SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Every week, a guest draws a card from our Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Margaret Atwood is known for writing books like "The Handmaid's Tale," stories about a near future where everything has gone wrong. But at 84 years old, her new book, "Paper Boat," looks to the past. It's a collection of her poems spanning over six decades. She talked with Wild Card host Rachel Martin about the skepticism she faced at the beginning of her career.
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RACHEL MARTIN: Your choice - one, two or three?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Three.
MARTIN: One, two, three. What's a piece of advice you were smart to ignore?
ATWOOD: Oh, boy (laughter). Well, where do I begin with that...
MARTIN: (Laughter).
ATWOOD: ...Since I ignored almost all advice. So when I was at university, we were given faculty advisors...
MARTIN: This is at Harvard. Yeah.
ATWOOD: ...To advise us, I suppose, about the direction that our life should take. And by that time, I was already writing and publishing poetry, and I had a graduate student scholarship. And my faculty advisor said, why don't you just forget all this writing and graduate student stuff and find a good man and get married?
MARTIN: Come on.
ATWOOD: How about that?
MARTIN: Truly?
ATWOOD: So this would be 1961. Well, you weren't born, so you don't remember what that was like, but that was a little extreme even for those days.
MARTIN: Yeah.
ATWOOD: So my usual way of reacting to people's advice that I didn't agree with was my inner voice saying, you're an idiot.
MARTIN: Did you keep that as your inner voice or did those words...
ATWOOD: You're an idiot?
MARTIN: ...Sometimes find their way outside into the public...
ATWOOD: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Domain?
ATWOOD: I'm afraid I let it out a bit too much.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
ATWOOD: Maybe I should have kept it as an inner voice. But at that moment, it was, you're an idiot, and OK, is this conversation over yet? Thank you very much. Goodbye.
MARTIN: To get good advice, did you have to - I mean, did all your good advice come from good friends?
ATWOOD: I'm not sure that my good friends would have been much use at that time because I was...
MARTIN: Yeah.
ATWOOD: ...Quite a lot different from people of that time. But I did have another person on faculty who did give me a piece of good advice, and I'll tell you what it is. Are you interested?
MARTIN: I'm very interested.
ATWOOD: OK. So I really did think this, that I was going to go to France, work in a restaurant, live in a garret, smoke Gitanes - no hope of that - and write masterpieces while coughing myself to death, as in "La Boheme." So I thought I would do that.
MARTIN: Tres romantique, yeah.
ATWOOD: No. I didn't share the whole package with this person on faculty, but I shared enough of it so that they said to me, I think you would get more writing done if you went to graduate school. And they were right because I was a waitress in a restaurant a bit later, and I didn't get much writing done.
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DETROW: That's author Margaret Atwood talking with Wild Card host Rachel Martin. Her book, "Paper Boat," is out now. To hear more from that conversation, follow the Wild Card podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
