Margaret Atwood Reflects on the Past Decade at Vulture

This week, Vulture "will be publishing long talks with six people who helped shape the decade — and were shaped by it — to hear what they’ve learned." For the first installment, Molly Young talks to Margaret Atwood: poet, Canadian, and author of (among other volumes) The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments.

In her introduction, Young explains that, "[a]s the decade began, there were rea­sons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and despite a global recession just two years earlier, the world hadn’t cascaded into total financial collapse." From their conversation: 

Was there anything you learned about repressive regimes after you finished Handmaid that you then worked into The Testaments?
I’m constantly learning. One of the things that we don’t go into in The Testaments is what would it be like for people to grow up thinking this is the way life is. And that would cover people such as children who are members of the Hitler Youth and grew up within it, children who were born after the USSR took over.

What was life like for them, and you can get a pretty good view of it in various people’s memoirs and this quite excellent book called The House of Government. It’s the biography of an apartment building in Moscow that was built by the Bolsheviks after they won. They built it on a piece of land called “the swamp,” which they had to drain. So building it was called “draining the swamp.”

They move into it. They start accumulating bourgeois artifacts and pianos and doilies, and then Stalin starts purging. And he purges the heads of government, and that is called “draining the swamp.” Does this sound in any way familiar?

Read their full discussion at Vulture.