Some years ago, I was asked to make a stunt appearance on a comedy show. The host, Rick Mercer, was doing a series in which people well known for one kind of accomplishment, such as writing, astonished viewers by doing something different and entirely unrelated, such as rolling a joint.
“I want you to be a hockey goalie,” Rick said.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “Couldn’t I just maybe bake a pie or something?”
“No. You gotta be a goalie.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll be funny. Trust me.”
So I was a goalie, in a full set of pads, with gloves and a stick. There I am on YouTube, still goalie-ing it up; and, yes, it is kind of funny.
I wore my own little white figure skates with black socks over them to make them look like hockey skates. But you can’t slide and stack the pads in figure skates, so those feats were performed by a body double – an accomplished women’s hockey player. With her face mask on, you can’t tell that it isn’t me. It’s the job of the body double to take the risks you yourself are too sedate or chicken or unaccomplished to take.
I wish I could have a body double in my real life, I thought. It would come in so handy.
Of course, I do have one. Every writer does. The body double appears as soon as you start writing. How can it be otherwise? There’s the daily you, and then there’s the other person who does the actual writing. They aren’t the same. But, in my case, there are more than two. There are lots.
Some months after my sixth novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, had been published, I was doing a book event to promote it. During audience question time – with open mics, which many folks present used to deliver sermons – a man gave his opinion.
“So, The Handmaid’s Tale is autobiography,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“No, it’s not,” I said.
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not. It’s set in the future,” I said.
“That’s no excuse,” he said.
He was wrong, of course. Within my own lived experience, I had not donned a red outfit and a white bonnet and been coerced into procreating for the top brass of a theological hierarchy. But, in a very broad sense, he was right. Everything that gets into your writing has gone through your mind in some form. You may mix and match and create new chimeras, but the primary materials have to have travelled through your head.
While discussing my novel Cat’s Eye when it first appeared, I was evasive. Was the novel based on my own personal experience? Well, I would say, judging from the large number of letters from many different countries relating similar and worse experiences, it would appear to have reflected universals. This was true. Letters poured in, from erstwhile children, from their siblings, from their parents: accounts of lifelong trauma inflicted by girls on other girls, men saying they’d never understood until now what was going on among the girls in Grade Four, despairing parents wondering what to do about the misery being inflicted on their girl by other girls. When I did public book signings, some women would break down in tears while thanking me for writing the book.
“You knew a Cordelia,” I would say. Yes. They had.
Cat’s Eye was nominated for the Booker prize, and Graeme and I went to the dinner in London. I’d made myself a stretchy, strapless, silver-sequined top to be worn under a black jacket, though I hadn’t quite finished it and had fastened it up at the back with big safety pins. I’m sure the book proceedings were riveting, though I was preoccupied: would my elasticized silver top escape from its safety pins and go sproinging across the room?
My silver top was to no avail. “Atwood fails to win Booker,” as the Canadian press was now in the habit of saying. However, no prize depends on your own active participation: it’s not an athletic contest, so you can’t exactly fail at it. More like Best Pig in Show: the pig stands there looking fat as someone else pins a ribbon on it. I did get a nice handbound copy of my own book, however.
Alias Grace was shortlisted for the Booker prize, but didn’t win it. The head of the jury was the formidable toughie Carmen Callil, once of the feminist press Virago, who announced in her speech that we’d had enough of colonials and the Celtic fringe, and that it was time for an English man to win.
By this time, I had a running contest going on with novelist Beryl Bainbridge as to which of us could get nominated for the Booker the most times without actually winning. So far, we were even-steven. I received a lot of mail about Alias Grace. Some writers wanted to know if they were related to Grace. (Unlikely.) Some fans made the quilt that Grace makes at the end of the book – “The Tree of Paradise” – and sent me pictures of it, and in some cases the actual quilt.
But then in 2000 The Blind Assassin won the Booker prize. Whew, I thought. I no longer have to deal with reporters asking me why I didn’t win it, only with the ones who’ll be saying why I shouldn’t have.
We were on a publicity tour for The Testaments in London when Graeme woke in the night with a terrible headache. By six in the morning he couldn’t speak, or move his eyes, one of his arms, and one of his legs. I called an ambulance. The nice paramedics arrived. Because the hotel was very old, the elevators were too small to accommodate a gurney, so they’d brought a wheelchair. At first Graeme refused to bend his legs so they could get him into it. He feared they would take him to a hospital and try to save him by doing an operation on him. But I had vowed I wouldn’t let that happen. I told him it would be all right, and we finally got him into the ambulance. I promised him that I would follow his wishes, and he relaxed. We held hands, as we’d been doing so frequently in the past year.
