Instead of going away from Gilead,
as everyone thought we were doing in the '90s, we turned around
and started going back towards Gilead.
And we know that if you give people unlimited power
and no checks and balances, they will behave badly.
- Today we're gonna have a conversation with... - Ms. Margaret Atwood.
First name, last name, Margaret Atwood.
About "The Testaments."
- I'm excited... - To find out what makes Ms. Atwood tick.
She's kind of the Canadian literary queen.
And as a Canadian myself, I can't wait to deep dive into talking about this book.
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- Hi, everyone. I want you to meet Margaret Atwood. - Hi!
- Hello. - Hi. I'm Evelyn.
Margaret, as you know, "BookTube" is a vibrant community
of readers who come to YouTube to share their love of books
and reading and learning.
And we are so excited to be gathered here with you IRL
to discuss your latest novel "The Testaments."
Now, "The Testaments" is a sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale,"
which was published more than 30 years ago.
Can you tell us why did you write the sequel, and why now?
People have been wanting me to write a sequel
- for a long, long time. - Yeah, yeah.
And I wasn't gonna do it, and then a couple of things happened.
Number one, instead of going away from Gilead,
as everyone thought we were doing in the '90s,
we turned around and started going back towards Gilead.
- And by "we" you mean... - I mean--
- ...real life. - In particular, the United States.
- Cheryl: Mm-hmm. -
This outfit that the handmaids are made to wear
has become a symbol of the women's movement
in the United States. What do you think about that?
Margaret:
It started in Texas.
There was a moment when a lot of men
in dark suits were gonna sign into law
- legislation restricting women's bodies again. - Again.
Again. So, these women decided
that they would put on the handmaid's outfit
and go and just sit in the legislature.
As a protest, it's quite brilliant,
because nobody can kick you out
for creating a disturbance.
-
But everybody looking at it knows
-
So, that's where it spread from
in this iteration.
What happens in "The Testaments" is you get
three different perspectives on the concept of good and evil
and the choices we make and why we make those choices.
So can you talk about your experience
with writing about human behavior
and what it is about us
that creates "The Testaments"?
Okay, so there's four kinds of stories.
Ordinary people during ordinary times,
ordinary people during extraordinary times,
extraordinary people during ordinary times,
and extraordinary people during extraordinary times.
An ordinary person in ordinary times
doesn't usually get to choose, doesn't have to choose,
between good and evil.
So, totalitarian regimes stick it to people
about the choices.
What do I do?
Do I go along with it?
Do I resist overtly
and get shot immediately?
- Do I join the underground? - Yeah.
Of course, we all think we would be quite heroic.
- We may be wrong about that. - I feel like the character
- we're really talking about is Aunt Lydia. - Yes.
Margaret:
the enforcers of women in Gilead.
In "The Handmaid's Tale," which I just reread,
I was very much like, "Gah! She's such a villain."
Then in this book, we see from her actual perspective.
And you learn what she had to go through to get to this point
and what decisions she's making,
and how, ultimately, she's hoping to try her best
to bring down Gilead.
As with "Handmaid's Tale," I put nothing in
that I didn't have historical references for.
And there were a number of people like this both
in the Nazi regime
and in the Stalinist regime in Russia.
There's an interesting book,
'cause I read a lot of books
about World War II.
Himmler had a masseur.
Himmler suffered from all these strange aches and pains.
And this massage guy was the only one
who could alleviate his suffering.
So he would get Himmler on the table
and then he would get promises out of him
to save this person or that person
while he was doing the massaging.
So, you would say that he was complicit with the regime,
sure, but from within it, he was doing these
savings of people.
My name is Ariel Bissett.
I've been making YouTube videos since 2011,
when I was very lonely and needed someone to talk to about books.
I can finally talk about this feminism stuff.
Growing up in Canada, Margaret Atwood is very much
one of the literary icons of our country.
It's so cool that basically our biggest author
is a woman writing badass fiction.
I wanna ask you about the most powerful moment in the book for me.
It was the moment where I was just--
I felt so viscerally there.
And it's when Agnes first walks in and sees a pile of books
and asks, "Why are these so flammable, so ruinous?"
Right? So I wanted to ask you why did you
decide to take away the right in Gilead
for women to be able to read and to write?
What makes them so flammable and so ruinous?
Uh-huh.
Okay, so they got their right taken away
- because people have had that right taken away in history. - Mm-hmm.
And most noteworthily, under slavery in the United States,
- it was illegal for slaves to read and write. - Right.
