Has to be the most spectacular, hilarious, and generous autobiography of the last quarter century ... Embedded everywhere are canny quips, enigmatic writing tips ... [Her] ingeniousness and sly wit are evident ... It’s impossible to capture the breadth and richness of Atwood’s oeuvre and private life in the confines of a book review. Or to adequately represent her eerie, resplendent mashup of prophecy and humor.
[A] tour-de-force ... Might as well be one of Atwood’s novels (with the addition of photos and illustrations). It’s a remarkable read. She makes space for everyone. Her engaging voice is populated by a large cast of beguiling characters, settings are enriched with vivid details, all of it grounded by a compelling story line.
A venerable sort, a cradle-to-rocking-chair telling of a celebrated life ... My single complaint about this charming, interesting and witty 599-page book is that it feels a bit completist at times. There sure are a lot of houses, book deals, backstories and long quotations ... Scintillating portraits ... It's all here.
Radiant...full, expansive and joyful ... Atwood’s life has been radically unproscribed, prolific and hearty ... This memoir highlights Atwood’s energy, generosity, focus and vigor, as well as her Canadian modesty, self-deprecation and good cheer. If you’re an Atwood fan, you will love this book. If you’re a writer, it will offer a model of productivity.
A largely shapeless narrative spanning the entire life of Canada’s pre-eminent novelist, and it contains a good deal of passive voice ... It frequently reads like a Politburo speech, in the sense that it takes its audience for granted.
Charts the remarkable life story of one daring author who looks back on her career with awe and humility, realising how much living and influence she has indeed accomplished. In all, Atwood renders a captivating portrait of personal history, one ultimately enlivened by its wisdom on the art of fiction from one master storyteller.
A big fat juicy memoir, as compulsively readable as her best fiction ... Breathtakingly brutal in some passages, but also tartly funny. One of the most deliciously engaging memoirs of the decade, this brims over with life, wit and flashes of prophecy.
What she has written is less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works, 85 years. Where most such backward looks are cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying, hers is sharp, funny and engaging, a book you can warm to even if you’re not fully au fait...with her astonishing output.
This is a very long book that is very ample on seemingly insignificant matters and oddly reticent on a few big ones ... Future biographers of Atwood will have much material to feast on in Book of Lives, as will the sort of congregants for whom no incident in her everyday life is unimportant ... If Book of Lives does not end up among the lasting Atwoods, I suspect the reason will be so many words, and so quickly—or, rather, her not taking the time to make it shorter.
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.
Pacy and fascinating ... Atwood is a careful if gleeful score-settler, making her the best kind of memoirist ... Atwood understands that it is the petty delights of stone-cold vengeance, along with the major trials and tribulations, successes and heartbreaks that make up a life. She’s lived a good one, and she’s generous enough to share it.
She strikes a good balance, focusing on her life away from the desk but including enough about the books to satisfy the keenest fan ... What do we not get in this book? Atwood acknowledges (after overhearing readers complaining) that her books have become very long, but doesn’t explore why. Perhaps it’s connected to the other missing element: there’s no sense of how she experiences writing a novel ... Atwood keeps us generously entertained, but the chapters grow shorter and there’s a shadow of mortality. The end of the book has a valedictory air.
Seems untouched by an editor. It’s almost 600 pages long, and meanders wildly ... Sheds light on the author’s morals and marriage – and offers some very niche gossip ... I would have preferred more whispers of the A-list kind.
The Canadian novelist’s memoir, Book of Lives, displays the wit, intelligence and complexity that marks her best work ... [A] fat and satisfying memoir.
Delightfully funny ... It sparkles with elegance, wit and grace ... Exquisitely captures moments small and monumental in equal measure, revealing one of our most brilliant storytellers at work.
Zestfully detailed ... Atwood has created a keystone source for biographers and scholars while delighting and enlightening readers curious about [her] life.
The tone of Atwood’s book is conversational and meandering, touching on what catches her memory’s fancy at any given moment. This results in some unfortunate longueurs, while other stories seem glossed over at too frantic a pace ... Reaching the end of Atwood’s frequently engaging, occasionally bloated reminiscence, what one is left with is simply this: Not bad. Not bad at all.
Clocking in at 624 pages, the memoir is propelled by Atwood’s incomparable witticisms and candor. While Book of Lives will engage the average curious reader, it seems written with a special warmth toward Atwood’s ardent fans and aspiring writers, rewarding them with countless details and anecdotes about what inspired her work ... She has thoughtfully shaped a future parting gift for her loyal fans, revealing herself and setting the record straight, intentionally cementing her legacy.
I’m no Atwood completionist, but her novels represent a vital force in my development as a woman. So when, at 100 pages in, I was simply bored by her memoir, I felt confused. How could the memoir of one of the most imaginative, provocative novelists of the 20th century be a simple record of facts and events (and occasional horoscopes), and say very little about how these events affected her and her writing? ... Atwood states that when initially asked about this book on tour, she responded that she had simply channeled the semi-universal cruelty of pre-adolescent girls. But in her memoir, she acknowledges that most of the events in Cat’s Eye are her own. It seems to me that the entire memoir, perhaps her entire oeuvre, is the result of this original betrayal ... Read her fiction, read her memoir, get bored (also enjoy the Canlit, aka Canadian Literature, gossip) and then look back at yourself: what does Atwood’s fiction say about me, about the world in which I became a person? For all my disappointment, the memoir is highly quotable.
