Margaret Atwood gets personal with "Inner Advice Columnist" in new memoir

This is an updated version of a story first published on Nov. 9, 2025. The original video can be viewed here .

You're an 86-year-old titan of literature, have been for a half-century now. You're Canada's best known author, 64 books and counting. And increasingly you find your work on lists of banned books, scrubbed from 135 American school districts. Yes, that includes your breakthrough work, the dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale." But you've also been censored for work like "The Testaments" and "The Blind Assassin," both of which won the Booker Prize, the top award for English-language fiction. What to do? Sure, you take to the keyboard and write sternly-worded opinion pieces. But as we first told you last fall, if you're the indomitable Margaret Atwood, you don't stop there.

Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Atwood was firing back at would-be book-burners by torching an unburnable edition. It was all promotion for a charity auction to benefit PEN America — a nonprofit that champions free speech.

Atwood's books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. She told us she was particularly peeved when a recent ban came from Edmonton, Alberta, in her own country.

Margaret Atwood: The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? I don't know.

Atwood speaks as she writes: with a mix of wisdom and deadpan wit. Last fall, she invited us into her Toronto home.

Jon Wertheim: Do you know off hand how many languages your books have been translated in?

Margaret Atwood: Well, we say over 50 for everything. How old are you? Over 50. How many books have you written? Over 50.

Published in 1985, "The Handmaid's Tale" depicts a near-future America overtaken by religious dictatorship, where a dwindling number of fertile women are forced to cloak themselves in red and bear children for the elite.

The book would sell more than 10 million copies and spawn an Emmy-winning Hulu series. Beyond that, its scarlet costume would become a uniform of real life protest and resistance.

Margaret Atwood: Yeah it's not due to me or the excellence of the book. It's partly in the twists and turns of history.

With the ongoing rollback of reproductive rights and the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, "The Handmaid's Tale" began, for many readers, to feel eerily prescient.

Margaret Atwood: Had it been so that none of this ever got enacted, then it would probably be sitting on a shelf somewhere, and people would be saying, "A jolly good yarn, but it didn't happen."

Or didn't it? In 2003's "Oryx and Crake," for instance, Atwood wrote of environmental collapse and a global pandemic. Pick a catastrophe, any catastrophe. Before the real world did its thing, she warned about it in her fiction.