Listening to the Wickedly Funny Margaret Atwood

A lively conversation with Atwood (left) and Off on stage

This evening we had the opportunity to listen to the one and only Margaret Atwood speak at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, the last event of the year as part of the Vancouver Writers Festival.

The Orpheum was almost completely full, save for a few seats here and there, and as my friend remarked, a lot of white people... 

In a way it's a bit surprising, as we all read her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale in high school in the mid to late 1980s, and has since become a highly rated TV series. 

Atwood, 86, is arguably the biggest Canadian writer, with over 50 novels, graphic novels, short stories, poems, children's books, the winner of the Booker Prize twice, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, and the Frank Kafka Award among others, and a champion of Can Lit, but also writers around the world, and co-founded PEN Canada.

Some of her books include Cat's Eye, The Edible Woman, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, and children's books like Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut, Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, and Up in the Tree. 

Joining her on stage was Carol Off, the former CBC host of the current affairs radio show, As It Happens, as they talked about Atwood's latest work, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.

The pair seem to be good friends already as they shared barbs with each other. At one point Atwood talked about how she and her friend were underpaid when they did puppet shows for children's birthday parties and demonstrated with her shawl how she manipulated the fabric to make into a character.

Off put her hand under her velvet blazer and talked in character, to which Atwood quipped it looked like a "talking tit" to great hilarity in the audience.

While Off tried to get Atwood to expand more on her answers, it was obvious the author would rather people buy her big thick tome than reveal too much, from how she grew up a lot in nature as a child because her father was an entomologist studying insects, to remembering that she wore a white crochet dress with wooden buttons when she met the love of her life William Gibson, and how they lived on a farm with a peacock that was desperate to mate...

Over an hour later time was up and Atwood got a standing ovation from the audience, some of whom clutched copies of her book after the event.