Margaret Atwood’s “A Memoir of Sorts” was published by her longtime Canadian publisher, McClelland and Stewart, to much fanfare in 2025.

It’s a huge book, nearly 600 pages long, with Atwood staring winkingly at readers from the cover page. Huge though it is, I am happy to report that it is an engaging and stimulating read. Margaret Atwood is a writer worth knowing and there is a lot to learn about her.

Written in tightly organized sections, the book covers her unusual but persistently literary doings over some 50 years with amusing facility.

The story of those individual books is at once awakening and exhausting — overall, her “Book of Lives” is the work of a compulsive writer, a dedicated storyteller and an acutely conscious self-evaluator.

In fact, over five remarkable decades she has succeeded in making her personal story the ongoing literary story and preoccupation of our Canadian times.

I have been fascinated to watch that story unfold from my perch in the small-scale literary world of Trent University. I arrived in September 1972 and was told I would be teaching Canadian literature, a subject about which I knew very little. By then Peggy Atwood was dramatically asserting herself upon the Canadian literary scene both as a poet and a prose writer.

In 1967, she had won the Governor-General’s award for poetry for “The Circle Game” (1966). Meanwhile, she was continuing to produce bone-chilling books of poetry while extracting herself from the tentacles of what might have become her own academic career.

There were also a number of personal relationships, including a marriage to a fellow graduate student at Harvard-Radcliffe that she needed to move beyond. And there were new paths to follow, including a connection to the newly formed Anansi Press in Toronto.

That same year,........

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