The real Margaret Atwood is sentimental, blunt and deliciously naughty

In 1984, the Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood was in Norfolk, England, struggling with a book she’d been writing for a while. As she tried and failed to make the manuscript work, an old idea that had been percolating for some time floated to the top of her consciousness instead, a novel she had been considering for years but “shelved […] because I thought it was too weird, even for me,” she confesses in her new autobiography. “A future United States that was a totalitarian theocracy? Surely not.”

That “weird” novel was, of course, The Handmaid’s Tale , originally called “Offred” after its main character, a woman subjected to monthly rapes intended to produce offspring for her superior caste householders in a nightmarish near future. Atwood switched to this manuscript instead