So if you read the biography of Frederick Douglass, for instance,
that moment when he learns to read and write,
it's very, very powerful.
So reading and writing gives you access to knowledge
that other people don't want you to have.
- Right. - And that is why regimes try to control,
censor, burn, destroy any books
that might contradict them.
Gilead goes all the way and makes it impossible
for women to read and write
because then they can tell the women what's in the Bible,
- although it isn't necessarily. - Right.
And when she starts to read it, she realizes,
- "This is not what I was told." - This is not what I was told.
- Right. - Exactly.
I have a feeling you actually
probably know the exact percentage
of how many women there are in the world versus men.
- 51. - See, I knew she would know that.
So I just wanna know,
patriarchy--
I'm just like, how did this happen?
A long, long time ago,
there were hunter-gatherer societies.
And in hunter-gatherer societies, women are far more equal.
But then you get the advent of wheat.
What do you need to grow wheat?
You need upper body strength.
What do you need to defend the wheat?
You need a standing army to defend your territory.
The other thing you need
for this kind of setup is more children.
to help you farm the wheat.
- Mm-hmm. - Whereas hunter-gatherer society is limited
to their populations.
So, this is not nature's plan.
It's not inevitable.
It happened at a certain time in history.
Rationales were then made up for why it should be so,
as they are for any kind of power structures that benefit
- the top slice, which is who writes the texts. - Right.
- Mm. - Right?
But change is happening now because...
Women: Yes.
Indeed, so let's talk about you working that keyboard.
We would love to hear--
We've gone back to ancient history, the beginning of patriarchy.
What about the beginning of Margaret Atwood?
Like you, I grew up in the wilderness of northern Minnesota.
- You grew up in Quebec, right? - Northern Quebec, yeah.
And I'm curious about how that shaped you
as a human and as a writer, your time in the woods.
- Did you have electricity? - I did not have electricity.
I did not have indoor plumbing, I didn't have running water.
- Then you understand everything. - Yeah.
I know. Well, I feel very kindred with you in that regard.
I mean, people think of my experience in the wilderness
associated with my book "Wild,"
but it actually began much before that.
That's what I was curious
- about your girlhood in the woods. - Okay, self-reliance,
knowing where you are, so you don't get lost in the woods.
Cheryl:
Never throw anything out because you might need it.
- That's right. Or duct tape. - Never know when you might need a little bit of wire.
We didn't have duct tape, dear.
Okay, I'm the next generation.
Pieces of string.
But also no television, no movie theaters, no school,
-
But we did have books, and we did have--
I don't know where they got them, 'cause it was wartime,
but we did have some paper
and pencils and crayons.
And we did a lot of drawing
and writing of these little books.
And I think that therefore the book
became my one art form
that I really had any access to.
We're all dying to know about the beautiful exterior of this book.
So on the front here,
we have a woman who clearly lives in Gilead.
And on the back, we have a woman who clearly lives in the promised land.
- Margaret: And then there's the hidden girl. Yes. - Women: Yes.
And there's a hidden girl on the back.
- Interesting. - A hidden girl on the back?
- Wait, maybe I missed it. - Where is she?
- I see it. - Margaret: There's the hat. There's the girl.
- We're trying to find the hidden girl on the back. - Wait. Oh, wait.
The ponytail. Missed that.
The cover of the book is by Noma Bar.
And when it first arrived it was--
this part was pale blue.
And I thought it looked somewhat cold.
So I changed them to spring green.
- Love it. - Got out my crayons and colored the cover.
One of the things that has happened
since "The Handmaid's Tale" has been published
is the world has very much read that book.
They have also seen a movie adaptation of the book
and now a television show.
Did you have to do some coordinating
in terms of those characters?
Margaret:
that was directly flatly contradictory
- to what was in the show. - Right.
That was a bit difficult because I was writing the book in advance
- of them writing some of the show. - Mmm.
- But I can talk with the showrunner... - Wow.
...and say, "I need you to not kill Aunt Lydia, please."
- Cheryl:
You refer to the work you do as speculative fiction,
not science fiction or regular fiction.
- Not fantasy. - Can you talk more about that?
Not fantasy, yeah.
So, if you think of a line that descends
from Jules Verne in the 19th century,
who was writing about submarines and big balloons.
And then from Jules Verne, we have "Brave New World,"
we have "1984," we have "Fahrenheit 451."
That's the family of stories
to which "Handmaid's Tale" and "The Testaments" belong.
