Atwood owes her life to a green caterpillar that sparked her father's entomology passion and led to her birth.
Margaret Atwood is introduced plainly, which suits her better than grand fanfare. Lauren Laverne sets out the size of the career: two Booker Prizes, poetry, short stories, children's books, essays, opera libretti, and novels. The Handmaid's Tale comes up through politically polarised times, with Laverne noting that its imagined world borrows from things people have already done. Atwood does not puff this up. She goes back to an old argument about whether art should improve the world or aim at a deathless masterpiece. She picked the masterpiece, and the joke is that she was still in her teens when she set the bar there. That mix of nerve and practicality keeps the conversation lively. Atwood says she would write rubbish to support herself, and even tried true romances because they paid best. It did not take. Her reason is wonderfully blunt: she thought they were too silly. Harvard shifts the mood. Asked about life there in the 60s, she says she was too old to be a hippie and belonged more to an existentialist, hardworking, overachieving generation. The place sounds stiff: very buttoned, very tweety, with middle-aged men trying love beads and long hair while she watched with cringing interest. Then comes the sharper detail. Female students could not go into Lamont Library, where the modern poetry was. If Atwood knew the book, she could request it. She just could not walk in, in case she distracted the hard-studying male students.
