talk about that, too. Uh, yes. So that's how it came about. And the English, um, being always quite mischievous, put out a set of, um, postcards with all three. And they, they also put out, and in the advanced reading copies, they put some of them with "hear no evil," some of them with "see no evil," and some of them with "speak no evil."

• 6:54Kara Swisher?

  Well, I think it communicates a lot, even if you didn't, even if you're weak-spinned and didn't attend to, and you were forced into that.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is striking, and everybody's very happy with it. And, um, I don't have the outfit because where would I wear it?

• 7:10Kara Swisher?

  That's true. Um, I, there's a lot of other choices you could have made. And I also like the idea of book of lives and a memoir of sorts, um, which is, I think, pretty much describes the book, um, which is that you contain multitudes. So let's talk about the contents of the book now, instead of just the cover, because a book isn't just a cover, in this case, slightly. Um, you've written dozens of books, and this is your first memoir of sorts, as you said. Um, you said one of the reasons you waited, uh, until you were in your eighties to write is because, quote, "people died." Um, but also that includes people you write about very lovingly, like your parents, and also your longtime partner and fellow author, Graham Gibson. Why do you feel like you needed that distance, even for people you love, to tell the story of your life?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Well, I think you do. Um, because it's the story of your life, not the story of their life, although their life, uh, has a lot to do with your life. In other words, if you didn't have parents, you wouldn't exist. Um, so I did put in quite a lot of, about them. They were quite exceptional. I have written about them before in various works of fiction. Um, but this allowed me to put my, the thing that my father wrote when he was fairly old about how he became an entomologist, which is a real back-of-the-backwoods, um, to major university, uh, twentieth-century story.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  And part of which, of course, you're always part of your time and place. At that moment and in time, they were looking for people like him. So today, it wouldn't be so easy.

• 8:43Kara Swisher?

  No, not at all, not at all. But when you think about telling the story of your life, do you have to be older to tell it? Do you feel?

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Well, it's very hard to tell the story of your life. Your pretty much entire life, because quite frankly, we know the plot by now, Cara. And we kind of know how it's going to end. But when you're 20, you don't know that.

• 9:04Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  So it's all before you, even when you're 30 and think you've just become an old person. You really don't know, as they say in while reading novels, how it's going to turn out. You don't know that. So memoirs written by younger people are usually centered around an episode, an incident, a motif. And they're circumscribed this many years. So, or this many months, quite sometimes.

• 9:36Kara Swisher?

  Or something, a drug addiction or...

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Something like that, yeah.

• 9:40Kara Swisher?

  What would you say the motif of your book is then, if you had to?

• 9:44Speaker 00

  The motif?

• 9:45Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  You never know.

• 9:50Kara Swisher?

  And you do not, actually. You still don't.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  You do not. You never know.

• 9:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you never know. That's interesting. So you had to revisit a lot of your old work to write that book, including some early stories that were never published. And you say the process conjured up strange dreams that were, you were conversing with the benevolent dead. Explain, I love that phrase, the benevolent dead, because there's other kinds, by the way. Explain what you mean by that, and also, what was it like to revisit those stories and photos you put aside for decades?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so ghosts, voices from the past. So we're back with Scrooge and the ghost of Christmas past. When Scrooge says, "Long past?", and the ghost says, "No, your past." So the ghosts of your past, you as an individual, and everybody has them, unless they've lost their memory. And they don't. The benevolent ghosts are people that you liked and meant you well. And malevolent ones are people you didn't like, who didn't mean you well.

• 11:00Kara Swisher?

  And did you?

• 11:01Speaker 00

  What else can I say about that?

• 11:02Kara Swisher?

  When you think about that, because I want to get into your book Cat's Eye. It's my favorite book of yours, actually.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, you knew Cordelia.

• 11:10Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I did, indeed. We all knew it at Cordelia. But when you have to revisit those stories, tell me what that was like.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Okay, things that weren't published, of which there are a lot, because I wrote copiously from the age of 16 onward, and who knows why I saved this stuff, but I did. So your reaction to those is, "Thank you, Providence, for not publishing this work."

• 11:37Kara Swisher?

  Did you ever look at something and think, "That's good"?

• 11:39Speaker 00

  I thought, this was written by quite a weird person.

• 11:42Kara Swisher?

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  That's what I thought.

• 11:44Kara Swisher?

  Really?

• 11:45Speaker 00

  But I also thought, yes, it has promise, but I wouldn't want to live or die by this.

• 11:52Kara Swisher?

  Did it make you change how you thought of your younger self? I mean, everyone has a version of what they thought they thought of themselves, and then there's the reality.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, I think your version of yourself changes from decade to decade and even from year to year, because we are all involved in narrative revisions.

• 12:11Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  And changes a point of view. So something that seemed like a terrible tragedy to you when you were 18 seems like a funny anecdote when you're 40, and then when you're 70, you may have forgotten all about it. So we all do that. We all prune, edit, and look at things from a different perspective. And if we're writing murder mysteries, or if there are great unsolved mysteries in our lives, we can even have aha moments. You open the drawer, and here's the letter from somebody telling you things that you really didn't know at all.

• 12:49Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. How did your personal narrative get revised, would you say, as you looked at that?

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Well, I think you get older. If you're lucky, you get older. If you're not lucky, you die.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  So as you get older, your perspective on your own actions, other people's actions, that changes. And I think you either become more forgiving and tolerant and understanding of things, or you become more set in your ways and curmudgeonly. And since I knew some set in their ways and curmudgeonly people when I was younger, I try not to be that person, although I can feel sometimes traces of it creeping in. So I see what they did and how they behaved with what I like to think is more perspective.

• 13:45Kara Swisher?

  In doing it. So a lot of the early chapters are about your childhood and summers you spent in Canadian forests around Lake Superior. Your father, as you said, was an entomologist. He studied insects that caused forest infestations. And you describe your mother as a tomboy, kind of, I guess it's an old word.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Without a doubt. Well, tomboy doesn't necessarily mean gay.

• 14:04Kara Swisher?

  No.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  It just means not interested in frilly frogs.

• 14:07Kara Swisher?

  Right. Well, that would be me. But I'm also gay, but that's a different story. But it's an old word. I wonder if there's a new word for that. But how do you think of those?

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Well, that's how she described herself.

• 14:17Kara Swisher?

  Well, that was the word of the day.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  So I'm happy to stick with her vocabulary.

• 14:21Kara Swisher?