Did you read those books as a young woman?
Of course, and many others besides.
Do you remember the first book
that you read in this category of speculative fiction?
It was probably "Animal Farm,"
except that's more like a fantasy.
But, of course, I read it as a child
and I didn't realize that it was a political satire.
- Yes. - I thought it was about real animals,
and it just ruin-- absolutely ruined me.
My name's Evelyn, and I go by Evelyn From The Internets online.
Me? I was fly, skin glistening in the Louisiana sun.
I like to call myself a digital storyteller.
I feel like I'm repping for the 24 to 34
black women in the U.S.?
Margaret and I are gonna do some lightning round questions.
Are you ready?
All right, favorite book or author as a kid?
- Pick an age. Eight, okay. - Eight.
Eight I was reading a lot of Andrew Lang.
"Red Fairy Book," "Green Fairy Book."
He had all of these fairytales.
What did you wanna be when you grew up?
- Okay, at which age? - Eight.
When I was eight. I didn't have a lot
of ambitions when I was eight.
- Let's take 11. - Okay.
11, I was gonna be a famous painter.
- Ooh. - Ooh.
What's your favorite time period in history?
Henry VIII is endlessly fascinating to read about,
but it would've been hell to have been actually in his court
because your head would be next to roll.
What's your biggest pet peeve?
My biggest pet peeve is people who do not acknowledge
or understand that we are in a climate emergency.
In "Handmaid's Tale," it's an environmental crisis.
And I'm curious why you wanted to have the environment,
- because you are an environmentalist. - Yeah, true.
Is that an important topic to think about
how that could be a contributing factor to that leading--
- Because everything's connected. - Yeah.
And you're seeing that right now.
So you're seeing climate emergency,
things get warmer, food supplies go down,
There are crop failures, there are famines,
there are hurricanes, there are floods.
And all of that affects food supply and social stability.
As things stop working, people become angry and fearful,
and they think it's somebody's fault.
And they think if they can overturn whoever's in charge
and put somebody else in charge, that it will get better.
- Yeah. - But we know that if you give people unlimited power
and no checks and balances, they will behave badly.
We have seen that time and time again.
- Mm-hmm. - That's why there should always
be checks, balances, oversights on any kind of power.
Left to its devices, it just gets worse.
What I noticed and I love is that you put song into the story,
and it feels very real and it adds so much depth to the world.
How did you, not even just come up with the songs, but how did you find
the right place in the story to put the songs in the story?
Every culture sings.
It stood to reason
for me, number one,
that the Aunts would have liturgical songs,
and also that children would invent songs
and dark rituals.
That's why it's so rich.
That's why it adds so much depth to the world.
Because it's in the world.
So, a little happy skippity hoppity version of childhood
with no awareness of darker motifs
is not going to feel real to us at all.
'Cause we've been children. We know it's not true.
Hi, my name is Amerie and my YouTube channel is Amerie.
I'm a writer. I am a singer-songwriter.
One thing I love is having an extensive library.
And that doesn't mean grabbing anything,
it means grabbing things that I think not only will interest me,
not only that I will hopefully enjoy,
but also things that I may want to re-read.
The most important thing when you're reading literature
is to see humanity at its best and at its worst.
I wanted to ask if you wouldn't mind sharing with us the last line?
The last line is...
And it is a quote, as you know, from The Bible,
and it is from the Song of Solomon.
It makes it so admirable that you're an optimist
and that you're able to maintain this hope about humanity.
But I see a lot of good things that they do, too.
Some people do some quite brave things,
which some of us would also do under the circumstances maybe.
But we don't really know,
faced with impossible choices and difficult decisions--
we don't really know what we would do until we're there.
I was so moved by the end of the book.
When I read the last page I was on an airplane,
and I burst into tears
- at the last line. - Aww.
Did you cry after you wrote that final line?
Did I cry?
Well, tears were shed during the writing of the book.
You've written about a society
where evil has prevailed for a long time.
And what we see, I think, so much in "The Testaments"
is the testament to love and a great sense of hope.
Well, there is hope.
The hopeful part is that Gilead did not last.
The open question is what replaced it?
- Mm. - Margaret Atwood,
thank you so much
for joining us on "BookTube" today.
- And thank you all. - Thank you.
It's so much more fun to discuss books with friends.
- Yes. - So, thanks for being here, all of you.
- Thank you. - Thank you.
- Are you making your own little tubes? - Yes.
- Are you an "influencer"? - I am.
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