My Evil Mother by Margaret Atwood
Life is hard enough for a teenage girl in 1950s suburbia without having a mother who may—or may not—be a witch. A single mother at that. Sure, she fits in with her starched dresses, string of pearls, and floral aprons. Then there are the hushed and mystical consultations with neighborhood women in distress. The unsavory, mysterious plants in the flower beds. The divined warning to steer clear of a boyfriend whose fate is certainly doomed. But as the daughter of this bewitching homemaker comes of age and her mother’s claims become more and more outlandish, she begins to question everything she once took for granted.
About Author
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid’s Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood’s dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood’s work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers’ Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.
Recap
A daughter grows up half-believing, half-doubting that her mother might actually be a witch. The story drifts through childhood memories, superstition, loneliness, womanhood, and the strange inherited powers mothers seem to carry, whether magical or not. It’s funny in places, unsettling in others, and never fully explains itself, which somehow makes it more compelling.
Notes
7%
In everything, she took care to imitate the third choice of Goldilocks: just right.
10%
She was evil, but not that evil.
16%
“They may not like me, but they respect me. Respect is better than like.” I disagreed. I didn’t care about being respected—that was a schoolteacher thing, like black lace-up shoes—but I very much wanted to be liked. My mother frequently said I’d have to give up that frivolous desire if I was going to amount to anything. She said that wanting to be liked was a weakness of character.
63%
She wouldn’t really care about the greater good, she’d just be showing off. Gratifying herself. That was my twenty-three-year-old view of her.
91%
The protector was her, the greater power was her, the Universe that took an interest was her as well; always her. “I love you,” I said.
Review
This is the first time I’ve read Margaret Atwood.
Downloaded My Evil Mother on a whim, mostly because her name has always vaguely hovered in my head as one of those ultra-popular-author names that intimidate me a little. Reading very popular authors sometimes makes me feel oddly pretentious, like I’m arriving late to a very famous dinner party.
But it was a short story, so I gave it a go.
It wasn’t extraordinary in a loud, dazzling way, but there was something about the narration that quietly gripped me. The voice lingered. Sharp, strange, intimate in that way only very confident writers can manage without showing off.
A lovely short story, and a very good introduction for me to one of the legends. I think I’m going to continue reading her, at least the new short stories she’s writing.
Final Take
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Shabana Mukhtar