The Testaments
The Testaments
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Margaret Atwood on The Testaments
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Thirty-four years of no, then 2016For three decades, the barrier to a sequel was not reluctance so much as a technical impossibility. Offred’s narration in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ shaped by one woman’s radically limited vantage point, left no room to re-enter without falsifying the voice that had made the original work.
I couldn’t do it. Not possible. To recreate that voice and do more of it. I just couldn’t.
What finally broke the thirty-four-year refusal was not a craft solution but a political one. The religious-right movement Atwood had been tracking since the early 1980s had, by 2016, reached a scale she had not anticipated when she first imagined Gilead, the theocratic regime at the center of both novels.
For a long time we were going away from Gilead and then we turned around and started going back towards Gilead, so it did seem pertinent.
Once the decision was made, the question she needed to answer was not ‘what happens next?’ but something more specific and historically grounded. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ had established through a future-set epilogue that Gilead eventually falls, but left the mechanism of collapse entirely unexamined.
I wanted to explore the beginning of the end of Gilead. As Churchill said: ‘It is not the end, and it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.’ How did these things fall apart? That idea fascinated me.
That question, how authoritarian regimes actually crumble from within, gave ‘The Testaments’ its structural spine and determined which narrator could plausibly carry it.
How she wrote it
The one character who knew enoughOnce Atwood ruled out returning to Offred’s constrained point of view, she worked through the cast of the original asking which character had access to the regime’s inner workings that no handmaid could. Aunt Lydia, present throughout the first book but deliberately kept opaque, was the only answer. To build her interiority, Atwood researched historical figures who had held similar positions of constrained authority, including reading the diaries of Joseph Goebbels.
How do you get to be such a person? How do you act within that structure? What are your fears, what are your goals, when you’re in that position channeling J. Edgar Hoover, who collected dirt on everybody?
The same historical discipline that governed ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ every dark element required a real-world precedent, was applied to the sequel without compromise. This was a deliberate defense against a particular kind of dismissal.
I didn’t want people saying, like some have said, ‘How did you make up all this twisted stuff?’
The title she chose carried more weight than a single reading could hold. She worked through its layers when pressed to explain her choice, and the answer revealed how precisely she had calibrated the book’s relationship to testimony, scripture, and legal inheritance all at once.
It has several different meanings: last will and testament, Old and New Testaments. And what does a witness give? A testimony, but also a testament. So it’s those three: the witness, the will and ‘I’m telling you the truth.’
The physical conditions of writing the book were improvised around a packed schedule. She worked in hotel rooms, on trains, on planes, wherever she could find quiet. The first major edit happened at sea: her partner Graeme Gibson wanted to recreate a voyage from his youth by ship to Australia, and she spent twenty-one days editing on board while he slept. The cover, by contrast, took almost no time. She described settling its color with characteristic brevity.
I colored it with my crayons and said, ‘I think it would look better green.’
She called the shade ‘spring green’ and linked it explicitly to hope, a deliberate visual counterpoint to the red of the first book’s iconography.
On what’s at stake
When the curtain is drawn backAtwood wrote the book at a moment when the Hulu adaptation of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ had turned red robes into protest costume around the world. She was alert to the question of whether ‘The Testaments’ was commentary on a fictional world or a warning about the actual one, and she framed her answer as a question she put back to the reader.
Is The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments a dystopian world? Let us hope so.
She was specific about the mechanism by which authoritarian regimes lose their grip. The analysis was not abstract: it described the internal condition that makes institutional collapse possible, the point at which the gap between what a system promises and what it delivers becomes undeniable to the people inside it.
Crumbling can happen when the curtain is drawn back and you realize that what you’ve been told is not true. You know that you’ve been lied to quite a bit. [paraphrased from audio]
She also made a distinction between two very different kinds of people who end up enforcing authoritarian systems, a distinction that bears directly on how readers might judge Aunt Lydia and the other figures who hold Gilead together from the inside.
There will always be people willing to take those jobs. And there will always be people frightened into taking those jobs.
She pointed to KGB officers who became double agents after finding that the reality of the system bore no resemblance to the ideals they had signed up for as her model for Aunt Lydia’s trajectory, though she declined to deliver a verdict on the character herself.
What she wants us to sit with
Hope, but not a verdictAsked directly whether ‘The Testaments’ offered readers any relief from the dread accumulated across both books, she did not hedge. The reply came without qualification, and it ran against the expectation that a sequel to a dystopian novel set inside a collapsing theocracy would be relentlessly bleak.
Tons of hope. Lots and lots of hope.
She was equally clear about what she was not prepared to do. The political moment around the book’s 2019 publication was charged enough that readers and interviewers were looking for the novel to deliver a moral position, to tell them what to conclude about power and resistance and complicity. She refused that role.
I’m the person who’s against dictatorship, remember that? I’m not going to tell the reader what to think.
The instruction she gave readers about Aunt Lydia, ‘Let Aunt Lydia speak for herself, and make up your own mind,’ extended that same refusal all the way down to the character whose moral status the book most conspicuously leaves open.