Margaret Atwood had to be talked into this book. The prospect of memoir initially struck her as 'dead boring — who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?' Then, she writes, a 'sinister alter ego' pointed out the upside: thank benefactors, reward friends, trash enemies, pay off scores long forgotten by everyone but her. That negotiation between self-deprecation and sharp-elbowed honesty is the engine of Book of Lives, and it runs cleanly for all 25-plus hours. The subtitle — 'A Memoir of Sorts' — is doing real work. Atwood doesn't deliver a linear life-chronicle. She circles. She skips. She admits, cheerfully, that she can't recall much about her early books. What she does remember she renders with the precision of someone who has spent six decades choosing words for a living. The tone is leisurely and gravelly and exactly what you'd expect from a person who has written just over 50 books and has earned the right to move at her own speed. The score-settling, when it arrives, is deployed purely as comedy. A poet who told the young Atwood in the early 1970s that she wrote 'like a man' — intending it as a compliment — received the following correction: 'What you meant was, She writes. Like a man.' The pause built into that punctuation is the whole joke, and Atwood lands it in one sentence. This is the register the book operates in: the long memory of a writer who never forgot an insult but weaponizes it for laughter rather than grievance. The section on The Handmaid's Tale — still her most famous work, first published in 1986 — is brief but revealing. Showing an early draft to novelist Valerie Martin, Atwood said she thought she was 'gonna get into trouble.' Martin's response: 'I think you're gonna make a lot of money.' Both predictions turned out to be correct. Atwood doesn't linger on the novel's cultural afterlife, which is wise; the book would collapse under the weight of everything The Handmaid's Tale has become if she tried to carry it. The audiobook format suits the material unusually well. Atwood reads it herself, and her narration adds a layer the page cannot replicate — there is something in the timing of her delivery, the slight rasp, the deliberate pacing, that makes the dry wit land harder than it might in print. At 86, she is not performing energy she doesn't have. The cadence is unhurried, which is the correct choice for a book about a long life looked back on without panic. This is not a confessional memoir. Readers hoping for intimate disclosure about her decades-long partnership with writer Graeme Gibson, or for a reckoning with the controversies that have attached to her in recent years, will not find it here. Atwood's mode is wit and deflection, and she is honest about that preference. 'A Memoir of Sorts' means the book will tell you what it wants to tell you, and you will be entertained while accepting the terms. The further listening recommendations that accompany the review — David McCloskey's spy thriller The Persian and Arthur Snell's geopolitical study Elemental — suggest the audiobook market's range, but neither threatens to overshadow what Atwood has made here. Book of Lives is modest in its claims and ambitious in its craft. It knows exactly what it is: a long, funny, sharply observed conversation with one of the most important writers of the past 50 years, on her terms, at her pace.
