Margaret Atwood: Future Imperfect

·57 min·5 clips

Margaret Atwood's story deconstructs Cinderella with a modern, satirical twist on poverty and beauty.

Margaret Atwood is introduced with a little ceremony. Meg Wolitzer places her among writers whose imagined futures feel sharp because they keep watching the present. The framing is brief and admiring. Atwood is connected to The Handmaid's Tale, the Mad Adam Trilogy, and Old Babes in the Wood. Then the stage falls away. The excerpt shifts to a widow speaking with dry precision about loneliness, manners, and the ridiculous sting of being approached too soon. A man asks if she is dating. The remark lands as geriatric flirtation, half joke and half trespass, in a world where everyone knows little can come of it. She answers carefully. The passage is sharp about the odd pressure on widows to manage every sentence, because grief can start to look like strangeness. Tig is still painfully present. She cannot say that out loud without feeding gossip, so the real letter stays private. Stevie is across the river. That image gives the piece its weight, separating the living, the bereaved, and the people who have not had to cross yet. The unsent letter eases into courtesy. Health, winter, snowdrops, daffodils, lilies, beetles, children, grandchildren, and a possible kitten become safer things to say than the truth. Atwood lets comedy sit right beside mourning. The piece is not sentimental, and it is not cold. It is a controlled look at how ordinary language keeps people from saying the thing they most mean. Wolitzer returns at the end, and the credits bring back the show's calm frame after a story that has already found its way forward.

As heard by us

A live Selected Shorts hour that lets Atwood's story and Burstyn's reading carry the set.

Margaret Atwood is the center of a live Selected Shorts from Symphony Space, with Meg Wolitzer introducing a New York appearance tied to Old Babes in the Wood.

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Why you'd press play

You want Margaret Atwood on a live Selected Shorts stage, with Ellen Burstyn reading a story from Old Babes in the Wood.

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