Atwood was accepted into the University of Toronto. While she had a bit of help from her parents and a small scholarship, Atwood had also had to save up for her tuition. She worked as a waitress at a summer camp, where she befriended her fellow waitresses and found creative expression baking cakes and performing in a funny operetta. Meanwhile, she kept in touch with her boyfriend, Paul, who was traveling across Canada. After her waitressing stint, her father came to get her, and the two drove to northern Quebec, where they went on a canoeing trip together. The memory of canoeing on the moonlit lake with her father inspired Atwood’s poem “A Boat.”

When she began university, Atwood felt that she did not fit in socially. She was unsure of how to dress and whom to befriend. While she initially studied philosophy and English, she soon changed her major, feeling that the prevailing attitude of the philosophy department was that scientific truths were more important than the arts. Now an “English Honours” major, Atwood met fellow student Denis Lee, who would go on to have a huge influence on her life.

Over the course of university, Atwood had the same job each summer: running a nature program at a Jewish summer camp at Lake Placid. Atwood was a natural at the job since she had been interested in nature since she was a little girl. However, a surprising amount of the work involved managing the children’s behavior—and numerous bed-wetting episodes. Atwood befriended the camp counselors, who were rabbinical students from the city and unused to the harsh climate and insects of rural Ontario summers. She fondly remembers helping them hide their illicit beer in the lake and rowing them out to enjoy it from time to time. The younger boys were most keen to sign up for Atwood’s nature program, and her experiences informed her poem, “Snake Woman,” in which she reminisces about her time as the fearless snake handler at camp.

The camp’s owner, Joe, was keenly interested in social improvement and human rights. He hired people of different backgrounds and made peace and cooperation part of the camp curriculum. Atwood feels that this had a positive influence on her and many of the young campers. She reflects on how Camp White Pine was a safe and fun place for young Jewish people at a time when there was pronounced antisemitism in Canada. Atwood still has fond memories of her time there and knows that being “Peggy Nature,” as she was known at camp, is one of her many selves. Sometimes campers still recognize her as “Peggy Nature” on the streets today.

Atwood’s university courses were challenging but interesting. She was also very involved in student activities on campus, especially in the arts. She and her friends enjoyed hanging out in the “King Cole Room,” a cellar pub with cheap beer. Her brother, Harold, married a creative woman named Lenore, whom Atwood adored. At this time, she continued writing in her free time, focusing on poetry. While she endured many rejections, she was published in college literary magazines and The Canadian Forum.

While Atwood was buoyed by these early successes, her parents were still reluctant to support her writing aspirations. Her mother loved the “Peggy” version of her: the little girl who loved nature and artistic hobbies like crochet and cake decorating. Atwood feels that her mother was scared of the “M.E. Atwood” writerly version of herself, which was more intellectual and sometimes dark.

Nevertheless, Atwood continued writing and even collaborated with a close friend on a writing persona called “Shakesbeat Latweed,” a parody of Shakespeare combined with other poets and beat verse. Atwood’s budding career as a poet also took her to The Bohemian Embassy, a cafe bookshop where there was folk music and poetry readings. While she feels the quality of her work at this time was not very good, she knows it was all valuable practice for being in the public eye and performing her work.

She was accepted to graduate school and awarded the Woodrow Wilson scholarship. However, when she met with her career counsellor, he advised her to drop out, marry, and have children. Disappointed, Atwood ignored this advice but continued to grapple with the received wisdom that a woman could have a career or a family, but not both. Feeling pressured to do well, Atwood once took a “benny,” or benzedrine, pill before an exam. She was pleased to get an A, though she cannot remember what she wrote.

Meanwhile, she tutored a woman from Czechoslovakia and learned more about the atrocities in the USSR. She also befriended Adrienne Clarkson, who would go on to become the governor general of Canada. Atwood continued to develop, dating different people, moving out of her parents’ house, and living in the home of one of her professors near campus.

Now in her early twenties, Atwood self-published a chapbook of poetry called Double Persephone. In these poems, Atwood wrote from the perspective of the Greek goddess Persephone and even designed the cover herself with her own linoblock original illustration. Atwood asked local bookshops to sell her chapbook, and it was reviewed by the University of Toronto Quarterly, a small triumph.

Atwood explains that at this time, Canada had little to no literary infrastructure or support. There was only one creative writing university program in the whole country, and Canadians did not consider Canadian literature—what little there was of it—worth reading. Atwood laments that Canadians did not even grow up reading Canadian literature in schools. People in English-speaking Canada had been raised on British and Protestant curriculum, while in French-speaking Canada, people studied more French literature and had a Catholic curriculum. This system finally dissolved in the 1960s as education became more secular and somewhat more open.

Faced with this literary desert, aspiring writers like Atwood were advised to move to major European or American cities, where there were more publishing houses and a greater audience for their work. Atwood proudly relates that instead, she and other creatives stayed in Canada and built a literary scene from scratch, founding publishing houses and creative writing programs and normalizing author interviews, book tours, readings, and more.

