On the other hand, isn’t that what countless advertising campaigns promise? If you buy our product, you’re a responsible consumer who cares about sustainable consumption (and just don’t think about the fact that we exploit the imprisoned for cheap labor). On one hand, it is hard to imagine a middle-class Canadian woman in 2021 believing she could easily opt out of consumerism. How do you think The Edible Woman’s commentary on consumerism fits into the influencer-filled society of 2021, where the platforms meant to connect us are now being simultaneously used to advertise to us? military, which could pair interestingly with Marian’s conflicting roles as a critic and agent of capitalism. WandaVision’s themes, of course, are further complicated by Marvel’s relationship to its parent company Disney and its representations of the U.S. If I could step outside the novel form, though, I’d like to put The Edible Woman in conversation with Marvel’s miniseries WandaVision, to think about what it means to cope with trauma by forcing yourself to conform to a normative family structure. One obvious answer-and you see this in the literature quite a bit-is Lady Oracle, because it deals with many of the same sort of questions about power, body image, and eating. Margaret Atwood – 2020 Frankfurt Book FairĪlternately, if you were able to buddy-read any novel with Atwood, what would it be and why? The conclusion was extremely critical of academia, and I remember feeling both terribly mature and, when I recalled the stack of grad school applications on my desk, more than a bit hypocritical. I’d also just read Kristeva’s Powers of Horror for the first time, and my final paper compared the themes of abjection and exploitation in The Handmaid’s Tale to those in Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet. Of all the horrors in that book, I was most disturbed by the closing “Historical Notes” and the idea of academics making bawdy jokes about Offred at a conference. I read a little of Atwood’s poetry as a teenager, but I was introduced to her prose when I read The Handmaid’s Tale for an undergraduate course called Feminist Writing.

When were you introduced to her work? And what was your first impression? Many people are first exposed to Margaret Atwood (1939- ) through the classroom, either in high school or university.

Aerial view of downtown Toronto (from helicopter), with view of Toronto Islands and Lake Ontario in the background

Author of the edible woman