Lady Oracle is both the title of a Margaret Atwood novel (1976, very funny) and the author’s unofficial epithet. Crack open a news source today and you’ll find something that Atwood speculated about a decade or three ago in one of her novels: lab-grown meat, environmental catastrophe, state surveillance, the diminishment of reproductive autonomy, antimicrobial clothes. Atwood isn’t thrilled about her reputation as a cheerful eschatologist and has pointed out that it rests on a misunderstanding of dystopian fiction, which, she argues, isn’t a prediction of the future (dummies), it’s an interpretation of the present. In other words: If you’re not seeing what I’m seeing, you’re not paying attention. Just as she squirms away from the mantle of prophecy, Atwood rejects ideological labels, most institutional affiliations, and the idea that a writer is necessarily a moral agent. Some labels that do safely apply to her include poet, woodswoman (she grew up in rural northern Quebec), troublemaker, palm reader, student of history, inventor (look up LongPen), and—on a frigid Monday morning at a New York hotel with “weird 1970s décor,” in her words—wearer of earrings in the shape of mini-ducks.
Earlier this year, Kylie Jenner threw a birthday party with a Handmaid’s Tale 1 theme.
Oh, Kylie Jenner. I had to look up who Kylie Jenner was, I’m so old.
What did you make of that?
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