What is a writer's life?

'Negotiating with the dead' by Margaret Atwood

Will this book teach you how to write? No, it won't. Instead it challenge how you see writers. Atwood takes us on an erudite trip through the history of the roles we've expected writers to play, detailing the shift from oral storytelling to the romantic cult of the writer to postmodern equivalent of high art aesthete. With humour and candour, she debates the issue of a writer's duality. Can scribes produce great books and still do the grocery shopping? If so, how do we write books and still afford to buy that grocery shopping? Do writers live lives of constant passion or do they write the life they dare not live?

Atwood peppers her discussion with stretches of autobiography and anecdotes from her own history. Of particular interest is her sketching of the Canadian poetry scene of the 50s and 60s. For me, this functioned as an illuminating backdrop to her exploration of the differences between the work the writer creates and the image of the writer created by the work. In a small economy, writers are never just writers. Yet as readers we feel cheated by the idea that an author must do unwriterly things in order to write.

These unwriterly things often include academia. In the spirit of this, she launches into a discussion on how the storyteller differs from the writer by borrowing from theorists ranging from Walter Benjamin to Ong and slips in examples from Wilde to Ondaatje to Alice in Wonderland. Writing, she and her favourite theorists' argue, is evidence whereas storytelling is theatre. A storyteller moulds their story in a constant interaction with the audience while a writer does not need to engage with their audience at all if they so choose. Writers feel the pressure to be original, but storytellers are able to utilise stock lines and techniques with impunity and possibly even expectation.

Atwood's work is a swirl of ideas, examples and bursts of colour from her own life. As a result, it feels muddy and circular in parts. It is exactly this element, however, that makes it such an intriguing read.