After completing The Robber Bride, Atwood began working on a new novel, Alias Grace. She began writing it in a Zurich hotel room and wondered what the gruesome scene she was describing could be about, and who her characters were. She realized that she was inspired by the story of Grace Marks, a real-life Ontario woman who had been accused of murder and sent to an asylum. With the help of Ruth, Atwood researched Grace’s life, trying to ascertain whether she was likely innocent, guilty, or experiencing mental illness at the time of the murders. She found contradicting accounts and decided to write the story from the first-person perspective, with Grace herself as the unreliable narrator. The novel was later nominated for the Booker prize, an award Atwood had been in the running for repeatedly. She received many inquiries about her novel, with some fans sending her quilts like the one Grace makes in the book. One young Canadian actress, Sarah Polley, expressed her admiration for the novel and her desire to make it into a film, which, 20 years later, she did.

While Atwood completed her work on Alias Grace, she went through another personal ordeal. Graeme’s ex-wife, Shirley, had been found dead in the kitchen of her new home. Atwood, a believer in ghosts, thought Shirley might haunt the house and did a ceremony with exorcists to encourage the “entities” to leave. She then sold the house to her stepson’s friends.

After her father’s passing, Atwood helped to support her mother, who refused to live in a care home. Her mother’s vision was increasingly limited, but she still had a sharp wit. Atwood began writing her novel The Blind Assassin, a story within a story about a wealthy woman and leftist man having an affair in the 1930s while creating a pulp fantasy. When the novel came out, a scathing review was published in The New York Times, yet it went on to win the Booker Prize. Atwood reflects on how she tried to remain stoic about criticism and handle it with humor.

A more hurtful episode was when Atwood agreed to an interview with the newspaper The Globe and Mail. The journalist, Jan Wong, asked intrusive questions and misrepresented Atwood, sometimes even inventing personal information Atwood did not give her. Atwood felt threatened by Wong’s strange assertion that she kept her daughter’s life private out of fear of kidnapping, particularly because Wong then revealed where her daughter attended university. The Globe and Mail did not apologize to Atwood, though some of its journalists disapproved of the piece.

Atwood and her family traveled again, visiting Australia and Japan. While traveling through tropical Australia, Atwood went birding and learned about the Indigenous people of the area. This inspired her novel Oryx and Crake. Atwood was waiting to board a flight to New York when she learned about the events of 9/11; her flight was cancelled. While the world changed quickly around her, Atwood worked away on Oryx and Crake, soliciting a young man’s opinion of her male protagonist’s perspective. The novel, a dark science-fiction tale, was released to mixed reviews.

Atwood, now very famous in Canada, continued to be the target of malicious accusations and gossip in the media. She recalls one journalist’s claim that she said something critical of George W. Bush while at an antiwar rally. The accusations appeared in The Globe and Mail. In reality, she was having her hair cut at the time of the rally. When she accused the paper of libel, they printed a small retraction, but the journalist in question continued to write negatively about her afterward.

Atwood continued to take on a variety of projects. A trio of publishers decided to collaborate on a retelling of a myth and asked Atwood to reinterpret a myth of her choice. Intimidated, she tried to get out of the obligation but ultimately settled on retelling the ancient Greek story of Penelope and the 12 maids. Atwood ended up loving the project, which would become The Penelopiad, even collaborating on a theatrical reading of her myth in London.

In 2006, Atwood published Moral Disorder, a collection of stories, most of which center on the characters Nell and Tig. This fictitious couple is based on her and her husband Graeme, but the book also contains some nods to her parents. After some persuading, she agreed to be the Massey Lecturer for 2009. This involved writing a book and then delivering five lectures across Canada on its subject matter, with the print published by Anansi and the broadcast aired by the CBC. She focused on matters of debtor-creditor relations in fiction and real life, with the 2008 financial crash becoming an interesting coincidence. Atwood found that the publishing world changed immensely in the recession that followed, and she and her literary agent came up with their own publicity tour to promote her latest novel, The Year of the Flood. She also accepted a role as a mentor to a young author, Naomi Alderman, befriending her and taking her on birding trips while giving her writing feedback.

Meanwhile, Atwood and her husband became even more involved in supporting bird conservation in Canada and around the world. They also purchased a home in the wilderness a couple hours outside Toronto, undertaking an ambitious renovation. Graeme enjoyed nature, and Atwood wrote in the basement suite. Atwood and Graeme’s travels on Adventure Canada ships, on which they both gave talks to the passengers, inspired her 2014 story collection Stone Mattress. The main story revolves around a murder plot on a ship.

In 2012, at the age of 80, Graeme was diagnosed with dementia. While he accepted this news and life carried on more or less as normal, Atwood felt that they were “treading water,” and she dreaded his decline. Her busy professional life continued as she published her 2013 novel Maddaddam, which a British theater company later developed into an opera. She also accepted a new project from an editor in London, who asked her to choose a Shakespeare play to adapt into a novel format. She chose The Tempest and set it in a prison since all of the characters in the play are imprisoned in some way; this became the novel Hag-Seed.