  That's fine by me. So how do you think those summers shaped your sense of self and what it meant as you got older?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so we're not talking summers. We're talking two thirds of the year. So from the time the ice would go out in northern Quebec to the time when it would set in again. So insects do nothing in the winter. And anyway, we would have frozen to death because our house that my father built didn't have any insulation. It wasn't made as a winter residence. So how did all of that shape me? And we're talking about quite a few years. First of all, if there's a problem, figure it out.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  So don't just sit down and go boo hoo.

• 15:11Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Um, if something breaks, fix it. And if you don't have the part, improvise. So never throw out a bendy piece of wire.

• 15:22Kara Swisher?

  Throw bendy pieces of wire is what you brought away.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:26Kara Swisher?

  Always have a bendy.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Are you listening to me? Are you paying attention? Collect those bendy pieces of wire now because you may need them.

• 15:33Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. Sort of MacGyver attitude. When you, from an early age, you're also drawn, even in those settings, obviously it's beautiful place, there's a lot of physicality to the world, being outdoors. But you were also drawn to writing and the more reflective arts. And you were six when you wrote your first book of poems called Rhyming Cats. At 16, you decided you wanted to be a poet, although you say in the book, you're not sure why. Talk about sort of the development of you as a writer in this setting then that was so impactful to you.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Okay. In this setting, there was nothing else to do when it was raining. So you could, you could read, you could draw, you could write. That was it. So no movies, no Saturday morning programs for children, no, not much radio. Sometimes we seem to have gotten the Soviet Union, I don't know why. And no television. It didn't really come in anyway until the 50s. And what else was there? None of, no theater, no school. So when it rained, you either did your school lessons, if you were old enough to have any,

• 16:50Speaker 00

  or you read and wrote. And I read from an early age, partly because two stories my brother taught me. Second story, nobody would read the funny papers to me. Do you know what the funny papers were?

• 17:04Kara Swisher?

  Oh, sure, I do. I'm old. I'm old, Margaret. I know what the funny papers are. I read Nancy, growing up, so.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, no, she was good.

• 17:13Kara Swisher?

  She was never funny, actually.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Nancy was not funny?

• 17:16Kara Swisher?

  Never. That, go back and look at it. I would sit and wait and see if it would be funny. It was never funny.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 17:22Kara Swisher?

  Hmm, well, ironic, perhaps.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  She had little, she had adventures.

• 17:26Kara Swisher?

  She did, she did. So, so you had nothing to do. So, rain, essentially, is what you're saying.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  When, when it rained, yeah, rain is the cause. No, I would say, uh, nature abhors a vacuum. So, vacuum is the cause. There wasn't anything else to do. So, we're in a Bronte situation in which we had an imaginary universe, or two, and we made up stories about that. And sometimes we wrote them down, or made pictures about them. Uh, and I think a lot of kids do that.

• 18:00Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, they used to, when, uh, my, my, uh, one of my kids is like, what did you used to do when you stood in line? I'm like, nothing. We just stood in line. So, what, what drew you to poetry specifically, as a kid, as opposed to writing novels, or biology, like other, like, science, or something? You write about your decision to become a poet when you were crossing your high school football field on the way home one day. Do you remember the four-line poem you said, composed in your head?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  I do, but I'm, I'm not gonna tell it to you, because it's not very good.

• 18:31Kara Swisher?

  Okay, all right.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  What else can I tell you about it?

• 18:33Kara Swisher?

  What, what made you decide to be a poet there with not a very good poem, or why poetry first?

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. You, you, you don't decide to be a poet. Uh, poetry says, "Come with me," and you either say yes or no. But if poetry doesn't say, "Come, come with me," uh, there's no point.

• 18:53Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  If you look at the juvenilia of people who became, quotes, famous poets, um...

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Usually what has survived shows promise, but it's not the same as their later work. Because they go through an apprentice period in which they're essentially imitating other poets and things that they feel an affinity with. And I did describe my period of writing a lot of garbage blowing around on the streets of T.S. Eliot-esque types of poems.

• 19:33Kara Swisher?

  That was your inspiration, T.S. Eliot?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Oh, I had a lot of them, but he was the one I imitated in university because, hey, he was the guy.

• 19:44Kara Swisher?

  He was the guy? Mine was Louise Gluck. I love Louise Gluck.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, but she hadn't appeared yet.

• 19:50Kara Swisher?

  No, I know that. So can you tell us what that poem was about? Or are the topics that interested you when you started?

• 19:58Speaker 00

  When I started? Well, I did describe my rather bad poem about, in fact, I put it in, about the Hungarian Revolution.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  You weren't born in 1956, no.

• 20:12Kara Swisher?

  I almost was born, but...

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Well, it was very cliffhanging at the time. Everybody got very excited about it and then they got very disappointed as it was crushed. And a lot of people died, a lot were arrested, and a lot of them came to Canada.

• 20:30Kara Swisher?

  Oh, I didn't realize.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  So I knew a number of these and still know people who had gotten out at that time.

• 20:36Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, for me, it was Salvador. I read a lot of Carolyn Forché and then Gluck.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, Carolyn Forché is an old pal and she told me about El Salvador as we were driving away from the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Away from Portland.

• 20:55Kara Swisher?

  Wow.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  So, the story of that was, I was supposed to go out and read poetry there with Carolyn Forché, this mountain blew up. So, I phoned them and said, "It's still okay to come to Portland." "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the window always blows in the other direction." So, we're doing the reading, and we look out the window, and it's snowing.

• 21:14Kara Swisher?

  Ash.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  But it isn't snow, it's volcanic ash. So, by the time we're finished the reading, you can't get out of Portland. So, no planes, everybody's taking the last train, buses aren't running, nothing. So, we feel quite trapped, and we arm twist and browbeat somebody into driving us to Eugene, Oregon, which is out of the fall zone. And we hire a car. And we both have a plane that we're supposed to be catching from San Francisco. So, we drive down the coast of California in the dark, and to keep stopping at Smitty's Pancake

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Houses. And to keep ourselves awake, this was back in the days when I could drive no longer with me, we told each other stories of our lives.

• 22:09Kara Swisher?

  Oh, my God.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  And one of the stories of the lives that she told me was El Salvador and what was going on there. And I said, "Well, can you write about this?" "No, no, no, nobody will publish it, they're all too scared." I said, "Well, why don't you publish it in Canada?"

• 22:21Kara Swisher?

