Margaret Atwood’s First Memoir Announced

The multi-award winning feminist author Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) has announced that she will be releasing her long-awaited memoir later this year. The 85-year-old Canadian writer’s ouvré includes everything from 17 novels to 19 poetry books and a few graphic novels, but this is her first memoir.

Part of the reason she hadn’t written one before now was because she thought it would be boring, but her publishers brought her around to the idea. In an interview with British Vogue, she explains her timing for writing the memoir, saying, “My publishers made me do it.”

“I sweated blood over this book…But I also laughed a lot. A memoir is what you can remember, and you remember mostly stupid things, catastrophes, revenges, and times of political horror, so I put those in – but I also added moments of joy, and surprising events and, of course, the books.”

The memoir, titled Book of Lives, will be published by Doubleday in the US on November 4, 2025.

To read more about the release, visit The Guardian.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.