Handmaid’s sequel ‘wasn’t written for new TV audience’
MARGARET ATWOOD said she made no concessions to a television audience when she wrote her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
Fans have waited 34 years for The Testaments, which some critics say is more accessible than its predecessor.
Many of those buying the book will have come to the story after watching the television version of The Handmaid’s Tale, but Atwood dismissed suggestions that she wrote The Testaments with her new audience in mind.
“I wasn’t intentionally being ‘more accessible’,” she said, during a British Library launch event. “I’ve always written short chapters, and that has to do with the fact that I don’t have people bringing me my breakfast on a tray every day like characters in Henry James’s fiction.”
Atwood laughed off the fuss surrounding the book’s publication.
Waterstones in Piccadilly staged a midnight opening for readers. “London loves a happening,” she said. “I think that this kind of thing could be quite ruinous for a 35-year-old, because where do you go from there? In my case, we kind of know the answer.”
The author, who turns 80 in November, was introduced on stage as a “rock star” of the literary world. “Considering the lives that rock stars live, I hope not,” Atwood said.
The Canadian author said she had spent years resisting calls for a sequel but changed her mind after being struck by the similarities between her fictional Gilead, where women have no control over their reproductive rights, and the US under Donald Trump.