  Oh, my God.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  "Why don't you break the story in Canada?" And which she did.

• 22:26Kara Swisher?

  I can't, for people that don't know, Carolyn Forché wrote a beautiful book of poetry about El Salvador called The Country Between Us. And I can't believe you're the reason, well, thank you, let me just say.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  I'm not the reason.

• 22:37Kara Swisher?

  Well.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  I'm just, I'm not the reason, I'm just the fix-it person.

• 22:41Kara Swisher?

  Well, it works for me, it's one of my most important books.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  I'm like the plumber.

• 22:44Kara Swisher?

  I've ever read, actually. So, especially The Colonel, of course, everyone knows The Colonel, but I liked the entire book, actually.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Carolyn, I hope you're listening, Carolyn.

• 23:04Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription-based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international affairs,

• 23:47Kara Swisher?

  climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. Plus, The Guardian wants to emphasize they're not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube starting May 13.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. We're leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all: legacy, stability, and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only, availability of products can vary and may be provided by different Ripple entities.

• 24:38Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Hers. Losing weight on your own can often feel like a fight you never win. Luckily, weight loss by Hers offers access to the FDA-approved Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen. Wegovy is the first-ever GLP-1 weight loss medication available in a pill, but also comes as a pen, so you've got options. With Wegovy, you can lose up to 20% of your body weight. People lost an average of 14% body weight at 64 weeks in a clinical trial of Wegovy alongside diet and exercise. To get started with Wegovy, just go to forhers.com and complete an online consultation with a licensed provider who will determine if your prescription is appropriate. And Hers doesn't stop there. Nutrition and lifestyle guidance are part of the plan,

• 25:21Kara Swisher?

  along with access to 24/7 messaging with your care team. So, support is always in reach. Ready to reach your goals? Visit forhers.com/kara to access personalized, affordable care for weight loss, hair, menopause, and more. That's forhers.com/kara. Individual results may vary, and stopping treatment may result in weight regain.

• 25:44Kara Swisher?

  So, let's pivot at your career and some of these books. The duality is a theme that runs through a lot of your work, including this memoir. And you say, "Every writer is at least two beings, the one who lives and the one who writes." But you say, "In your case, there are more than two, as you said on the cover of Book of Lives." That comes through with these two parts of your identity. There's the Peggy nature side, the nickname you earned as a teenage camp counselor. Then there's the author Margaret Atwood's side, who's maybe a little more serious, maybe not. So, how is Margaret the person distinctly different from Margaret the writer?

• 26:20Speaker 00

  Margaret the person?

• 26:21Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Well, is there a Margaret the person?

• 26:24Kara Swisher?

  I don't know.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  No, we don't know. Maybe there's just Peggy the person and Margaret the writer, which would be very neat. So, people say, "Well, what's the connection?" And I usually cite Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So, I'm the Dr. Jekyll person, and Margaret is the Mr. Hyde.

• 26:50Kara Swisher?

  Well, explain that, please. I can't leave that there on the ground.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  You could.

• 26:54Kara Swisher?

  I could, but I'm not going to. I should have just picked it up and I'm asking you what it is.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  I know you are. Okay, so, Mr. Hyde, and we're not going to push this too far because Mr. Hyde is unequivocally evil. But let us say that the writer's side of people is usually somewhat more intense. And it's usually somewhat darker in its imaginations, in its imaginings, especially if you're writing in the 20th and 21st centuries, when carefree social comedy is harder to write.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Than it was in, say, um, eighteen twenty.

• 27:44Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, because those are the fun days.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Well, no, it's that social classes were, um, were isolated and you could write about them as if nothing else existed.

• 27:54Kara Swisher?

  Right, as things weren't linked to each other.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:56Kara Swisher?

  So you think the writer is darker than the part I would, it's, what's, that's very interesting. I've seen you speak at a number of things. I never had the guts to come up and introduce myself, but your humor really comes through in your memoir in a way that I have seen you in public, uh, at speeches and various book readings. And you're very funny, which is something I was caught off guard by. I think many people are. I had someone sitting next to me and she, they were like, she's hysterical. Like, how dare she be? She wrote The Handmaid's Tale. How can she be not dire?

• 28:29Speaker 00

  The Handmaid's Tale has a number of jokes.

• 28:31Kara Swisher?

  I, I agree. I agree. But, but when you think about yourself and your presentation, because you do, you do carry around the, the seriousness part of it, right? And the darkness part as a public figure.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, what can I say about that? Somebody said to me, why do you always write these gloomy dystopias and you're so pessimistic? I said, I'm, I'm not really, because I didn't kill them all off at the end.

• 28:57Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  You know, some people have.

• 29:00Kara Swisher?

  So that's the hopeful part. They're not all dead, correct?

• 29:03Speaker 00

  They're not all dead, yeah. They're not all dead. And, and as for The Handmaid's Tale, um, we know by the historical note at the end that this regime did not last.

• 29:13Kara Swisher?

  Right, exactly. Which I think, I actually tend to argue when people are talking about your books, that they're actually quite hopeful because they're, they're about the fight, the existence of a fight that continues despite.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, there is always a resistance and that can go either way. Um, yeah, so for my characters, I, I write the year of their birth and then all the years across the top, and I write the months down the side. And that allows me to pinpoint what is going on in their lives when they are a certain age. So we, we all are a part of our own time and place. And I cannot escape the fact that I was born in nineteen thirty-nine, two months after World War Two began. So the whole Hitler trajectory, the whole World War II trajectory was part of my

• 30:07Speaker 00

  growing up, and so was the Stalin trajectory, which was somewhat different. But it too eventually fell apart. The question that always occurs when these things fall apart is what happens then? What replaces it?

• 30:27Kara Swisher?

  What becomes it? Right. It's an interesting idea because one of the things, I have a relative, even though I sort of rail on tech and billionaires and things like that, everyone's like, you're rather hopeful. And I said, well, to me, all dictators end up dead in a hole. That's been my historical, just, just observation.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  But so does everybody.

• 30:49Kara Swisher?

  Right. But there's a dead in a hole, and then there's.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a dead in a hole.

• 30:53Kara Swisher?

  I mean, killed by their people, or strung upside down, or the Ched Ched skews.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  A lot of them, not Stalin, he died with his boot on.

• 31:00Kara Swisher?

  He did. I, I lived in Germany right after the wall fell. I covered stuff there, and it was really interesting. It was a real.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  What part of, were you in Berlin?

• 31:09Kara Swisher?

