The Robber Bride
by Margaret Atwood

List Price: $14.00
Pages: 468
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0385491034
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 writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees. She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, including two children's books, and three volumes of short stories. Her eighth novel, The Robber Bride, has her trademark virtuoso wit and trenchant gaze, this time employed on a tale of three women, once classmates at the University of Toronto, and the influence wielded on them by a fourth classmate--the seductive and destructive Zenia.

Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than twenty 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 Jess.

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Margaret Atwood's Address to the American Booksellers Association Convention
Miami, Florida, June 1, 1993

It's a great honour to be here this morning, and in such distinguished international company. I have always enjoyed talking with booksellers, though I usually do it in bookstores. I like to lurk around and pretend to be a customer, and ask searching questions, because who if not a bookseller lives where the rubber meets the road bookwise?

In fact, my first contact with the official world of books was not with publishers--it was with booksellers. This was in Canada, in the early sixties, which was when I began to write seriously--by which I mean that I myself took it seriously. Others, somehow, didn't. About the most positive comment I got was from a friend of my mother's, who said, "That's nice, dear, because it's something you can do at home." She was right, too. My parents felt I should be a botanist. Not that they had anything against writing, but they didn't want me to starve to death.

I, on the contrary, was all in favour of starving to death, because wasn't that what artists did? Or they got TB, or consumption, or brain poisoning in Paris from drinking absinthe, or, at the very least, they suffered neglect in rat-infested garrets. These things were in the cards for me, so I was in a hurry. I might snuff it by the age of twenty-six, like John Keats, so I'd better get cracking.

At that time, the publishing world in Canada was a lot less pretentious than I was. It was small and cautious, and suspicious of wild-eyed twenty-one-year-olds, which I was--although I myself felt I was pushing late middle age, and couldn't understand why it was taking me so long to turn into Emily Brontë, or Herman Melville, or Samuel Beckett, or whoever I thought I would shortly become. Most young writers in that somewhat sparse publishing climate began by self-publishing, me included. I had the use of a small flat-bed press, and with the help of a friend I painstakingly hand-set my first book--which was extremely short, luckily, because there was a shortage of A's and we had to disassemble each poem before we could set up the next one. We ground out the enormous total of 250 books; and dressed in my long black beatnik stockings and with my hair pinned back into an existentialist bun--it took about two hundred hairpins and I looked like a porcupine, but nobody could say I wasn't in earnest--I trotted around to all the bookstores I knew, and foisted my freshly minted books upon the bemused managers. They sold for fifty cents, retail.

Jump ten years, to the early seventies. I wasn't dead yet; moreover, I didn't even have any romantic major diseases or life-threatening addictions. I'd tried the garrets, and opted for central heating. I wasn't Emily Brontë, but I did have a modest reputation as a distinguished woman of letters, and/or a rug-chewing radical maniac, depending on your point of view. By this time, I had published several volumes of poetry and a first novel--The Edible Woman--which some reviewers hailed as the cutting edge of feminism, and which others said showed an immaturity that I would doubtless grow out of later, once I had come to terms with the proper woman's role.

In 1972 I did a tour of four towns in the Canadian Near-North. "Near-North" means it isn't above the Arctic Circle but can still get fairly chilly. Some of these towns had never encountered a writer in the flesh, which meant I had at least as much drawing power as that month's movie, which everyone had seen anyway. I read in high-school gyms and Oddfellows Halls, and the question periods afterwards were, to put it mildly, direct--or let us say that no one was too concerned about my water symbolism. My favourite author's question of all time--because it's so simple to answer--dates from one of those readings: "Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?"

The other question I got asked a lot wasn't nearly as easy to answer. It was "Why do you write?" People were really puzzled, they really wanted to know--what would drive a person to it? I hadn't really thought about this before, so I didn't have much of an answer. I'm not sure I have one now, but here's a beginning of what I should have said in Arnprior, Ontario, in 1972.

I spent much of my early life in a forest. I don't mean a village in a forest, I mean a forest, pure and simple. My father was a forest entomologist; for three quarters of every year he did his insect research there. We lived in a cabin with a wood stove and several kerosene lanterns. There were bears and wolves and moose and loons. When my mother wanted a fish for dinner, she would just make a cast off the end of the dock.

