Graeme Gibson was a Canadian novelist and Margaret Atwood’s husband. His fiction novels include Five Legs, Communion, Gentlemen Death, and Perpetual Motion, while his nonfiction works include The Bedside Book of Beasts and The Bedside Book of Birds. Gibson was instrumental in creating writers’ organizations in Canada. He founded the Writer’s Union of Canada and co-founded PEN Canada, a human rights organization for writers. He was also a passionate birder and contributed to bird conservation in Canada and around the world, including BirdLife.

In her work, Atwood presents Graeme as a bohemian spirit who loved travel, wildlife, and the arts. She emphasizes his rebellious youth, during which he was expelled from multiple schools and spent a lot of his time getting into mischief. She also paints Graeme as “chivalrous to the core and a born maiden-rescuer” (286), noting how he met his first wife, Shirley, when she found herself pregnant and abandoned by another man. Reminiscing on their decades-long marriage, Atwood presents Graeme as a stable and supportive partner with more than a few personal quirks, like his lack of financial acumen and physical clumsiness. While they had some personality differences, Atwood notes that she and Graeme bonded deeply over their love of nature, sharing writing work, farm life, bird conservation work, and world travels during over 40 years together. His death in the memoir’s final chapters contributes substantially to this section’s darkened tone, underscoring his centrality to Atwood’s life.

Carl Atwood was a Canadian entomologist and professor. Born in Nova Scotia, Atwood grew up with an interest in the outdoors and was a skilled builder and gardener. He met his wife, Margaret Killam, at the normal school in Truro. The two married in 1935 and had three children together. After completing his doctorate, Atwood accepted a job with the Department of Agriculture and later became a professor of forest entomology with the University of Toronto. His main interest was protecting Canadian forests from damaging insects.

In her work, Atwood describes her father as a hard-working and intelligent person who had a wide range of talents, from music to literature to science. She highlights how her father coped with many challenges while working in the remote wilderness with his young family in tow, including building their forest cabin by hand. Carl was innately a self-sufficient person, always looking for ways to expand the family’s property and grow more of their own food. Atwood explains, “Being from a small-time farming background, he was always interested in acquiring more land” (65). Atwood also recalls Carl’s stoic parenting style, sharing that he would rarely express negative feelings or opinions. She fondly remembers her times in nature with her father, particularly their canoe trip together. When writing about Carl’s passing, she shares a poem, “The Ottawa River By Night,” that conveys the dream she had about canoeing with her father, showing their special bond.

Margaret Killam was the author’s mother. She was born and raised in Nova Scotia, where she was “a tomboy and intensely athletic” and “somewhat rebellious” (9). Against her father’s wishes, she attended post-secondary school and became a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in rural Nova Scotia. After two years, she had saved enough money to attend Mount Allison Ladies’ College in Sackville, New Brunswick. There, she studied home economics and soon accepted a proposal from Carl Atwood, marrying him in 1935. Now a married woman living through the Great Depression, Margaret stopped working and focused on supporting her husband, typing up his doctoral thesis for him. Margaret also became the primary caregiver for their three children, Harold, Margaret, and Ruth. She thus both flouted and conformed to gender expectations, providing a counterpoint to her daughter, who grew up in an era when opportunities for women, though still limited, were expanding.

In her memoir, Atwood remembers her mother as a natural outdoorswoman who relished life in the forest. She recalls how her parenting style was largely hands-off; she encouraged Atwood to play and learn independently. Atwood’s decision to become a writer made her mother somewhat uncomfortable, as she preferred Atwood’s playful childhood self to her more intellectual writer self; this friction facilitates the memoir’s exploration of the tension between self-creation and the self as socially constructed. Nevertheless, the two women retained a strong bond. Fiercely independent, Margaret refused to live in a nursing home, and Atwood helped to honor this wish by supporting her mother’s independence until her death.