  I lived in Berlin, and the wall had just fallen, and I lived in Kreuzberg, which was right next to the wall at the time.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Cheap at the time.

• 31:17Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, and it was, it was still there, pieces of it. I mean, it had been broken down. But what was really interesting is when I went into East Germany, and they had never been taught about the Holocaust that much, or that it was their fault, or anything else. And so they had a whole different history, and it was.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Completely.

• 31:34Kara Swisher?

  It was riveting, and, and of course, the West Germans had been very much taught about the Holocaust and their, and their culpability. And so the difference between them, and I was covering race riots in, about immigrants, they were anti-immigrant, in Rostock. And I'll never forget, there was a, it was the birthday of Rudolf Hess, so they, these neo-Nazis went and had a march, and you couldn't do it in West Germany. So they wandered all over East Germany. I followed them around a small. A small car and and I kept thinking, God, Rudolf Hess is the worst Nazi to celebrate, but all right. And all these people were in East Germany were celebrating this, which was really interesting, except for one woman who stood in front of the march and said schade, which is shame,

• 32:19Kara Swisher?

  of course.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:21Kara Swisher?

  And I wrote about her, but it was it was something else. And you wrote part of The Handmaid's Tale while you were in West Germany and visited East Germany.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, West Berlin.

• 32:30Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, but you also went there before the wall fell, correct?

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:34Kara Swisher?

  Tell me a little bit about that.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  Well, it was very tight. In fact, it was the tightest probably of those East Bloc countries. And people didn't really want to interact with you as adults, and they were quite happy to say, oh, decline a angle about your child. That was safe.

• 32:56Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  But obviously, everybody was worried about who else was watching them, and rightly so, because we now know that at least one in every 50 East Germans was spying for the regime.

• 33:08Kara Swisher?

  Through those files that came out, right?

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, you probably know this book called Stasi Land. So, yeah, so that was East Germany with terrible ice cream and awful chocolate and not much you could spend your converted money on, which you then couldn't convert back. So there was always a cash grab at the border. You had to change Western money into their Deutschmarks, and you could not reconvert it.

• 33:34Kara Swisher?

  Right, so you had to keep their money. I assume it was formative, seeing that presumably.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Well, it was very interesting. And then we went to Czechoslovakia, also very interesting and pretty tight, but not as tight. And then we went to Poland, which was very loose, even in 1984. So I thought to myself at that time, it's going to crumble here first, which it did.

• 33:59Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, and then Czechoslovakia and then East Germany.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  But Poland had a big opposition, namely the Catholic Church.

• 34:07Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  And it was it was huge. And it was so big that that they couldn't arrest and shoot everybody, although they arrested and shot some people.

• 34:14Kara Swisher?

  Right, they did. When you think, so like we're talking about your lived experiences are a big influence in your writing, though in your memoir, you reveal that you were bullied by a group of girls when you were nine, and your experience inspired Cat's Eye, which again is my favorite of your books. And you're right, everybody has a Cordelia, I feel.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Not everybody. Some people were Cordelia.

• 34:35Kara Swisher?

  Oh, right, fair.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  There's an imbalance there. If everybody has one.

• 34:40Kara Swisher?

  Well, everyone who writes about a Cordelia had one, and Cordelia doesn't write.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, sometimes Cordelia does write, but not, she writes different things.

• 34:49Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Could you read a little bit from the part of the book for us?

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'm talking about Cat's Eye. But despite its universality, it was true that parts of the novel were autobiographical. I avoided saying so then because the chief perp was still alive. She'd become a teenage friend and we'd kept in touch. But now, she and her immediate family are all dead. While writing the novel, I came to realize that she was a damaged person, that she was a lot unhappier than I'd ever been, and that she would be hurt if I identified her. Did she even remember what she had done to me? In some way, probably, though for her, it had been a sort of game. For me, on the

• 35:35Speaker 00

  other hand, it had been serious. Anyone who thinks that females are perfect, that girls are nicer, that every sadistic thing girls and women do is the fault of the patriarchy, has either forgotten a lot or never been a nine-year-old girl at school. The desire for power is a human constant, though the ways of demonstrating this desire change according to circumstances.

• 36:05Kara Swisher?

  Amazing. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely. So your Cordelia was a girl named Sandra. How did that experience of being bullied play into your views? Because I think that's a very nuanced view of feminism, right? And your willingness to criticize some aspects of the movement. I find it to be factual, again, factual, like I was.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if you look on Wikipedia, at least last time I looked, there were, there were 75 different kinds of feminism. So when somebody says, are you a feminist? I always say, what kind did you have in mind? Because there are many different kinds. And I saw it during the 70s. And there are factions, sub factions, differences of opinion, arguments.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  All of this stuff goes on while feminism is actually achieving some successes in the 70s.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  The right to have your own credit card, even if you're married. And, and a lot of other things actually got achieved. But there was always factionalism. And, and you do find that whenever something new hits the ground. I'm, I'm quite interested in the moment, at the moment, in the Cromwellian Revolution in England in the 17th century.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  So I'm reading Baudet, and I did not realize it was so factional. It doesn't mean that the movement has no value. It doesn't mean that the people in it are not serious people or anything like that. It just seems to be something that happens at these moments in human history when things are in serious flux.

• 37:53Kara Swisher?

  Sue, you, you have a reputation for writing series that do speak to women and the issues they face. But on a personal level, many feminists idolize the fact that you never married your longtime partner, Graham Gibson. You didn't take his name. You had one daughter. But that's not what you actually wanted, reading this. You wanted to get married and have more kids. It was something he apologized to you for toward the end of his life, as you write. But talk about the disconnect between your personal life and how people perceived you.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Well, you kind of get stuck with these things, which you can't contradict without sounding like a complete idiot or just unbelievable. So the reason Graham didn't want to get married, which is quite funny from this perspective, from my age now, it's quite funny. He said he already had known three Mrs. Gibsons and he didn't want to create another one. So his mother, his stepmother and his ex-wife were all Mrs. Gibson. Don't you think that sounds quite strange?

• 38:54Kara Swisher?

  It does. But wait, so you just don't correct people, like, in that regard?

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Well, I can correct them now because all those people are dead.

• 39:03Kara Swisher?

  Right, that's a fair point.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  But I couldn't correct them at the time without causing real trouble with the stepmother and the ex-wife who were still alive and still, you know, joined at the hip in some way with Graham's life because he had two sons. So you can see the dilemma. Well, actually, it's not my decision not to get married. It's Graham's because he dislikes the other Mrs. Gibsons. You know, that would not have added to tranquility and general peace of mind.

