Atwood and Gibson, both writers, are married and have three children.
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"One thing I take very seriously when writing fiction is the accuracy of the physical details....I like the clothes and the food to be accurate, and I like to be clear about all kinds of other little things--to the point of doing obsessive research on things such as the date plastic garbage bags were invented..."
"When people say to me, 'Which of the characters in "The Robber Bride" do you identify with most closely?' I say, 'I identify with Zenia. She is the professional liar, and what else do fiction writers do but create lies that other people will believe'?"
"There is almost nothing you can write about which has not been outdone in absurdity or ghastliness by real events."
"The writer...retains three attributes that power-mad regimes cannot tolerate: a human imagination...; the power to communicate; and hope."
"When there was a known fact, I felt that I had to use it. In other words, I stuck to the known facts when they were truly known. But when there were gaps or when there were things suggested that nobody ever explained, I felt I was free to invent."
"I feel a writer must involve the larger world. That's where people live; they live in the world...[I]t's artificial to limit the characters so much that they never read a newspaper or listen to the news."
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Margaret Atwood grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College. The daughter of a forest entomologist, Atwood spent a large part of her childhood in the Canadian wilderness. At the age of six she began to write "poems, morality plays, comic books, and an unfinished novel about an ant." At 16 she found that writing was "...suddenly the only thing I wanted to d more...
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11/18/1939 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada,
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I absolutely adored this book ... until the end. Atwood has a bad habit of ruining her books with the last chapter (take the Edible Woman for example.) In the case of Alias Grace the narrative become downright creepy, but with a distinctly different tone than the creepiness that flavours the rest of the novel. To say any more would spoil the ending, and perhaps turn potential readers away from an otherwise good read. Because other than the ending, this period piece is completely engrossing with interesting characters and a perplexing mystery. Atwood teases the reader with clues along the way but nothing prepares you for the solution. Despite the strength of this novel, it exists largely in the shadow of Atwood's more prolific work.
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