Cat's Eye
by Margaret Atwood

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 480
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0385491026
Publisher: Anchor

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and 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 sixteen she found that writing was "suddenly the only thing I wanted to do."

Throughout her career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees including the Canadian Governor General's Award, Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. She is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including children's books, and short stories. Her most recent works include The Handmaid's Tale (1986), Cat's Eye (1989), and Alias Grace (1996), the story collection Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994), and a volume of poetry, Morning in the Burned House (1995).

Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than twenty-five countries. She has traveled extensively and has lived in Boston, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Provence, Berlin, and Edinburgh.

Margaret Atwood now lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson and their daughter.

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Q: What about your early life might have influenced you to become a writer?

MA: I grew up in the north under rather isolated circumstances, spending most of my early life in a forest with no electricity, no running water, without any radio or movies, and before television. I was read to a lot as a child. There were always books in the house, and they were my entertainment. They were what you did when it was raining, they were the escape, they were the extended family. So it was a natural step from loving books to writing them.
Q: Cat's Eye is perceived as your most personal novel. Is there any truth to that statement?

MA: In some ways, yes. Cat's Eye draws on more semiautobiographical elements than any of my other novels--the time period and the place, primarily. But in many other ways, it's fiction.
Q: What would you say is the novel's primary theme?

MA: Cat's Eye is about how girlhood traumas continue into adult life. Girls have a culture marked by secrets and shifting alliances, and these can cause a lot of distress. The girl who was your friend yesterday is not your friend today, but you don't know why. These childhood power struggles color friendships between women. I've asked women if they fear criticism more from men or from other women. The overwhelming answer was: "From women."
Q: You now have over thirty books behind you. Could you have written this novel when you were younger?

MA: By middle age you have a past with a discernible shape, whereas young people are driven by the present and the future. Cat's Eye is partly a coming-of-age novel--middle age--but judging from the response, it speaks to women of all ages and to men as well.
Q: Do you consider Cat's Eye a novel that might advance your reputation as a feminist writer or one that might challenge it?

MA: If by "feminist" you mean that I write about women--though not exclusively--the answer is yes. Cat's Eye is about the underside of little girlhood and about the intricate ways adult women's attitudes evolve from our ambiguous childhood friendships. But if you mean that I see all women as good and all men as bad, then the answer is no. Feminists haven't attacked Cat's Eye much; they too were little girls.
Q: What are your thoughts on the future of the book?

MA: Reading is far from defunct. Many people are turning away from full-time television, toward the more personal act of reading. Neurologists tell us that reading, in the intensity of the brain activity it generates, is second only to actual experience.


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© Copyright 2009 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted with permission by Anchor. All rights reserved.

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