Atwood's memoir relents: Book of Lives tallies 50 titles

Just over 50 books into her career, Margaret Atwood has released Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. It's an audiobook — a recording read aloud — that treats her own bibliography as autobiography.

She didn't want to write it. Persuaded by what she calls her "sinister alter ego," Atwood turned the project into an inventory: each novel, short-story collection, and poetry book gets its own origin story.

Why she almost said no

The author's resistance opens the audiobook. Writing about herself, Atwood says, seemed "dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?"

The narrative tracks her change of heart. Time passed, and the project took on — in Atwood's own phrase — "a lurid phosphorescent glow." Her "sinister alter ego" laid out the case. She could thank benefactors, reward friends, trash enemies, and "pay off scores long forgotten by everyone but me."

What's actually inside

The book runs through Atwood's loves, losses, and literary output. The literary thread runs longest. She walks readers through her bibliography (her complete list of published works) in roughly chronological order. Each entry explains how a work came to be — and why it survived.

Reader's practical question: what does this give me that a standard celebrity memoir doesn't? The answer is form. Atwood treats the bibliography as the biography. A manuscript's first sentence, or the rejection letter it generated, becomes a life event.

The score-settling bit

The audiobook includes one set-to, told plainly. A poet told Atwood in the early 1970s that she wrote like a man — he meant it as a compliment. She replied that he had misplaced the punctuation. "What you meant was, 'She writes. Like a man'," Atwood says.

That exchange captures the audiobook's pitch: dry, exact, well-aimed. The Guardian's review calls the book "a fine showcase for her wisdom and wit." Score-settling here is structural. It exists, in Atwood's own framing, "purely for the punchline."

So what

Book of Lives lands as Atwood's own record of a decades-spanning output. It also works as an audio primer for first-time readers of her catalogue. The "lurid phosphorescent glow" line lands differently when she reads it herself.

For audiobook subscribers, the format choice matters. Memoirs drafted for the page often sound thin when read aloud — their rhythm assumes the eye, not the ear. Book of Lives was built for voice from its first sentence.

Audio listeners will hear Atwood deliver her own anecdotes, including the punctuation jab, with timing no narrator could fake. That comic precision is, in the end, what the book is selling.