The cover of Margaret Atwood\u2019s memoir shows a close-up of the author holding a finger to her mouth, a mischievous look in her eyes, as if to suggest a riddle or two: is this a book in which secrets will be revealed, or perhaps one in which secrets are kept?<\/p>\n
Yes, and yes.<\/p>\n
While Atwood has discussed everything from childhood to parenthood in essays and interviews, she has otherwise been more at home with understatement than with confession.<\/p>\n
But after years of resisting requests from her publishers to tell her story, she came to like the idea of a memoir, of sorts, about \u201cwhat you remember, rather than a biography, which is a lot of things you don\u2019t remember or would rather not remember\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n
Atwood writes in the introduction that she was not immune to the \u201clurid phosphorescent glow\u201d of gossip and score-settling, but did not want to limit herself to \u201csqualid moral bookkeeping\u201d. Her book is, in part, a story of how a writer writes \u2013 and gets inspired.<\/p>\n
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