Book of Lives, as its title suggests, reflects on the many lives Atwood has lived: as a child in Toronto and the Canadian wilderness, as a young professor and poet, as a mother, and, of course, as a novelist. In sharing anecdotes from her many lives, the author explicitly connects her experiences to the events and characters portrayed in her novels. Atwood believes that all writers draw on real life when creating their stories and that understanding the author’s context is essential to comprehending their work since writing does not happen “in a vacuum” (319).

In part, this insistence on the life behind the work reflects Atwood’s attunement to questions of marginalization and inequity. The sexism that drives the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale is something that Atwood has encountered firsthand (albeit in less severe form), but she also recalls learning about the different ways women have been oppressed around the world and using this information as fodder for her novel. The regimes in Afghanistan and Iran partly inspired her idea of a theocracy that controls women’s freedom and reproduction. In learning more about human rights’ issues around the world, Atwood also learned that in Argentina, the ruling generals murdered dissident women and then raised their babies, a surreal form of violence that informed the novel’s plot, in which women are forced to reproduce for the elite. While Atwood resists defining herself simply as a “feminist” writer, her memoir suggests that the experience of living as a woman necessarily informs her work.

At the same time, this amalgamation of different sources into something distinct suggests that understanding the standpoint an author brings to their work is only part of the puzzle. The memoir implies that a committed writer is always taking in their surroundings, consciously and unconsciously. She remembers of her travels in Afghanistan, “In the market I bought a chador—the long garment for women with a mesh opening to see through—and tried it on. Inside, it was stuffy, with limited vision” (397). This image of Atwood trying on the chador figuratively evokes her efforts to immerse herself in the world around her, absorbing material that she would later repurpose, sometimes in unexpected ways—e.g., the library at Harvard that became a secret police headquarters in The Handmaid’s Tale. Her discussion of The Edible Woman reveals a similar process of synthesis and transformation. For example, her job as a market researcher provided insights that “all ended up in The Edible Woman, one way or another” (188). The qualification “one way or another” underscores that the relationship between reality and fiction is not one-to-one; rather, it involves recombining elements and drawing on symbolic associations. Thus, her increasingly strained relationship with her first fiancé also helped inspire her plot and protagonist for this novel.

Atwood implies that this process of transmutation can be cathartic. At the time she was writing The Edible Woman, Atwood, too, felt trapped in a “mental fog” and increasingly dissociated as her relationship deteriorated. She recalls, “Without the composition of my novel as a psychic escape hatch, I was now stuck with real life—a real life in which I was getting married. Paralysis. Conflict. Despair. Sulky behaviour on my part. Failure to smile. Loss of interest in sex” (192). Such passages suggest that novel-writing is one way to process and repackage real-life experiences while imbuing novels with depth and realism.