Margaret Atwood's first full memoir traces the life behind more than six decades of poetry, fiction and criticism, and its organizing idea is that a writer's books and her life are tangled together in ways that are rarely direct but always present. Atwood begins with an unusual childhood: her father was a forest entomologist, and for much of each year the family lived in the bush of northern Quebec and Ontario, without electricity or schools, an upbringing that gave her a lifelong attention to the natural world and a habit of self-reliance. From there the book moves through her Toronto girlhood, including the bruising schoolyard year that later fed Cat's Eye, her studies at Victoria College and Harvard, the small and scrappy world of Canadian poetry in the 1960s, and her emergence as a novelist with The Edible Woman and Surfacing. She describes West Berlin in 1984, under the shadow of the Wall, where she began writing The Handmaid's Tale, and the strange afterlife that book acquired decades later. Running through the narrative is her partnership with the novelist and naturalist Graeme Gibson, from their early years on a farm in Ontario to his decline with dementia and death in 2019. The memoir also touches on Canadian cultural nationalism, feminism and the politics of being labeled a feminist icon, and her environmental activism. Written in Atwood's dry, digressive and often funny voice, the book is long and anecdotal, as interested in friends, animals and odd episodes as in literary landmarks, and it offers readers a rich sense of where her imagination came from.