• 39:35Kara Swisher?

  That's true. And what's good about this book, I have to say, there's definitely... I like score settling myself personally, but you do score settle with Gibson's ex-wife as there isn't any good memoir. One of your friends is quoted in one of the first pages as saying, "Don't piss her off or you'll live forever," which I love. But you also draw, you know... But you do draw on history extensively to shape novels that are set in the future, like The Handmaid's Tale.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Well, what else do you have to draw on?

• 40:01Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Because you can't actually time travel to the future, much as we would like to believe you can. You cannot do it.

• 40:08Kara Swisher?

  Right. But how do you marry the personal with a historical to write, what you call speculative fiction, which is what you call it? Other people think you're some kind of clairvoyant or, "Look, she was right," etc.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  I know, well...

• 40:20Kara Swisher?

  You reject that, correct?

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I reject the prophetess because, in fact, there isn't any one the future. There are lots of possibilities for the future. And then there are completely unexpected things that alter it a lot. So a volcano blows up. So the bubonic plague hits Europe.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  You know, all of those things you could not necessarily have predicted. In fact, you couldn't have predicted them at all.

• 40:50Kara Swisher?

  Right, but you are prescient. I would say prescient profit probably is too much. I mean, the rise of authoritarianism, the financial collapse, the pandemic. But you say you are just pointing out things that could happen and that we should be on the lookout for.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 41:05Kara Swisher?

  But you certainly are putting things together. You're almost like one of those CIA agents who figures out scenarios, right? That's what you're doing, is scenario building.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah, and I read a lot of murder mysteries as a child. I also read a lot of sci-fi as a child.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  So, yeah, how will it work out? What is the what-if scenario? What if? So, what if America were to become a totalitarian dictatorship? What kind of totalitarian dictatorship would it be? And for that, of course, you always look at a country's past history, see what it has been. So, under the Tsar, Russia was an absolute estate with an extensive secret service and a Gulag archipelago. Communist revolution happens, everything's going to be wonderful. These things always come in as utopias, you know that.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  And then bingo, it's a totalitarian regime with an even bigger secret service and an even larger Gulag archipelago.

• 42:16Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you are talking about DNA or things going back to their shape.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, just patterns that people are used to and that they tend to fall back into. So, the Aztecs, when they wanted to build a new pyramid, didn't knock down the old one. They built a new one on top of it, and that's what countries are always doing. So, the old regime in China was an extensive bureaucracy.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  And so was Mao's, once things got settled.

• 42:47Kara Swisher?

  But settled down, so we don't sort of move out of our shape, is what you're saying.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Well, we can move out of it temporarily, but we have a habit of falling back on a shape that we already know.

• 43:02Kara Swisher?

  Right, right, right.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  So communist regime goes down in Russia, goodbye authoritarianism, it's all going to be wonderful, in comes capitalism, right, right, you can get Kentucky Fried Chicken in Moscow, I'm not sure if that's true, but you can certainly get burgers, and then along comes you-know-who, Mr. Putin, and basically he wants to restore a combination of the Tsar.

• 43:27Kara Swisher?

  He does.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  And Stalin.

• 43:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, old Russia.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, old Russia, you know, in his mind, obviously Stalinist Russia was pretty much the same as Tsarist Russia.

• 43:41Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  So you change the flag, you change the statues, but really the structure is pretty similar.

• 43:48Kara Swisher?

  So are you essentially saying you're a good guesser based on historical observation?

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying, so we go back to the 17th century in America, the answer to our question, what kind of dictatorship would it be, would not be a communist dictatorship. It would not be the French Republic during the revolution, it wouldn't be anything like that, it would not build a cardboard mountain and have a festival to the divine being, although you'll notice on the American money, there is that eye in the triangle.

• 44:22Kara Swisher?

  I saw a national treasure, I know.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, the masons got in there pretty solidly in the 18th century, you would have a group of elect elders running what is essentially a dictatorship, they got to say what people were going to do, but you could not become one of those elect elders unless you'd had a personal conversation with God.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  According to whom I put in parentheses. So it's much less likely to be a one-person dictatorship and much more likely to be a top group of people like the commanders and the handmaids.

• 45:10Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, or say the billionaires in front row at the at the inauguration.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, yeah, like that. I'm not sure who's actually running the American government at this, at this time, and neither is anybody else.

• 45:25Kara Swisher?

  That is correct. One of my favorite parts of American history is the chaotic nature of it, which is why it won't last. We'll be back in a minute.

• 45:41Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has got your back. Instead of forcing you to spend tons of time searching, Indeed Sponsored Jobs matches you with quality candidates fast. According to their data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 46:22Kara Swisher?

  And listeners to this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 47:49Kara Swisher?

  Let's move on to the current state of politics for a second. Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Yours comes from Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  So Margaret, I am a big fan, and I wanted to ask you a question. In The Handmaid's Tale, one of the first things the government of Gilead does is strip women of their economic rights. From closing bank accounts to firing all female employees. That's the canary in the coal mine before Gilead rips away the rest of their rights. So flash forward to now. Women have lost a disproportionate number of jobs since Donald Trump took office. Women, small business owners, are feeling the strain of Trump's chaotic tariffs and skyrocketing costs more acutely. In short, women are bearing the brunt of an economy that's flattening just about everyone.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  So people have called you prescient. How do you view this moment?

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Okay, the women moment. Well, all dictatorships do this. I can't think of one that has not. Sometimes they have nice slogans at the beginning, women hold up out of the sky, et cetera.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  But it doesn't usually play out. It sometimes plays out that a select group of women get fairly high-profile positions, and you can see that in the Trump government. There are a number of cabinet people, and certainly the White House spokesperson, they're all women.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  But that doesn't translate any more than it did with Duchess's into the lives of ordinary women. And they do seem to be, I mean, even the Soviet, early Soviet state, in which it was supposed to have all of these improvements, resulted in total chaos for women. They had no security. Yeah, so I have an even more sinister view. I don't think it's confined to women. I think that the powers that be in the United States have decided that there's too many poor people.

• 49:55Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  So all of the changes that they are making in food security and in healthcare, and particularly in not providing medical care to pregnant women, may run into difficulties. The end result is going to be people dying. So I think it's a plan to get rid of poor people. Does that sound too-

• 50:19Kara Swisher?

