PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (TLS)Atwood revels in her horticultural and culinary activities with an eye for detail that makes these years feel like a reconnection with her forebears ... Above all, this memoir is the record of a phenomenal literary output; most chapters bear the title of one of Atwood’s books. Personal events are treated with brisk frankness ... [There\'s] unexpected bluntness. She is similarly direct about her difficult relationship with the novelist Margaret Laurence ... This lively, often humorous memoir is thrown off course by the triumph of The Handmaid’s Tale ... The anti-free-trade liberal nationalism that Atwood espoused for a quarter of a century, obscured in this memoir, is alien today ... The second half of Book of Lives diverts the reader’s attention to her relationship with Gibson ... The Atwood on display here, as incisive as ever as she approaches her eighty-sixth birthday, is more emotive, her wit riper and more forgiving ... Her accounts of Canadian literary polemics, by contrast, are not reliable.