In 1961, Atwood moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin her doctoral program in Victorian literature at Harvard University. Atwood felt a bit disappointed by Cambridge and was struggling with her persistent anemia, which left her tired and weak. She befriended her roommate, Mary Irving Carlyle, who was from North Carolina and stood out more than Atwood. She later learned that the college authorities had put all the “misfits”—“the Southerners, the New York Jews, those of atypical biological beliefs, the drug-addled, the Canadians” (169)—into the same living quarters, as they expected them to tolerate each other better. Atwood did not feel like she was boldly pioneering a new path for women at Harvard but simply felt she was taking her chances and hoping for the best for herself.

It was an anxious time to be a woman on campus. The women’s graduate dorm building attracted many intimidating and criminal men who tried to access the rooms and bathrooms. One night, Atwood and her roommate even woke up with a man in their rooms who then fled out the window. To make matters worse, the “Boston Strangler” was targeting women, killing them in their apartments. Worried, Atwood took a class in self-defense.

While at Harvard, Atwood absorbed the New England scenery, which would go on to influence her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Each building in the story was inspired by campus buildings. Atwood remembers that Harvard gave the novel a poor review when it was first published but later changed its tune. As Atwood began her studies, she knew that she would have to learn more about American literature, as this was the subject of one of her main exams. With some of her ancestors being Puritans, she was interested in their beliefs and read about the Salem witch trials and some of the literature that influenced it, such as The Hammer of Witches. Atwood was able to find her own ancestors in Harvard’s resources and even identified a woman accused of witchcraft as one of her family members.

That summer, Atwood returned to Toronto to work and save money. She broke up with her boyfriend, who was unfaithful and threatening, and did not change her mind when he followed her to her cafe job every day. She soon quit and graded high school exams instead. When she returned to Harvard, she missed her old dorm friends, who had moved out, and dealt with the panic of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Still friends with Mary Irving, she attended Mary’s wedding in the South, which was still segregated at the time. Atwood wrote the best man’s speech for him because he did not know what to say, and she kept a lid on her liberal politics while talking to Mary’s family. Back at Harvard, she befriended fellow student Jim Polk, a Montanan with a pet rat who was also studying Victorian literature.

Atwood titled her first novel, Up in the Air So Blue, after a line from a poem. She wrote it in the evenings as a 23- and 24-year-old while living in a sparse rooming house run by two elderly men. Atwood had decided not to return to Harvard, feeling ill-prepared for her Latin exam and missing her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Jim Polk. Atwood compared herself to teenage female novelists and felt that she must write a successful novel soon since she was already 23.

She felt incredibly lucky to be hired at Canadian Facts, a company that asked reviewers to test products and share their insights. Her job was to transform the managers’ questions into a clear survey for the testers. Since she could complete her work in a few hours per day, Atwood brought in notes for her novel and began typing it up at work. Meanwhile, the experiences she heard of from the housewives who reviewed products helped to inspire her book The Edible Woman. At work, Atwood befriended her manager, Mrs. Sims, who had a practice of extending jobs to people who needed them the most. Atwood also became close to her co-worker Bev, who was extricating herself from a bad marriage. The women remained close friends for years.

This support system was especially helpful to Atwood as she, too, ended an unfulfilling relationship. She had been engaged to a boyfriend from university and worried about their impulsive decision to marry. Eventually, they mutually decided to break up, which made Atwood both sad and relieved, as they were not compatible and he was not supportive of her writing ambitions. Atwood completed her first novel, Up in the Air So Blue, and sent it off to the few Canadian publishers that existed at that time.

Soon after finishing Up in the Air So Blue, Atwood visited her friend Doug Jones, a poet, his wife, Kim, and their four children at their cottage in rural Ontario. Seeing their happy family life made Atwood realize that a writer’s life did not have to be dour and lonely but could involve a life partnership and children. The family often played “circle games,” like Farmer in the Dell, which Atwood drew on in her book of poems, The Circle Game. There, she also met a very young Michael Ondaatje, who would go on to become a well-known novelist. Atwood was later shocked to discover that Michael was having an affair with Kim, which broke the family apart. She could not believe that such a picture-perfect couple was having problems, and it made her question if long-term romantic relationships could last.

She borrowed money from her parents to go to Europe, as she wanted to explore England and France while continuing to write. Landing in London, Atwood found it less historical than she had hoped and incredibly unaffordable for her meager means. Luckily, she ran into a friend from college who was living in a crumbling mansion with other women. The two of them explored England’s towns and countryside together, with Atwood particularly enjoying places with literary or historical significance. Throughout her travels, she continued writing poems and stories in longhand, as she did not have access to a typewriter.

Unexpectedly, she met Jim Polk, and they traveled on to France together, eating cheaply and staying in hostels. When she arrived back in Canada, she visited Doug again. Now both single, Doug and Atwood began a fling, but at 24, she had other ambitions than to become a step-mother to his children. Instead, she left and took the train across Canada to Vancouver to begin a teaching job.