  No, I think you're absolutely, I think they hate them. I think they hate them. And of course, they get them to vote for them, too. I just interviewed Beth Macy, who wrote Dope Sick, it's a new book about her small town, and that's exactly what's happening to them, and yet they voted for Trump, which was interesting.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Well, he gives the appearance of standing up for the common person. But it's only an appearance, as I'm sure they're going to discover all-

• 50:44Kara Swisher?

  I think they kind of have discovered it. I mean, one of the things you said is, if you were an American, you'd be worrying a lot about my country right now, and that we should pay attention to the patterns of power grabs, infighting, and the disintegration of the rule of law. What are the things you think people should look out for? And these, what alarm bells do you see? And I think you are actually a hopeful person. What is the antidote to that in the history you've seen of the United States?

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Oh, you mean, how are you going to get out of it?

• 51:13Kara Swisher?

  We just, we opened our last podcast event in Toronto. We sold out immediately and we apologized to the entire country of Canada on behalf of all Americans, except for the Trump people.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  I don't think you have to apologize on behalf of all Americans because half of Americans do.

• 51:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I know, but I, we felt bad, so we just.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, thank you, but don't apologize for things you didn't do.

• 51:37Kara Swisher?

  Right, that's true.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, how are you going to get out of it? Well, I, I think you, you will get out of it, but there's going to be an awful lot of repair work. And will it go back to the way it was before? No, because things never do. They don't go back to exactly the way they were before, which is why it was always a pipe dream, make America great again. Just exactly what period of history were you thinking of? So I think what you really have to pay attention to is, is voter fraud and gerrymandering, what they're going to try next in order to maintain control of the government.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  But I think it's also not out of the question that there will be a rebellion from within the ranks of, for instance, the army, that there will be resistance. And I think there's already a certain amount of resistance going on with people just not, not falling in with this plan, not accepting as a given, you know, the patently illegal actions that, that parts of this government have been doing.

• 52:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  So rule of law, we won't talk about the Supreme Court, but, but general rule of law, you know, judges who actually know the law.

• 53:04Kara Swisher?

  Which, they've been very strong here.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  A lot of them have been very strong. And how far is the current regime willing to go in its defiance of the law? And how many Americans will actually sit still for that?

• 53:20Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I have to tell you, there's a distinct fuck this guy sentiment across the country, more so.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  How do you know that?

• 53:27Kara Swisher?

  I've taught, I traveled just extensively recently and from people.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  But do you talk to Joe in the diner?

• 53:33Kara Swisher?

  I have, I have, they're all my relatives.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  They're your relatives?

• 53:36Kara Swisher?

  They're my relatives. And it's more like, you know, it's a lot of people, it was interesting, were like, well, I think there's too much immigration, but not like this, like this isn't how we feel. But not like this is said by a lot of people.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:48Kara Swisher?

  Like, I believe in, I don't love trans people, whatever, they hate trans people, but, but not like this, but not, but not like this enters into every sentence. So they don't like the method, even if they might agree with some of the issues they have. And I think affordability has trumped everything.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:06Kara Swisher?

  Everything costs more.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 54:07Kara Swisher?

  Everything costs, right now, an inexpensive chicken sandwich costs as much as someone makes in an hour. So I think that's, says it to everybody, like, what?

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:17Kara Swisher?

  So, yeah, I have a lot of West Virginia relatives, so I pay a lot of attention to them. There's, there's a passage in the, in the book about how you started using Twitter. One of the things that I read about a lot is the social, the impact of social media when it started to become popular. You said it helped you fill some seats for a New York event that hadn't gotten much publicity.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  No kidding.

• 54:36Kara Swisher?

  It also helped you recover a laptop you accidentally left on the plane. This is all good. But how are you thinking about the downsides of social media and the rise of these tech titans alongside authoritarianism in politics right now? Because they're the version of the commanders here alongside authoritarianism in politics.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they didn't start out that way.

• 54:56Kara Swisher?

  Well, they did. I was there.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  No, they didn't?

• 54:58Kara Swisher?

  Oh, okay.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  That was not the public face they were putting out.

• 55:02Kara Swisher?

  No, but that's what they were like. But go ahead.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, okay, sure. Any entrepreneurial person is going to want one thing, more market share.

• 55:13Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  And a second thing.

• 55:14Kara Swisher?

  You got it.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Uh, their share is going up in value. So, of course, they want those things, but, and it was brought in, same as the internet. And I remember when that started, it was a bunch of scientists who wanted to be able to exchange information more quickly. And hey, it was great at the beginning. And so was Twitter at the beginning.

• 55:37Kara Swisher?

  Agree.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  It was a fun place. You could use it in helpful ways. You could share information helpfully. And in my mind, the Democrats won the Obama election because they figured out social media and the Republicans hadn't. But then they did.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  So, yeah, the other rule of military history, which I'm sure you know perfectly well, is that if you invent a new weapon that's quite successful, your enemy's going to get hold of it pretty quickly and use it against you.

• 56:10Kara Swisher?

  That's correct.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  So that's always what happens.

• 56:13Kara Swisher?

  Are you still on Twitter? I had 1.6 million followers. I'm not on it. I like left. I called it a Nazi porn bar and I said, I just don't like Nazi porn bars. So.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm still on it because a number of people that I follow are still on it. And I did set up a Blue Sky account, but I haven't really figured out how to use it.

• 56:36Kara Swisher?

  It's the same.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  It's the same.

• 56:38Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. So threads, they're all the same.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  They're all the same.

• 56:41Kara Swisher?

  They're not, no, it's not a Nazi porn bar over there. It's actually, speaking of which, it's a little, it's very left in that regard, but, and you talked that you've come under attack more from the left and the right through here and that the left thinks you should be preaching their sermon, whatever that may be.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:57Kara Swisher?

  What has to happen in this retrenchment of the rights that many spent decades fighting for, because right now, everything is the binary, right?

• 57:06Speaker 00

  You mean over here, over here?

• 57:07Kara Swisher?

  Yes, exactly, because you're complex and I think people want you to be something, right?

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Oh, sure they do, but good luck with that.

• 57:14Kara Swisher?

  I can see that. I can see that. But you have said they've been tougher on you if you don't follow through on, over.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, they were actually paying attention to me, whereas most people on the right don't.

• 57:24Kara Swisher?

