Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale has become ‘more acceptable’ | Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood said the plot of her book The Handmaid’s Tale, which tells the story of a totalitarian regime under which women are forced to give birth, has become “more and more plausible” in recent years.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme, Atwood said she thought the plot was “crazy” when she first developed the concept for the novel because the US was the “democratic ideal” at the time.

“It was the land of the free,” she said. “People in Europe couldn’t believe things could ever go like this.”

“I’ve always been someone who never thought it couldn’t happen here. It could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.”

When Atwood was asked about the book’s enduring popularity, she told the show’s host, Lauren Laverne: “Well, it’s always a possibility, isn’t it? Then in 2016 everything changed again, and we’re now in that period where The Handmaid’s Tale is much closer.”

“Not the clothes. I don’t think we’ll get the clothes, but the rest of it seems more and more plausible.”

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 and tells the story of a totalitarian and fundamentalist regime called the Republic of Gilead that took power in the United States and subjugated women who were forced to become slaves and bear children. The novel was turned into a television series starring American actress Elisabeth Moss in 2017.

The red gowns worn by the maids have become a symbol of the American protest against Donald Trump and the decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion.

“These kind of systems don’t last, partly because they become unsustainable,” Atwood said. “This system in particular seems quite chaotic.”

“Let’s also not discount America. First and foremost, it is much more diverse than it might appear from a distance. Second, Americans are quite feisty.

“They don’t like people telling them to all line up and do what they’re told. They don’t really like it, but they don’t like anyone controlling them left or right.”

Atwood’s follow-up story, The Testaments, was a joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. In an interview with The Guardian in November, she said that the mere fact that filming on the first season of the novel had finished was a sign of hope for the United States.

“The United States is not totalitarian — yet,” she said. “Despite the move towards a concentrated power structure. If it had been complete totalitarianism, we wouldn’t have made ‘The Testaments’ at all. We would be in prison, in exile or dead.”