Can it really be a year since I picked up Margaret Atwood’s wonderful non-fiction collection “Writing with Intent – Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005“? Well, yes it is! I chose to explore the first section for last year’s Margaret Atwood Reading Month and absolutely loved it; so I deliberately left the book out on my Book Table with the intention of returning to it asap. Needless to say, it’s sat there for a year! But the nudging of this year’s #MARM sent me scurrying off to pick it up, and I spent some happy hours exploring the next section of the book, which covers the years from 1990-1999. As you might expect, they made fascinating reading!

Atwood is always a wonderful and engaging commentator, and as I’ve probably mentioned before, whenever I read her non-fiction I can’t help but hear her very individual voice in my head! She has the most marvellous dry humour, and way of getting straight to the point, and these pieces covered a wide variety of topics.

The writings in this section range from book reviews of authors such as Marina Warner, Angela Carter and Hilary Mantel; lectures on Canadian historical fiction and writing villainesses; and writings on film plus an autobiographical piece. Each entry displays Atwood’s wit and erudition, and I must admit when I got to the end of this section of the collection I was sorely tempted to continue reading.

And there you have it, the difference between literature—at least literature as embodied in plays and novels—and life. Something else has to happen. In life we may ask for nothing more than a kind of eternal breakfast—it happens to be my favorite meal, and certainly it is the most hopeful one, since we don’t yet know what atrocities the day may choose to visit upon us—but if we are going to sit still for two or three hours in a theater, or wade through two or three hundred pages of a book, we certainly expect something more than breakfast.

As usual, I do struggle to pick favourites when I love a whole collection, but I’ll select a few standouts. “The Grunge Look” is the autobiographical essay, dealing as it does with Atwood’s time in Europe in 1964. She gives a wonderful insight into the place and period, which is particularly interesting to see through Canadian eyes; Britain, in particular, sounds so very backward!! She also seems to encounter men trying to pick her up, thinking she’s American, wherever she goes – and I wonder if that kind of attempt would be done more subtly nowadays…

I enjoyed Atwood’s takes on Marina Warner and Angela Carter, two favourite authors of mine; her discussion of their work is generous and informed. Her piece on Hilary Mantel was fascinating, too, at a time when she was not perhaps the major figure she became.

Of particular interest were the two lectures which had bearings on her own writing. The piece on writing wicked women was particularly pithy, exploring how complex it could be in the climate of the times to have your characters less than perfect. The feminist movement had rejected cliched portrayals of female characters, but Atwood is arguing that writers can’t just write ‘nice’ or ‘perfect’ women – they have to cover all kinds of people. “In Search of Alias Grace” was equally fascinating, as Atwood looked at not only her process in writing about Grace over the years, but also the whole concept of Canadian historical fiction as related to the national identity. “Alias Grace” is one my favourite Atwood novels so it was really interesting to see her explore her process.

Those are some of my favourites but really, all of her writing is wonderful. I’ve read her novels, short stories, poetry and non-fiction for several decades now and always love her way with words, her distinctive voice and her view of literature – and indeed the world! Thanks so much to Buried in Print for hosting #MARM and giving me the push I needed to get back to this volume – I’ll try to get to the third part before next year’s event… 🙄