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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The writer Margaret Atwood is with us now. I'm so thrilled we get a Margaret Atwood twofer today. She's here for her new book called Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021. She's here to continue our series on friendships in adulthood that started with Jennifer Senior from The Atlantic last week and is inspired by Jennifer's article on how friendship changes in middle age. Well, Margaret Atwood responded to Jennifer's article, first on Twitter and then in an interview that they did on The Atlantic site. The original tweet from Atwood who is 82 said, "Wait till you get really old, it will all change again," punctuated by a smiley emoji.

Even as people never stop talking about her 1980s book, A Handmaid's Tale, which unfortunately seems increasingly relevant at the Supreme Court and in Texas, and many other places today, we are honored to have for a twofer on her book and her responses on friendship, Margaret Atwood. Ms. Atwood, so nice of you to come back on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Margaret Atwood: Thank you. A pleasure to be there.

Brian Lehrer: I'll start with the book. Let me say that even with the warm weather in New York this weekend, I think the most joyful part of my weekend was reading a number of the essays in your book, including the introduction, which is practically a history of the world from 1960 to the present in eight pages. First, thank you for your work. You reference your 2003 book Oryx and Crake from your MaddAddam, is that how you say it? Trilogy.

Margaret Atwood: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: MaddAddam, plotted around the climate crisis, and of all things, a pandemic. As you write in 2003, these premises seem remote, now, not so much. What got you to writing stories about a pandemic like 20 years ago?

Margaret Atwood: It's a very very old theme in human history. We know of several pandemics from the ancient world, there's some in the Bible, and certainly, we know about the Great Mortality or the Black Death, which wiped out probably 50% to 60% of the population of Europe. In the 1919, Spanish flu which killed a lot of people and a lot more suddenly and right on on the street with blood coming out of their ears, which my parents lived through, and all of their families. Pretty familiar things. It's just that we keep thinking it won't happen again.

The premise in the book is that we can now make viruses which we can. I don't think, however, eminence just in, I don't think the Coronavirus was one of those. I don't think it was an on-purpose thing.

Brian Lehrer: Similarly, you wrote that you began thinking about the ideas in a Handmaid's Tale in 1981, just after Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, but you thought it was too far-fetched. Then you did start writing it just three years later. Had you seen something in the world change between 1981 and 1984?

Margaret Atwood: Yes, things were changing but also I had visited a number of places that were quite suggestive. When I began writing it, I was living in West Berlin, which at that time was encircled by the famous wall. All of those spy thrillers with Checkpoint Charlie in them, that was all still going on. It was a combo of things, but also the rise of the extreme religious right as a political force in the United States, which pretty much that then what they would like to say the role of women reverting to.

Brian Lehrer: Your sequel to a Handmaid's Tale, The Testament, which was published in 2019, that of course, was when Trump was president, but it looks like you started writing it before that election. Did something specific inspire a sequel 30 years after the original Handmaid's Tale?

Margaret Atwood: You could see it coming. At least, I could. We started shooting The Handmaid's Tale in 2016 in August.

Brian Lehrer: For TV?

Margaret Atwood: For TV. I had a little cameo in that and I was so endowed playing Lydia. That was pretty interesting to me because she gave a lot of depth to that character. That started me thinking about people who began as true believers and then changed their minds, and there have been a number of those in history.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, interesting. Have you ever then thought of sending signed copies to Amy Coney Barrett or Texas Governor Greg Abbott or anyone?

Margaret Atwood: I don't think they would read them. At the time the novel came out, I said, "Why don't we have any death threats?" They said, "All those people don't read," or "They wouldn't read your book." When the 1999 movie came out, we did get some. People have their minds made out usually under these circumstances, and reading a novel is not going to change that.

Brian Lehrer: Margaret Atwood is our special guest right now. You mentioned that one of the more bizarre episodes of your writing life was that hackers tried to steal the manuscript of The Testaments online. I didn't know about that. What happened?

Margaret Atwood: We now think we know who it was. It was a man who had actually tried with a lot of manuscripts and we don't even know what he was doing with the ones that he succeeded in stealing, but he was impersonating people in the publishing business. He was pretending to be scouts or agents or editors to get hold of people's unpublished manuscripts. At the time it was happening, we thought maybe this person or people was holding them to ransom. "Give me lots of money or else I'm going to put your unpublished manuscript up online," but that doesn't seem to be it. He seems to have been just collecting them.

We came within a whisker of having that happen because he impersonated an agent and approached a member of the Booker jury, but luckily, the person phoned up the one being impersonated and said, "Did you just send me an email?" They said, "No." Anyway, it was famous in the publishing world, and we were resorting to double passwords and special drop boxes and all sorts of things.

Brian Lehrer: It sounds just like the guy was weird. I was imagining a high-tech book-burning, like stealing it to destroy it, but no?

Margaret Atwood: No, that wouldn't have worked because there would always have been copies. It would have been stealing it to reveal it, but that didn't happen.

Brian Lehrer: The second to last essay in the book, just before the concluding one, which is a wonderful new introduction to environmentalist Rachel Carson's Sea Trilogy, the second to last one is a new introduction to an old dystopian novel called We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was big brother before George Orwell and you say it influenced Orwell, but it was also in the Russian context of the slide towards Stalinism. Here we are with Stalin admirer, Vladimir Putin, committing today's top headline, human rights atrocity. Is there a war in Ukraine context for reading We today or am I asking you for too much of a stretch?

