![]() ![]() ![]() Thus she tells a good tale of being raised, drab and colonial, in postwar Canada, constantly imagining a spinning centre somewhere else: London, New York or Paris. This split, she suggests, allows the writer to get away with murder: sometimes literally, when she litters her pages with corpses mostly, though, by letting her slip off the leash and go to places and states of mind that she would not dream of exploring in her neat and rather samey life (there is nothing more deadly than a writer’s daily schedule).Ītwood’s thesis comes most alive when she roots it in her own early life and career. By this she means that there is a self who writes, and a self who does all the other things that non-writers do: walks the dog, makes cookies (Atwood is a dab hand at these) and eats bran as a sensible precaution. The major starting point of all Atwood’s thinking is an assumption of every writer’s ‘doubleness’. In these six substantial pieces, Atwood roams over all the things that worry authors most: money, critics, and how to cope when the only thing your readers seem interested in is where you get your hair done. ‘Negotiating with the Dead’ actually refers to the last lecture only ‘A Writer on Writing’ is what the whole sequence is actually about. ![]() Negotiating With The Dead is a tidied-up transcript of the Empson Lectures that Margaret Atwood delivered two years ago at Cambridge. ![]()
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