Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin opens with one of the best first sentences I’ve ever read: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” Though the novel isn’t structured as a conventional mystery, there’s mystery inherent in that first sentence, and it only grows as the reader learns more about the narrator, Iris Chase, her sister Laura, and Alex Thomas, the man they both love. The novel spans genres, decades, and galaxies, weaving together elements that a lesser writer would never think to put together.
I’ve known the writer Ashley Winstead (author of This Book Will Bury Me, Midnight Is the Darkest Hour, and others) for several years, but before this interview, I never realized that she was a Margaret Atwood scholar. (Literally: she wrote her dissertation on Atwood at Southern Methodist University and has published scholarship on the author’s work.) Recently we sat down to talk about braided narratives, genre-hopping, and the definitive take on why female characters should never be described as “unlikeable.”
Why did you choose The Blind Assassin?
When people asked me what my favorite book was, I always used to say The Blind Assassin. I hadn’t reread it in a long time, so it was a pleasure pick. I think it’s been about eight years since I reread it, and it was a whole new experience. I’d go so far as to say that it’s the book that made me think to myself, “I want to be a writer.” I’m sure there were actually something like a thousand books over the course of my lifetime that slowly convinced me I wanted to do this, but this is the book I remember putting down and thinking, “If I could one day create something one-tenth as good as this, that would be my definition of a successful life.” It was that perfect combination of the voice and the story speaking to my soul, and at the same time the craft being so far out of my level that it made me want to work at this as hard as I could.
That’s such a great description of what I think every writer has felt. On the one hand, you have the aspiration to write something as good as the book you just read, and on the other hand, you know you’re not quite capable of it, so you have to keep trying. When did you first read this novel?
I was twenty or twenty-one when I read it for the first time. In college, I spent my summers out in San Francisco, where my uncle lives, and I’d work an internship out there. I never knew anyone except my uncle and a few work friends, so I just read a lot. One time I picked up The Blind Assassin, and I had that strong emotional reaction to it right away. Then many years later at SMU, I ended up writing my dissertation about Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and teaching The Handmaid’s Tale to undergrads in Women and Gender Studies classes, but I never worked on The Blind Assassin, even though it’s always been my favorite of her works. One of the reasons I love it is that I think it’s one of the most writerly books I’ve ever read. The main character, Iris, is a writer, and the story centers around an illicit romance between two writers. It’s a book about storytelling that’s deeply meta at certain points. Then on a sentence level, the precision and perfection of Atwood’s language is a marvel. The book is somehow at the same time dry, deeply irreverent, shockingly brutal—all of that.
I was an English and creative writing major, and I’d gone to college thinking I wanted to be a poet—cue the obligatory pause for laughter—but by the time I’d found Atwood, I’d decided I wanted to write short stories, and I was taking classes with a lot of incredible short story writers. I was going to every lecture from every visiting writer who came to campus and sitting in the front row, because I was so in love with writing. One time the writer Deborah Eisenberg came to talk to us, and she was talking about braided narrative structure, where disparate parts of the story come together in a way you can’t predict. In The Blind Assassin, you’ll have one chapter with newspaper articles from the 1930’s, and in the next a story of two people having an affair, and in the next the science fiction story that one of them is writing, and in the next Iris as an old woman in her eighties reflecting on her life. Atwood puts all these pieces together and allows the reader to make the connections and associations between them. I just fell in love with that form of writing, and I thought of The Blind Assassin as the ultimate version of that kind of narrative.
I think the form appealed to me is because I love the idea of there being connections between everything. Like the butterfly effect, that idea that if a butterfly flaps its wings in California, it can cause a typhoon in Taiwan. In braided narratives, rather than spelling out those causal connections for the reader, the writer gives them the agency to find the connections for themselves. I guess it was probably part of my budding interest in mystery—solving puzzles, putting things together. In this novel, you’re looking at obituaries and diary entries and recollections and trying to extract meaning out of them, and to do that, you have to have this kind of quaint, romantic belief that there is meaning. You trust that there is a thread there, and something beautiful and worthwhile is waiting for you if you can follow it.
I love what you said about the puzzles in the novel appealing to the mystery writer in you. Atwood often plays with genre, and The Blind Assassin definitely has elements of a crime novel.
You’re wondering, why did Laura drive her car off a bridge? What’s the story there? Throughout the novel, you’re chasing the what and a why. The fact of someone driving their car off a bridge seems so simple and straightforward, and it’s only later that you see all the hidden layers underneath. That sentence that you thought was so direct is only the tip of the iceberg.