  Yes, that's true. That's fair.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  So when The Handmaid's Tale came out as a book. We didn't get any death threats. When it came out as a movie in 1990, just as the wall was coming down, we'd launched it in East and West at the same time. We did get death threats for that, and I said, "Why didn't we get them for the book?" And they said, "Well, those people don't read." So I must ask the TV series people how they're doing in that department. But it is a conundrum for the right, because why are you objecting to someone portraying what it is you have said you actually want to do?

• 58:04Kara Swisher?

  And the answer when you say that to them?

• 58:07Speaker 00

  Well, I never got a chance to say that to them directly. But that's their conundrum. So, and also the religious part. Some people think it's an anti-religious book. It isn't. It's about the misuse of religion in these power grabs, and that has happened a lot in history.

• 58:31Kara Swisher?

  Especially in the US, actually.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  A lot, yeah. So it has the banner of religion, but it's not Christianity, as anybody who actually reads the New Testament would understand it.

• 58:44Kara Swisher?

  Right. I think a lot about Father Coghlan and a lot of our history.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had people like that in the 30s in Canada.

• 58:52Kara Swisher?

  Just curious, when you're on the left side, which I assume you're progressive, I wouldn't even be able to describe you.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  I don't use the word progressive, because I don't believe in inevitable progress.

• 59:02Kara Swisher?

  Oh, okay.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  And I don't believe in the right side of history, because history doesn't have sides that are inevitable. And we are not on the yellow brick road to the Emerald City of Oz. Sorry.

• 59:18Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah. Which, of course, was a tale, a populist tale about monetary policy, people don't. And the Emerald City, I think, was DC.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  No, we certainly don't understand that. But the Emerald City of Oz, by the way, when we get there, is a totalitarian dictatorship, but never mind. But never mind, it's a benevolent one.

• 59:39Kara Swisher?

  Well, the new movie kind of spells that out pretty clearly, right? Yeah, yeah, you you have not seen Wicked?

• 59:44Speaker 00

  I haven't seen it. No, no, no, no, it's it's okay. So I should go and see it?

• 59:48Kara Swisher?

  Oh, both of them. Yes.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Why should I?

• 59:50Kara Swisher?

  Because the singing is great.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  The thing that, oh, I thought you were gonna say because it has a profound political message embedded in it.

• 59:57Kara Swisher?

  Yes, too. That does, too.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, no, yes.

• 1:00:00Kara Swisher?

  It doesn't hit you over the head with it in a in a

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:00:03Kara Swisher?

  But the singing is fantastic. How about that? The singing is amazing.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  All right, I believe you.

• 1:00:07Kara Swisher?

  They're very gifted, and it's a story about, speaking of, you know, Cat's eyes about a relationship between two women and or girls and then women later, you talk about that, but it's about a relationship between two women is what it's about.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:22Kara Swisher?

  You know?

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Each with a different outfit.

• 1:00:23Kara Swisher?

  Yes, absolutely. But they're the same, you see. You see, it's a mind fuck. How are they? Oh, well, oh, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Well, there you go. I think you should see it.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:00:33Kara Swisher?

  You would you would laugh your ass off, is what I would say. Anyway, I want to end by returning to your memoir and talking about you. Toward the end of the book, you mentioned in passing, you've been doing some Swedish death cleaning lately. This is a practice, for people who don't know, where you get rid of a lot of your belongings so your children don't have to deal with them, which is, I think, is a very kind thing to do. It made me wonder if this memoir is also part of that process for you. And if so, do you feel, what do you feel like you've gained from the experience of of writing it?

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Well, I had a lot of fun. Does that count as gained?

• 1:01:06Kara Swisher?

  Yes, absolutely. It's likening your load, right?

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I don't get too profound about my deep inner self. You may have noticed that.

• 1:01:18Kara Swisher?

  I appreciate it. I'm the same way. But go ahead. I'm a Tom Stoppard girl. You leave everything behind on the journey, but go ahead. He just died. R I P.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  What have I gained?

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  What have I gained? I don't know, I don't think in terms of that.

• 1:01:37Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Gaining things. For me, I think more in terms of, have I done the best that I could by the book? No, that's what you want, as a writer, that's what you want to be concentrating on is your relationship with the book. The book then has a relationship with readers, which you can't control and can't anticipate. It's completely out of your control. So you do the best you can with the book. You have a very intense relationship with it while you're writing it. And then you have a very intense relationship with the three editors, one from each of the

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  English markets, the States, Canada, the UK, all of whom have different views about what you should put in. And then when it's done, it's out there.

• 1:02:31Kara Swisher?

  It's out, it's gone.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you've, what you have gained is the experience of writing, and I suppose you could say that.

• 1:02:37Kara Swisher?

  Do you, then in your real life, what have you Swedish death cleaned recently?

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  What have I Swedish death cleaned?

• 1:02:43Kara Swisher?

  It's a verb now.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Is it?

• 1:02:45Kara Swisher?

  I just made it one.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  All right, thank you. Mostly they're paper objects. So if you don't want somebody doing your thesis on this, throw it out.

• 1:02:58Kara Swisher?

  So out it goes. I like the idea of just destroying it.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, goodbye it. No one need know. Yeah, so I'm getting around to, I always put my novel papers in my, my, I hate to say, okay, my writing stuff. I put it into the Fisher Library at, at the University of Toronto. So why do I do that? It would just pile up, would it not? And they will take care of it. And if you need to retrieve something, they can lay their finger on it, like, right away.

• 1:03:36Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, and a hundred years from now, some lady will be pawing through it.

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  Maybe, but I'm, I might be pawing through it myself for some peculiar reason.

• 1:03:45Kara Swisher?

  Right, for going forward, yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  So I, you know, finding things in my own house.

• 1:03:50Kara Swisher?

  Is that first poem in there?

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Not yet, but it will be.

• 1:03:54Kara Swisher?

  Oh, good. Oh, you're not destroying it. Oh, wow. Good for you. So you're still writing a lot and you're still traveling. You were recently in the Arctic Circle for a two-week trip. You're getting 10,000 steps a day. Your follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments is being turned into another series. I know you hate being asked what's next, so I'll ask instead. What is inspiring you right now? And what are you watching or reading? And obviously not Wicked, but go ahead.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Well, I'm paying pretty close attention to the American political scene because, of course, you know the old saying. A Washington cat is a cold, Ottawa sneezes. So, and I'm also watching the Canadian political scene, which is pretty interesting to us right now. So, yeah, I mean, it's get the popcorn. It's a, you don't know from one day to the next what's going to happen.

