How I finally got a read on the mercurial Ms Atwood

When he first met Margaret Atwood, Robert McCrum left their rendezvous wondering who this 'weird mix of frivolity and ferocity' was. Fifteen years later, he has found out

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I met Margaret - “Peggy” - Atwood for the first, and only, time in the autumn of 2010. She was 71, celebrating the 25th anniversary of her Handmaid’s Tale, a contemporary masterpiece. In advance of this rendezvous, I’d taken a few soundings of what to expect. The consensus was: scary, remote, and well read. An international literary diva who took no prisoners.

So I started our conversation - and why not? – with the suggestion that she might be en route to becoming an icon of Canadian literature. “What does that mean?” This dry, prairie challenge, somewhere between a drone and a drawl, did not bode well. “I don’t like being an icon.” A thin, ironic smile hinted that we might get over this. “It invites iconoclasm,” she went on. “Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you make an idiot of yourself.”

Atwood was, it turned out, game for a laugh. I came away from our encounter both puzzled and charmed by her weird mix of frivolity and ferocity. But who, precisely, was Margaret Atwood?

More than a decade later, there’s a quirky kind of answer in her Book of Lives: a Memoir of Sorts. Now 86, Atwood is more “Peggy” than before, but now widowed, and in a recessional mood. She’s still the mistress of backing into the limelight. At first blush, she seems to disdain the whole project. “Someone in publishing” is to blame. Or is it her “sinister alter ego” that’s at fault? Atwood revels in her many conflicting lives. A novelist, she disclaims, is not to be trusted, “a blend of detective and con artist”.