Have you ever had any contact with Atwood? Have you met her or communicated by email?
No, but I would love to, because I’ve been thinking about her work for so long. I promise I’m not going to go on about my dissertation, but when I was writing and publishing about her work, one of my interests was the fact that Atwood was, by some accounts, the first writer to ever incorporate and use an LLC for tax purposes. I was writing a lot about the overlap between writers and corporations, and how writing speculative fiction might connect to the futurism that companies like Exxon and institutions like the CIA practice as a way to explore possible futures and game out the factors that will affect their bottom line. I came to the conclusion that science fiction could be performative in some instances—that it almost walks right up to magical thinking. I was arguing that Margaret Atwood was doing that in Oryx and Crake, and that she had this really interesting perspective about the way to influence people politically that went beyond persuasion. That’s actually the title of one of the articles. But I think I’m going way too deep down the rabbit hole here.
No, I think that’s fascinating. I consider myself a failed academic—I will never willingly write scholarship again, but I do like to read it sometimes, and I’m definitely going to look up that article. To get back to The Blind Assassin, I wanted to talk a little bit about how critics reacted to the book when it was first published. In the New York Times, Thomas Mallon called it “overlong and badly written,” and I’ve seen other reviews that said it was too long or too slow. What would you say to those readers? What are they missing?
Well, the first thing I’d say is that everyone is allowed to be wrong on occasion. Literary taste is at least somewhat subjective. It honestly gives me a ton of comfort in considering that people give my books one- and two-star reviews, because if some readers can’t see the value in Margaret Atwood, that puts everything in perspective.
I think some people are really bothered by the mixing of genres. Like, “You can’t mix science fiction with mystery with romance with historical epic.”
But she’s done that throughout her entire career. The woman has no fear. She’s written in every genre, every form. She just does everything, and she’s so beautiful and expressive in her language. She’s everything. So maybe it is the ambition that some readers don’t like.
Ambition seems like exactly the right word. The novel spans almost a hundred years and covers major historical events as well as private dramas. I feel like a writer a lot of confidence to write a novel of this scope. Could you see yourself plotting something on this kind of scale?
I think so, but I’d probably call it masochism rather than ambition. You have to have a lot of faith in yourself to think that you can pull it off, or else a lot of naivete. When I first started publishing, I tried to go a little easy on myself and not be so ambitious, but now that I’m six or seven books in, I’m trying to be a little bit more conscious of my goals as a writer and how I can get there. Of course the jury is still out on how editors, agents, readers and others are going to respond to that. But what I mean by that is trying my hand at this braided narrative form, trying my hand at blending genres a little more outrageously and in a more self-aware way.
The Blind Assassin is always operating at so many different levels. It’s a virtuosic writer (Atwood) writing about another writer (Iris) writing about her affair with a writer (Alex) writing a science fiction epic that also comments on his affair with Iris. The book is so conscious of genres and tropes. When Iris and Alex first get together, he asks her what kind of story she wants him to tell her, but what he’s really asking is, “What do you want from this relationship? What kind of life do you want to have? What kinds of stories are you going to write for yourself?” As a writer, I’m always fascinated by writers thinking about storytelling—not just the kind we do when we sit in front of our laptops and open the Word document, but the kind we’re doing every day of our life when we make choices. I believe that for those of us who are readers, stories become part of who we are and how we act and react in the world, and that becomes a big part of the theme in my novel that’s coming out in March, This Book Will Bury Me. The narrator is conscious of the grief narrative that she’s participating in after the death of her father, and sometimes she succumbs to it, but she’s also able to pull herself out of it and comment on it in an Atwoodian way.
A professor in my MFA program told me never to write about writers because it would come off as too self-involved, but I think that as writers we’re all kind of obsessed with the idea that we can shape our lives through narrative, because that’s so much a part of our own experience.
It is the most self-indulgent belief, isn’t it? But it’s funny that it’s not just a literary thing—you see it in commercial fiction too, like in Emily Henry’s Book Lovers. I know this probably isn’t a representative sample, but I’ve seen so many Bookstagram posts where people say, “I’m so hungry for books about reading and writing and publishing.” Maybe it’s just having a moment, or maybe this is something that people just really like to read about.
The novel is the story of two sisters, Iris and Laura Chase, who are born with wealth, beauty, and (in at least one case) artistic talent, but end up living very sad lives. Did you see Iris, Laura, or both as (gasp!) unlikeable female characters?
