Time September 16, 2019
The Testaments arrives at the
peak of Atwood’s prominence. In
2017, her 32-year-old novel soared
back to the best-seller list when it
became one of a handful of clas-
sic dystopias that seemed to por-
tend troubling themes of the current era and evoke
prescient anxieties about women’s rights. Three
months after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Hulu
premiered an adaptation with Atwood’s involve-
ment that has won 11 Emmys. Women’s-rights dem-
onstrators around the globe—at pro-choice rallies in
South America and Europe, at Supreme Court Jus-
tice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in the
U.S.—have donned the handmaid uniform of crim-
son cloaks and white bonnets to make their case. At-
wood’s voice has become a rallying cry against cli-
mate change and threats to equality—last year she
headlined a summit on the intersection of those is-
sues, named after a reference to The Handmaid’s Tale.
Protest signs at the 2017 Women’s March bore the
slogan make margareT aTwood ficTion again,
her name now synonymous with resistance.
Atwood long rejected calls for a sequel because, she
says, she knew she couldn’t re-create Offred’s voice.
But as she saw the world change, she realized Offred
wasn’t the only way back into the story. She began
drafting The Testaments partway through 2016.
The anticipation has few precedents. The U.S.
publisher announced a 500,000-copy first-print
run, and the novel made the Man
Booker Prize short list despite a
strict embargo. Atwood will launch
it with a live interview onstage in
London, which will stream to 1,300
cinemas around the world. It’s a
larger-than-life reception for a larger-than-life figure,
one still a tad bewildered by the fanfare. She makes a
point of stating the obvious: “It’s just a book.”
GrowinG up in Canada, Atwood wrote whenever
she could—in the high school yearbook, in a col-
lege magazine under the pseudonym Shakesbeat
Latweed. Her early jobs included a teen venture in
puppeteering and later market research, and she pub-
lished her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969.
Since then she has published more than 60 works of
fiction, non fiction, graphic novels, poetry and chil-
dren’s literature. The Handmaid’s Tale was a break-
through, landing her on the Booker short list for the
first time. In 2000 she became the first Canadian
woman to win the award, for The Blind Assassin.
On the patio of her neighborhood café, Atwood
glances over her shoulder to scan for eavesdroppers.
“Things never used to be like this,” she says, peek-
ing out from under a sun hat. Caution is justified: the
plot of The Testaments is the closest- guarded secret
in publishing since Harry Potter lived (again). Impos-
tors posing as book agents tried to steal the digital
manuscript, so publishers around the world agreed
FALL ARTS PREVIEW BOOKS
‘I DIDN’T
WANT
PEOPLE
SAYING,
LIKE SOME
HAVE SAID,
“ HOW
DID YOU
MAKE UP
ALL THIS
TWISTED
STUFF?”’
^
Atwood at work on
The Handmaid’s Tale
in West Berlin in 1984
ATWOOD: ISOLDE OHLBAUM; ALIAS GRACE: NETFLIX
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