Margaret Atwood on ‘ghosts,’ George Orwell and ‘spying on the dead’

They don’t come in with any particular regularity. The ping or buzz could alert me at any day or time. But when Margaret Atwood’s newsletter “In the Writing Burrow” drops into my inbox, we engage at my house in an old-fashioned tradition: reading aloud.

The digital missives from the storied Canadian writer are hilarious, sometimes biting and fearsomely smart; recent ones musing on failure, Canadian writing and politics (look out Doug Ford).

“Will Douglas claim riches and power by seizing the Magic Greenbelt only to lose his Superpowers? Thrill! Action! Amateur drawing!”

We’ve been enjoying them, I tell her.

“Well,” Atwood giggles, as we talk via Zoom while she’s out of the country, “no editor.”

We’re meeting to chat about her new book, “Old Babes in the Wood,” a collection of short stories divided into three sections: Tig & Nell, My Evil Mother and Nell & Tig. The first and last sections contain a total of seven stories featuring a married couple, a husband and wife. The middle section is a mix of things: an imagined interview between Atwood and George Orwell, and a retelling of the “Impatient Griselda” short story among them.

There’s also a story titled “freeforall,” which was originally published in the Toronto Star in 1986, the year after “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published. Atwood wrote it, she says, as an “alternate tennis ball” to “The Handmaid’s Tale.’”

It was the decade of AIDS, when nobody knew quite how the disease could be contracted and fear ran rampant. People were “going down in waves,” she says. People she knew and hadn’t heard from for a while; she’d go to check up on them and they’d have died.

In the story, a “new class of disease” is discovered and humanity is adapting by, among other things, arranging marriages among “uncontaminated young people.”

It ran as part of a Life section series titled “The Family Into 2001.” The introduction described the story as probing “… the fascinating path family life could take — if the trend toward increasingly virulent sexually transmitted diseases continues into the next decades, and the human race attempts extreme measures to save itself.”

“It’s shorter,” Atwood says of the rewritten story. Slightly updated.

“Do you ever rewrite your stories?”

“Almost never.”

“So why this one?”

“Editors.”

Her editors had a range of pieces that they could use for a collection and they chose this one.

“We had to deal with four times as much as actually went into the book,” she says. Her editors — she has three: one in Canada, one in the U.S. and one in the U.K. — voted on what they thought should be included. “I don’t know what their discussions were like backstage, but this is what they came up with.”

While Atwood has the final say on what does or doesn’t get included, “I thought, well, if they’re so keen I will accept their opinion.”

Often, she says, the pieces are done as the result of an “ask.” So the story “Impatient Griselda” was part of the New York Times’ Decameron project, which asked writers to retell a story from Giovanni Boccaccio’s 1348 book written during the bubonic plague. She chose “Patient Griselda” because “Patient Griselda always annoyed me.”

Why? “Come on, have you read it?”

“The sadistic man who marries Patient Griselda and then does all of these really sadistic things to her to test her patience and see if she’s a good wife who never says boo. So that just really annoyed me.” In her version, Griselda takes matters into her own hands.

Atwood has also written a piece, in response to this ask: “If you could talk to one dead author,” a hilarious to and fro with George Orwell, whom she contacts through an intermediary, a spiritual medium.

“(Orwell) just ruined me with ‘Animal Farm,’ which I thought was going to be like ‘The Wind in the Willows,’” Atwood says dryly, about reading Orwell when she was a child. And then, of course, there’s “1984,” of which much cultural matchmaking has been done with her own “The Handmaid’s Tale.” She puts a line into Orwell’s mouth: “It’s not much of a comfort to have been right.”

The seven Tig and Nell/Nell and Tig stories have a different feel from that middle section; they haven’t been published before and they make up the beating heart of this book. They are poignant and personal, beautiful and, at times, heartbreaking in their observations.

It seems obvious that Tig and Nell are based on Atwood and her husband, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, which reveals itself in our conversation about one of the stories, “A Dusty Lunch.”

Nell is telling a story that is gleaned from documents — letters, books, other ephemera — belonging to the “Jolly Old Brigadier,” Tig’s father, whose papers she inherited after Tig died (as Atwood did with Gibson). Nell finds a letter to J.O.B. that Tig hadn’t seen: from wartime journalist Martha Gellhorn, who apparently spent time with the Brigadier during the war.

“Thank you for your great kindness. You were angelic to me and I had a lovely time with you boys,” she writes, signing off with “Yours, Marty.”

The letter, Atwood says, is real.

“So Nell is Margaret-ish?”

“Ish. I fictionalize myself a bit, but the rest of it is all true.”

She also discovers poems written by J.O.B. “The poems are amateur … but that is hardly the point.” They open up new questions, about who he was, about his life, about what Tig had thought when he read them.

In the book, she writes, “Reading them herself, Nell can’t really imagine. A discovery of buried treasure? An invasion of privacy? There’s always something duplicitous about it, this spying on the dead.”

Throughout the stories is a thread, of discovering new things about people after they’ve gone; of the things they’ve left behind. Little notes discovered or a jar of marmalade, for example, that Nell and Tig had made the year before, the last of the batch. There are a lot of ghosts in these stories, I suggest.

“Once you get to a certain age, Deborah, there are a lot of ghosts,” she says.

“That always happens. But I think everyone of a certain age is probably going to share these experiences and will say to themselves, ‘If only I’d known about that I’d have asked more about it.’

“Everyone has hidden depths. And I suppose that’s the interesting thing about writing fiction. You can go down these side paths people may not have expected were there.”

Another Tig and Nell story incorporates real events and real people: “Two Scorched Men” about a period of Atwood and Gibson spent in France. The two men of the title are François and John, from whom they’d rented a country house and with whom they became friends. They talked. A lot. François gave her a novella he’d written, in French, full of French puns.

She wondered at the time, she says, “Why are they telling me all this?” She answers the question now by saying, “People do like at some moment in their life to tell their story.”

And she’s shared their story with us by telling it in one of hers.

It’s a profound thought about stories: the ones we hear by happenstance, the ones we know, the ones we discover after it’s too late to find out more, and so we’re left to fill in the blanks with deduction and speculation.

“Stories are for the reader,” Atwood says. “Sometimes people get that backwards. They think that it’s all self-expression on the part of the writer. But they’re actually for the reader, because that’s who ends up with them.”