I called my director of operations, Lucia Cino, who – thankfully – had come with us from Italy to London. I don’t know what I would have done without her help. She worked the phone and emails, telling all the publishers and agents what had happened and explaining that the book tour they’d arranged would have to be postponed and possibly cancelled. Friends and relatives were informed. Meanwhile, the ambulance took Graeme and me to the hospital and Graeme had an MRI. Together with the doctors, I looked at the images. Graeme had had a massive cerebral hemorrhage. “There’s nothing we can do,” said the doctors.
“I can see that,” I said.
“Thank you,” they said. They must have had to deal with many tearful people pleading with them to restore their doomed loved ones to health.
I’d told Jess and Matthew that maybe they shouldn’t fly over, as Graeme wasn’t likely to be conscious for long – the brain bleed was vertical and moving down, and would hit the brain stem quite soon, which would shut off his breathing. Of course they came anyway. They were in time for a smile and a squeeze of the hand from Graeme. He knew they were there.
Earlier in the year, he’d talked all the kids through the event we all knew was coming. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,” he’d told them. “But it will be hard on her.” By “her” he meant me. This was true.
‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing,” said Henry James as he was dying. Emily Dickinson said, “The fog is rising.” Oscar Wilde said, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” Shakespeare’s Prospero said, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” It’s soothing to know so many others have passed through these doors – the door of dying, the door of grieving – but then there are the minutes, the hours, the days, the mundane details before those doors finally open. Graeme had a strong heart. It would take a while for it to stop.
The hospital decided on palliative care, and provided us with a mattress on the floor of Graeme’s room. The two kids and I took turns sleeping on it, while walking back and forth over Primrose Hill to the bed and breakfast that the writer Xandra Bingley had found for us on her street. We ate in cafes, blurry from lack of sleep. We drank coffee. How could the mornings be so crisp and beautiful? How could the evenings be so pink and calm?
We played Graeme’s favourite music for him, and bird calls, and sea sounds. We talked to him. We told him that we loved him. Did he hear? No way of knowing.
He had the stroke on 13 September and died on 18 September, at noon. We sat with him for a while, knowing and not knowing at the same time. All these days we’d been telling the hospital lady who wheeled soup around on a cart at lunchtime that, no, we didn’t want any soup. It occurred to us that the poor soup lady might come to the room, go in, and find a corpse, so Jess stopped by the desk, gave the room number, and said, “He won’t be needing any soup.” Pause. “Because he’s dead.”
Then we went cackling off to the elevator. Giddiness had set in, as it often does at solemn moments. Why is that? The release of tension – the tension of waiting? The universal desire to laugh in church? Plain old denial? He can’t possibly be just … gone. We can all believe three things simultaneously: the person is in the ground. The person is in the Afterlife. The person is in the next room. You keep expecting to see him.
Even when you know it’s coming, a death is a shock. Shock as in electrical shock: you’re stunned, you can’t place yourself. You wander around in hyperspace; you appear focused, but you’re not all there. Somehow you go through the motions. Afterwards, you won’t quite remember what happened during this time. That’s why friends and neighbours gather around and bring food: they know you aren’t fully present.
Many have walked this pathway, over thousands and thousands of years. Many more will find themselves travelling on it in the future. Yet the death of a beloved one is still hard to grasp.
Xandra Bingley gave us all dinner that evening. Odd how lightheaded we were – almost jolly. The next day we packed up Graeme’s things. Matthew stayed behind to take care of what are euphemistically called “the arrangements”. Canada House was a great help – the certificates, how to arrange the plane transfer of the ashy remains, all that – having done this a lot before. They had a procedure. Canadians, it seemed, had a habit of dying in London.
Then I took a plane to New York. Jess accompanied me. I watched Minions on the plane’s back-of-seat screen. That’s what you need in moments of deep gloom: total idiocy.
Did I get off the plane and walk on to Seth Meyers show? It seems I did. A book tour is a form of showbiz: the show must go on. Right after that, I staggered off to a dinner thrown for me by my US publisher. To the friends who came, I seemed functional, but that isn’t how I felt. A robot had taken me over and was doing the conversations and spooning up the dessert, and I was trapped inside it.
Some people were surprised that I continued with the book tour for The Testaments. But ask yourself, Dear Reader: the busy schedule or the empty chair? I chose the busy schedule. The empty chair would be there when I got home.