I think the term “unlikeable female characters” is actually a really sloppy shorthand for a host of other things that people are reacting to. To me, it’s kind of like when doctors used to diagnose women with hysteria, when they meant depression or anxiety or postpartum or PTSD after assault, or even too much independence or whatever. It’s this umbrella diagnostic term that actually tells us nothing at all. I think when you’re reading a book and you start to think that a character is unlikeable, it’s a great opportunity to pause and reflect on why. When we first encounter Iris in The Blind Assassin, she’s this curmudgeonly, crotchety old woman who is really blunt and direct about her bodily functions and her skin smelling of old pee and so on. So if you find her unlikeable, you could ask yourself, is that what you’re reacting to? Is it the fact that she’s supposed to be a sweet old lady but she’s not acting like that way, and she’s being blunt about her body in a way that women aren’t supposed to be? You could ask yourself, do you think the writer intended for you to receive the character this way or feel this way about the character? Why would a writer do that? What’s the intention behind it?
But I don’t mean to suggest that the problem is always with the reader. When a reader finds a character unlikable, it could be because they haven’t been introspective enough, or thought about the author’s intentions enough, but it’s also true that that word “unlikeable” is sometimes pointing to an author’s failure. Sometimes people will say that they found a female character boring, or—this comes up a lot in reviews of thrillers and mysteries—they find her choices really questionable or idiotic. Sometimes the word “unlikeable” is standing in for the fact that the writer has failed to make the character three-dimensional, or they’ve failed to give you enough insight into their thinking to convince you that their choices make sense. Sometimes, when we call a character unlikeable, we’re responding to the fact that the writer didn’t have enough distance editorially to see that whatever cool thing they thought they were doing with their character is actually not going to land well for anyone outside their brain.
I think that’s the best explanation I’ve ever heard of why that term is so frustrating. And I think we can say that in this novel, we certainly have ample opportunities to understand how Iris and Laura became the people they are.
And that’s the beauty of a novel of this scope. Your knowledge of Iris and Laura isn’t just limited to watching them grow up. You’re going back generations. You’re seeing why their grandfather and father are the way they are, and mothers and grandmothers. You’re seeing the scope of the generational trauma that then informs who these two girls are. You can’t see that and not understand Iris and Laura and the choices they’re making, even if you don’t agree with them.
I kept thinking that it was like a Victorian novel, because you have that sense of people being in community, being connected to everyone around them, that is so hard to do in the contemporary novel.
And the way she characterizes the community of Port Ticonderoga makes them feel very Victorian in their preferences and mannerisms. I don’t know about you, but I get told by editors all the time to narrow my scope. So maybe it’s partly that writers don’t want to attempt novels like this right now, but I think we’re also actively being told not to do it, probably for commercial reasons that are outside my knowledge.
Is there anything else we haven’t touched on that you wanted to talk about?
I’ve been thinking about the question of why the book resonated so much with me, and one of the things I haven’t talked about yet is the sacrifice that Iris makes in naming Laura the author of The Blind Assassin. It’s really complicated, because Iris gets so many things that Laura never did, and the two sisters in some ways are in competition. It’s not like they have an easy relationship by any means. But as an impressionable young writer at the age of twenty or twenty-one, it felt like the ultimate gift, the ultimate sacrifice, for Iris to give Laura the fame and the legacy and the place in history that could have been hers. Iris knows that in doing that, she’s giving up her own artistic legacy. She’ll be forgotten. She’ll be “meat dust,” as Atwood says at one point. I think a lot about legacy, and I know it’s a very narcissistic thing to be preoccupied with. It’s always possible that I’ll die and there will be absolutely no more readers for my books, but the hope that they will still exist, at least in digital form somewhere, and someone will still read them, that’s such a powerful form of immortality. For Iris to give that up for her sister, it still feels to me like the most powerful sacrifice and act of repentance. In This Book Will Bury Me, everything the main character does is an effort to create a legacy for her father, who she fears is going to be forgotten, and she makes some pretty radical and self-sacrificial choices to give that gift to him. It’s an idea that I just haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
I saw it more as one in a series of losses: Iris loses her lover, she loses her daughter and granddaughter, she loses her book. But you’re right that the book is something she gives up voluntarily, and for a writer to make that choice is a big deal. It’s a surprisingly generous and ethical decision, even though I don’t think Iris would describe herself that way.
For me, Iris redeems herself through that sacrifice. Maybe for a lot of readers, it’s not redemptive enough, but it works for me.