Margaret Atwood: I don't think so. I think there's a context for reading all of the 20th-century dystopias. The 19th century was a big utopia writing century because they thought things were just going to get better and better. They had abandoned sewage systems and trains and air travel by balloon. No, I guess that was the 18th century, but it was big in the 19th. They discovered germs.

Things were just going to get better. Then, of course, along came the 20th century and World War I and a couple of more than a few societies that began as utopias, because nobody begins by saying "I'm going to come in, I'm going to be a tyrant, and I'm going to ruin your life and make you miserable." They all come in by saying, "I'm going to make my thing so much better. Just do as I say. First, we have to get rid of those people, but then after that, it's going to be great." That's how they begin. All of these, 1994 Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World, and We, one of the granddaddies and of course, The Time Machine, H. G. Wells even earlier than that. They all give us a context, but most particularly I would say it's the history of strong men that gives us a context because Stalin was not what the Bolsheviks had had in mind. In the 1930s, he purged all the old Bolsheviks because they still believed in the communitarian dream and he was not providing it.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I don't know if he believed in anything anymore or was just out for his own power after that. Your premise that dystopias tend to be attempts at utopias gone bad, maybe there's also just plain authoritarian power-mongering dystopias.

Margaret Atwood: That's how they go bad. Somebody is opportunistically using people's wish to be good because that's what utopianism is, people want to be good, they want to make things better and someone comes in who gets hold of the game and opportunistically uses it to, usually but not always, his advantage.

Brian Lehrer: Margaret Atwood is with us. Her new book is called Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021. If I may ask about your now famous tweet on friendship in response to Jennifer Senior's article in The Atlantic, the first things many listeners may be thinking is, "Wait, Margaret Atwood, she of the full-length novels and literary essays bothers to tweet." Yes, you have a neat little 2 million Twitter followers. Can you talk about where Twitter fits into your writing life?

Margaret Atwood: Well, it started back in 2009 when we were publishing the second of The MaddAddam Trilogy. We had just had the big meltdown in 2008. Publishers were running around screaming, so I thought, "I guess I'm going to have to do this myself." I built a website. We actually did a 23-city tour of The Year of the Flood as a musical and dramatic book launch and environmental fundraiser. Put that together in your head.

The people doing the website said, "You need to have a Twitter feed." I said, "What is that?" They said, "Oh, it's really easy." That's when I started having it. It was a lot smaller then and a lot more benign. You didn't get these people yelling and screaming and realizing that they could fill it up with a fake propaganda and stuff like this.

In the beginning, it was a jolly activity. Every once in a while, I think, "Well, should I keep going on with this or not?" Then I think, "Why remove my little posts about long-eared owls." I think people look forward to the long-eared owls. Right now it's pretty valuable because you can put up stuff about the Ukraine.

Brian Lehrer: The best day of your life may be in the last 10 years was when Twitter increased from 140 characters to 280 characters. No, I'm kidding.

Margaret Atwood: No. One of the challenges of it was that it was a very short form like Haiku. It was a challenge to get what you had to say into that 180 characters. It's still a challenge, but not quite as larger one.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer Senior's article is wonderful on friendship in middle age and it goes off from there, as you know, into other themes about friendship. She was here last week, and we're thinking about a part two conversation because she started so many threads that are worth continuing. After you replied to it on Twitter, she asked you how friendship changes in old age and you told her-- Would you give us a radio version for our listeners?

Margaret Atwood: Well, what did I say?

Brian Lehrer: Oh, well, let's see if I can bring it up.

Margaret Atwood: I think some of the people who are your enemies become among the few people left who can remember stuff you can remember. There may be a kind of reconciliation there as the few of you sit around the fire and tell old war stories.

Brian Lehrer: Things look a little less intense after a certain point.

Margaret Atwood: I don't know, not always for everybody. Some people are very unforgiving, but it is also the way with romance and what was a romantic tragedy when you were 17 becomes viewed in a jolly or light when you're 30. and when you're 45, it becomes a comic anecdote, and then when you're 70, you can't remember that person's name.

Brian Lehrer: You told Jennifer senior that you think it's more common now for people to disappear from their friendships after a friend gets really sick like with cancer.

Margaret Atwood: Yes, she said that.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think that might have changed? Do you think that's changed with the generations?

Margaret Atwood: It's personal. Some people are just really afraid of death and they're afraid of dying themselves, but they're also afraid when one of their friends gets cancer or a potentially terminal illness. They don't want to be close to it, whereas other people rise to the occasion and are right there with them with the casseroles. I think it's a very individual thing.

Brian Lehrer: I know you got to go in a minute. Your love for Rachel Carson and the title of this collection Burning Questions, how much is the title a direct climate crisis reference?

Margaret Atwood: I would say it's among the top burning questions that we have and certainly, the burning part. We've seen quite a lot of that in recent summers both here and in Australia. It's a large motif and we're told it's going to get worse. Are we going to literally burn ourselves up? I certainly hope not. Rachel Carson was a huge heroine and took a lot of flak, but she was right. We have to do yet more examining of what we're putting into our environment that's ending up not only in our drinking water but in our bloodstreams.

Brian Lehrer: What an honor. Margaret Atwood, her new book is called Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021. Thank you so much for your time today.

Margaret Atwood: A pleasure for me.

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