In 2016, Atwood was supportive when the rights to The Handmaid’s Tale were finally sold and director Bruce Miller planned to make it into a television series. She was impressed with the passion the cast and crew brought to the show’s production and agreed to do a cameo as one of the “Aunts.” She was disturbed when Trump won the US federal election and felt that the ongoing political struggle for reproductive rights meant that the show would be newly relevant to American audiences.

Atwood summarizes Canadian author Steven Galloway’s fall from grace as the head of the creative writing department at UBC. After being accused of rape by a dean from the university, Galloway was fired. After an inquiry, a judge decided that Galloway was innocent and that the woman, with whom Galloway had had an affair, had made false accusations against him. Atwood was disturbed by how quickly people judged Galloway to be guilty in spite of his accuser’s changing story. She was especially disturbed that some of the faculty who had supported due process for Galloway were fired themselves. When she voiced support for Galloway’s due process, people accused her of enabling harm to women. Atwood rejects this mindset, likening it to a “cult” and maintaining that believing all women and finding all accused men guilty is too simplistic; she argues that everyone deserves the right to a trial. This scandal contributed to her novel The Testaments, in which Aunt Lydia gathers shreds of information to piece together the true story.

The show The Handmaid’s Tale was well-received in the States. However, viewers and fans had high expectations of Atwood and were sometimes disappointed by her understanding of the feminist cause. Atwood was similarly impressed with Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Alias Grace into a Netflix series. The Canadian actress and director made good on her teenage vow to someday adapt the novel. It was after collaborating with Polley on that project that Atwood began The Testaments. In hindsight, she cannot believe she completed it, as her personal life was full of stress as Graeme’s dementia worsened.

The two carried on doing what they enjoyed: spending the winter months in Norwich, England, going on Adventure Canada trips, and birdwatching. Graeme began to be more forgetful but kept a positive attitude. Disaster struck when Graeme’s son had a stroke and went into a weeks-long coma. However, the family rallied to support him, and when he began to recover, Graeme and Atwood went on another adventure to Australia. Graeme appreciating each moment even as his memory continued to deteriorate. Atwood was touched when he apologized for having doubts about marriage, a rough patch from 40 years before, and forgave him.

As Atwood worked on The Testaments, her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, the publishing world was gripped by scandal as a manuscript thief successfully conned authors into sending him their work. Atwood and her publishers worked out a secure way to communicate, but Atwood jeopardized this when she forgot her laptop on a plane. She was relieved to be reunited with it. Ultimately, the trickster was caught, and Atwood learned that he was a publishing professional who was stealing manuscripts for his own entertainment. When The Testaments was finally released, Graeme accompanied Atwood to the launch in England, determined to make the most of the time he had left.

While in England, Graeme had a massive stroke. He spent five days in hospital and then passed away. Atwood was determined to honor his wishes and not support any heroic measures to save him.

Atwood felt “stunned” by his death, finding it difficult to fully grasp. However, she was determined that the book launch continue and tried to honor all her commitments. She felt somewhat robotic as she went through the promotion and had helpers assist her. She also felt strangely alone in her hotel rooms at night, having not been single for so long. Once her promotion was over, Atwood dealt with her grief by traveling with friends, which became a challenge when she was diagnosed with shingles. Her travels were then interrupted when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Atwood worried about this new illness circulating the globe.

At home, she began compiling poetry for a book called Dearly. Many of these poems are about grieving for Graeme, both before and after his passing.

Atwood’s daughter, son-in-law, and grandson drove from New York to Toronto, where they lived with Atwood for the duration of the pandemic. Atwood tried to stay involved in the arts by participating in Zoom functions, and she also participated in a program called “Practical Utopias” in which students designed carbon-neutral societies. She kept active by going for walks with friends, even in Toronto’s chilly winters. While the COVID-19 era had its fears and inconveniences, she remembers being glad to have her family close by.

In spite of her heart condition, Atwood has continued her love of travel and writing. She produced a book of short stories called Old Babes in the Woods, mainly based on her and her sister, though some of the works reflect her experiences as a widow, and the surreal nature of losing a partner. She explains that she wrote these stories to reconnect with Graeme and relive their happy times, hoping that he could somehow hear them.

In 2024, Atwood released a book of poetry entitled Paper Boat, which includes poems from 1961 to 2024. She selected this title as it captures the fragility of human beings. While Atwood feels that art lasts for a long time, “life is fleeting” (551), and she knows that the end of her own life is near. Reflecting on her decades of poetry helped Atwood relive her life’s most significant moments while reinforcing how much the world has changed since she began writing in 1956. She hopes the best for the world but is also realistic about all the ways things are going wrong, noting the rise of authoritarianism, including in the US. Atwood ponders the best way to end the story of her life, noting that happy endings are not as convincing as they once were, and reviews a few famous novel endings. Like the mice at the end of The Tailor of Gloucester, she is also out of material.