This sounds like an idyllic childhood, and in a way it was. But in addition to no electricity and no running water, there were also no movies, no theatres, no art galleries, and no radios on which you could get much more than a crackling noise during thunderstorms. However, there were many books. Books were what you did when it was raining; they were the entertainment, they were the escape, they were the extended family, and I read them all, even when they weren't supposed to be for children. I was traumatized early in life by the death of that poor horse in Orwell's Animal Farm, which I thought was going to be about user-friendly bunnies, sort of like Peter Rabbit; and I became haunted by the accusing, voyeuristic eye-in-the-keyhole that used to be on the covers of the Dell murder mysteries. But whatever I was reading held my full bug-eyed attention.

So the short answer to "Why do you write" is--I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go places I haven't been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised. Whatever their other reasons, I think all writers write as part of this sort of continuum: to give back something of what they themselves have received.

One of my favourite books as a child was Grimm's Fairy Tales, the unexpurgated version--the one with the red-hot shoes. My parents sent away for it by mail order without knowing just how unexpurgated it was, and then worried that it would terrify my brother and myself. It didn't terrify us, but it did fascinate us; and it's from Grimm's that I've derived the title of my forthcoming novel, The Robber Bride.

In the original story, it's "The Robber Bridegroom"--a tale of a wicked maiden-devouring monster--so why did I change it? Well, I was sitting around one day thinking to myself, Where have all the Lady Macbeths gone? Gone to Ophelias, every one, leaving the devilish tour-de-force parts to be played by bass-baritones. Or, to put it another way: If all women are well behaved by nature--or if we aren't allowed to say otherwise for fear of being accused of antifemaleism--then they are deprived of moral choice, and there isn't much left for them to do in books except run away a lot. Or, to put it another way: Equality means equally bad as well as equally good.

From what I've just said, you will realise that The Robber Bride is a book with a villainess in it. What kind of villainess? Well, to begin with, a villainess who knows how to make an entrance. On October 23--when, as you're aware, the sun passes from Libra into Scorpio--or, if you aren't aware, you'll find it out on page 2--three women friends are having lunch in a Toronto restaurant called The Toxique. A reader was once quoted as saying, "I like Atwood's books because I can depend on her characters to grow old along with me," and so it has come to be; thus all of these women are what the French refer to as "of a certain age." The first one is an ambidextrous military historian, whose specialty is siege techniques of the Middle Ages. The second one has psychic leanings, a complex past, and a good reason for never eating pigs. The third one is a business wheeler and dealer with gambling tendencies. When they have reached the dessert, which is assorted sorbets--I like to be specific about food--in comes a fourth woman, whose funeral service all three of the others attended five years before.

This returnee--who, due to the wonders of modern plastic surgery, is very well preserved--did awful things to the first woman in the sixties, awfuller things to the second one in the seventies, and the awfullest things of all to the third one in the eighties. In a novelistic structure based on nineteenth-century symphonies with leitmotifs, Russian dolls-within-dolls, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," and boxed sets of gift soaps, we learn about the various awful things. Then we return to the present to find out what happens next. Will the perambulating nemesis do more awful things to our three heroines? Or will they, for a change, do awful things to her? I don't mean to imply that there is no love, compassion, sex, plangent lyricism, deep insight, wit and humour, metaphysical speculation, and language wielded with the skill of a tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls blindfolded in this book; I certainly intended to put in some of those. But on top of that, there are awful things. Well, why not? Life contains awful things. By the time you've reached a certain age, you notice.

What do I hope the reader will get out of all of this and, indeed, out of any book she or he may read? Exactly what I myself like to receive--and frequently do receive-- from the books of others. There's one word that sums it up; it's a quality without which all other qualities, in books or in life, ring hollow. It takes many forms--forms of the mind, forms of the heart, forms of the soul. It includes both tragedy and comedy, and the play of language, and Memory, the mother of all nine Muses, and, above all, the experience of getting your socks knocked off. The desire for it explains--when we go back in our lives to look for causes--why we are all readers here, and why you do what you do, and why I do what I do, and why my vocation is also my obsession. It was a favourite word of the poet William Blake, and it's in the full sense of his use of it that I invoke it now. That word is Delight; and this is what I wish for you as readers--Delight, in all of its bookly incarnations.

To Delight.

I thank you.

--Margaret Atwood




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

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