SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Margaret Atwood is known for writing books like "The Handmaid's Tale," stories about a near future where everything has gone wrong. But at 84 years old, she is also looking to the past these days. She's about to publish "Paper Boat," a collection of her poetry spanning over 60 years. Atwood talked to my colleague Rachel Martin about her early work.
MARGARET ATWOOD: I do look back on it, and I think, no wonder people found me scary, because I was scary. Poems are pretty intense.
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RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Are you less scary now?
ATWOOD: I think simply by virtue of being shorter.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
ATWOOD: Shorter, more white-haired and older.
DETROW: Margaret Atwood joined Rachel on NPR's Wild Card, where well-known guests answer big questions about their life drawn from a deck of cards.
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MARTIN: Your choice - one, two, or three?
ATWOOD: Three.
MARTIN: One, two, three. What's a piece of advice you were smart to ignore?
ATWOOD: Oh, boy (laughter). Well, where do I begin with that?
MARTIN: (Laughter).
ATWOOD: I ignored almost all advice. I'll pick something meaningful.
MARTIN: OK.
ATWOOD: So when I was at university, we were given faculty advisers...
MARTIN: This was at Harvard. Yeah.
ATWOOD: ...To advise us, I suppose, about the direction that our life should take. And by that time, I was already writing and publishing poetry, and I had a graduate student scholarship, and my faculty adviser said, why don't you just forget all this writing and graduate student stuff and find a good man and get married?
MARTIN: Come on.
ATWOOD: How about that?
MARTIN: Truly?
ATWOOD: So this would be 1961. Well, you weren't born, so you don't remember what that was like, but that was a little extreme, even for those days.
MARTIN: Yeah.
ATWOOD: So my usual way of reacting to people's advice that I didn't agree with was my inner voice saying, you're an idiot.
MARTIN: Did you keep that as your inner voice, or did those words...
ATWOOD: You're an idiot?
MARTIN: ...Find their way outside into the public domain?
ATWOOD: Yeah, I'm afraid I've let it out a bit too much.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
ATWOOD: Maybe I should have kept it as an inner voice. But at that moment, it was, you're an idiot and, OK, is this conversation over yet? Thank you very much. Goodbye.
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MARTIN: Three more cards - one, two, or three?
ATWOOD: Two.
MARTIN: How do you manage envy?
ATWOOD: Oh - directed towards me or envy that I feel?
MARTIN: Envy that you feel.
ATWOOD: I don't feel envy.
MARTIN: Do you not?
ATWOOD: I do not. I mean, apart from envying tall people (laughter).
MARTIN: When I asked the question, though, you asked for a definition - envy that you suffered or had to manage or other people's envy of you?
ATWOOD: Yes.
MARTIN: Is that - does that happen a lot?
ATWOOD: It has, certainly. Yeah. So what I said to young writers who had had a sudden success, I said, within a couple of years, you will have three nasty, vicious personal attacks from people you don't know.
MARTIN: What were the attacks that were leveled at you in your first couple years of success?
ATWOOD: (Laughter) Some of them were quite funny. So a lot of it had to do with hair - Medusa hair, frizzy hair, you know, name something about hair. Yes, and one of them wrote a satirical fairy tale in which I bit the heads off men and made them into a pile and turned into an octopus. Figure that out.
MARTIN: So you were a Medusa-haired man hater.
ATWOOD: Yeah. And power mad, ladder-climbing...
MARTIN: Oh, power mad?
ATWOOD: Yes. Power-mad, ladder-climbing witch.
MARTIN: Oh, wow. I mean, that's evocative.
ATWOOD: I thought so too.
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MARTIN: I am curious how you manage that. You were just able to just let it go, or did any of that get under your skin?
ATWOOD: No, I'm a vengeful person.
MARTIN: Are you being serious?
ATWOOD: Oh, yes. I'm quite vengeful. I can't help it. It's who I am. So I make them into idiotic people in fiction.
MARTIN: Oh, that's a sneaky, sneaky way to deal with that.
ATWOOD: (Laughter) Now, she thinks, I better watch myself.
MARTIN: (Laughter) I know. What's going to happen in this new book? This annoying radio host...
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MARTIN: Three more cards - one, two, three?
ATWOOD: Oh, let's do the middle one.
MARTIN: Have your feelings about death changed over time?
ATWOOD: Have my feelings about death changed over time? I'm not afraid of death, death, deathity (ph), death, death. What comes before can be very unpleasant. So I know people who've had horrible hospital and disease experiences. I know people who have ended up in care homes not knowing who they were, things like that. That's what you are worried - what I, anyway - I'm worried about rather than, quote, "being dead." I'm not too worried about being dead.
MARTIN: Right.
ATWOOD: Am I going to write my own funeral? It's creepy. And I've been to ones like that. But it's kind of fun.
MARTIN: Oh, my mom had a great time planning her funeral. And I remember thinking that's so macabre, l ike - and...
ATWOOD: No, it's like...
MARTIN: She didn't think it was at all.
ATWOOD: It's like event planning. You're planning a party for people.
MARTIN: Right.
ATWOOD: You want them to have a good time anyway.
MARTIN: Right, picking the music...
ATWOOD: You want them to have a good time.
MARTIN: Yeah.
ATWOOD: I used to be a great birthday party planner. So I just think of my funeral as a fun time for kids.
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MARTIN: Margaret Atwood, thank you for doing this. It was a real pleasure. Margaret's new collection is called, "Paper Boat: New And Selected Poems: 1961-2023." Congrats on the collection, and thank you so much.
ATWOOD: Thank you - fun.
DETROW: To hear more from that conversation, follow the Wild Card podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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