Barbara Adde’s Reviews > Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts > Status Update

Study of utopias with a class

“They were admirable and attentive, but they tended to duck two issues: 1) what do you do about people who don’t agree with you, who are criminals, or want to invade you? 2) what about money? Will it be bartering all the way, or ….? Utopias salter over these two issues, just as in real life.”

(Handmaids’ Tale tv series)
“Many films and television series disappoint the authors of the books on which they’re based, but it was the opposite for me.”

“Redoing The Tempest was a welcome distraction as the world darkened. The feel good era of President Obama was coming to an end. Rancour was shaking itself loose, unknown forces were on the move. It was beginning to feel like The Lord of the Rings.
The clock ticked. The calendar pages whipped off the wall. Donald Trump would soon be elected. Our assumptions about the world we lived in were about to change.”

“Who was this watching the red flowers sprout from gravel? And were they the same red flowers that had appeared in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, when Moodie was visiting the Lunatic Asylum and observing the locked ward? I decided that it must be Grace Marks, whose story I’d first come across in Susanna Moodie’s second book, Life in the Clearings.”

“My novels often start this way - with a scene, an image, some words. The opening scene often moves elsewhere in the book: The Handsmaid’s Tale began with the group hanging scene, but they part eventually shifted toward the back of the book. However, with Alias Grace, the first page remained the first page.”

“After the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, people often asked me whether the book had been ‘inspired’ by my exposure to the treatment of women in Iran and Afghanistan. Only partly, I replied: the so-called West does not lack its own inspirations for such things, although they’ve taken a different form.”

“Remember when I said that Dennis Lee was the fifth business in the trajectory of my life? To reprise: a fifth business in drama is not the hero or the antagonist, but an essential mover in the plot. So: enter Dennis Lee, stage left, looking nonchalant.”

“During the Great Northeast Blackout of November 9, 1965, when all the power on the East Coast went off and Cambridge assumed the appearance it must have had before electricity, I could see blue lights moving around inside the funeral parlour. I never found out what caused them.”

“I was often at my wits’ end, so much so that I began to question whether I had any wits at all. Nothing can make you feel stupider than a teen with attitude.”