• 1:04:49Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, life is more interesting than fiction right now, in a weird way.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  Well, it's also more terrifying.

• 1:04:56Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that, I'm looking at the situation in Europe as much as I can. And who's going to benefit from all of these shenanigans? Well, I think it will be China.

• 1:05:10Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  I think they're playing the long game. I think they're being pretty smart. And anybody who thinks that you can make a deal with Russia to hand over Ukrainian hoo-ha to anybody in the West is dreaming.

• 1:05:26Kara Swisher?

  You gotta punch them in the nose until they're...

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  Well, because they're in hawk up to their eyebrows with China.

• 1:05:33Kara Swisher?

  That's correct.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  So the person who's going to get that stuff is China. Should Russia get its hands on it?

• 1:05:38Kara Swisher?

  Right. One time I was writing about a tech billionaire, and he said, "When are you going to stop hitting me?" And I said, "When you stay down." That's how I feel about Russia.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the other question people ask me is, what about AI? Is it going to take over the world? And I say, you have a major energy problem. Unless you can solve that, you're just going to run out of electricity. And then they go, nuclear fusion. And I go, it hasn't happened yet.

• 1:06:07Kara Swisher?

  Not yet, but they are reviving the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. I don't know if Microsoft bought it, essentially.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  They need a source of energy to, because otherwise all the lights are going to go off in every city in America.

• 1:06:19Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that makes you feel warm and fuzzy. Let's revive Three Mile Island.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Kara Swisher?

  You're sort of like.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  And also, the idea that everybody in the world is going to be plugged into some kind of AI and become walking zombies. There just are not enough resources to have that happen.

• 1:06:34Kara Swisher?

  You don't want AI Margaret Atwood?

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Well, people have tried.

• 1:06:39Kara Swisher?

  I've seen it.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  Yes, they were rubbishy at it so far, but they might improve it.

• 1:06:44Kara Swisher?

  They will. All right, my last question is about something not dead, not AI, not whatever. It's a longtime birder. I want you to explain why you are. And are there any species you're still hoping to add to your life list?

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  I don't have a life list.

• 1:06:59Kara Swisher?

  Oh, you don't?

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  No, we made a point of not having life lists.

• 1:07:03Kara Swisher?

  Explain why you're a birder and what a life list is for people.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, I grew up with birding because my family just knew all that.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  By the way, nature will kill us before we kill it.

• 1:07:17Kara Swisher?

  100% Jeff Vandermeer, I think about him a lot.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you know, microbes will survive.

• 1:07:23Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. Along with cockroaches and.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Cockroaches, yeah, my dad used to say, and this is in the 50s, it'll all be cockroaches and grass.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  And happy Thanksgiving to you, too. Thanks, Dad.

• 1:07:37Kara Swisher?

  That's what he said, a thanks, yeah, well.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  Oh, well, this was dinner table conversation, like how many fruit flies multiplying unchecked would cause the earth to be covered to a depth of two miles with fruit flies. Why do you need to know that? Never mind.

• 1:07:52Kara Swisher?

  Well, now you do. Now you do. But we've gotten off the course. Why are you a birder? What is the, it's because you, since you were a kid?

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  Okay, so I grew up with it. My parents were early environmentalists, so back in the 50s. My dad was a systems biologist. This eats that, eats this, eats that. So I just grew up with it. It's my outlook on life. So Graham got into it in an activist way. And we did for some years, I think it was about 10 years. We worked with Birdlife International, which does very important work internationally. Because of course, birds, a lot of birds migrate. They're not limited to one country. So you have to deal with all of these countries.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  We worked as the honorary presidents of the rare bird club, which means we helped raise money. And that's on the macro level. On the micro level, we set up an organization on Pele Island, which is in the middle of Lake Erie, is the most southerly part of Canada and is on a migration flyway that goes from the Ohio shore, funnels up across Lake Erie and spreads out into the boreal forest where these birds breed. So we are migration data monitoring, among the other things that we do.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  And we are right now converting in 1928, large liquor store on Pele Island. You've got one guess as to why there was a large liquor store on Pele Island in 1928.

• 1:09:38Kara Swisher?

  Because people need to drink when they're sitting on Pele Island in 1928.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  No, prohibition.

• 1:09:44Kara Swisher?

  Oh.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  How much rum running was going on across Lake Erie? Quite a lot.

• 1:09:51Kara Swisher?

  A lot, that's right.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  So where was the depot? Well, there was certainly one on Pele Island.

• 1:09:56Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  So, yes, and we got hold of this building because our previous building where we put our bird banders was sinking into a swamp and there were snakes in the bathroom. And we're converting it right now.

• 1:10:09Kara Swisher?

  That's amazing. So do you still bird? Even if you don't have a life list, is there a bird you want to see?

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Well, I've never seen an ostrich in the wild and I'm unlikely to see one.

• 1:10:21Kara Swisher?

  Why?

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Because I'm getting a bit too old to go to ostrich land.

• 1:10:27Kara Swisher?

  Well, you seem like you have a lot of kick in you. I don't know.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  Well, you think so.

• 1:10:30Kara Swisher?

  Ostrich. Why an ostrich?

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  They're big. I can see them.

• 1:10:36Kara Swisher?

  Oh, you don't have to be like, where does the bird... That's a fair point.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  I'm gonna share this with you because you're obviously not ready for it. Your vision may decline a little bit as you get older.

• 1:10:48Kara Swisher?

  My vision's been terrible since I've been four years old, so I'm good.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  It's gonna get worse.

• 1:10:53Kara Swisher?

  I can't imagine it would get worse. I'm almost nearly blind. But I get it. I get it. I get the aging.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  You're gonna get cataracts.

• 1:11:00Kara Swisher?

  The biology is undefeated. But you are not, Margaret Atwood. I'm sorry to tell you. You're still kicking. I really loved this book. I thought it was joyful, which is really a nice thing. And I've recommended it to a lot of people. And they're like, isn't Margaret depressing? I'm like, no, she is not.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you. I'm glad you're not... Well, so many other things are so much more depressing than me right now than I come across as actually quite bouncy.

• 1:11:25Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you're bouncy. That's how I think of you. Anyway, I really appreciate it. What a delightful interview. The memoir is called Book of Lives. Margaret Atwood, thank you so much for your time.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  And thank you.

• 1:11:43Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yocum, Michelle Eloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you're an honorary Canadian. If not, you're on Margaret's shit list. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.