Negotiating with the Dead

I still don’t understans what it is that persuades a person with common sense to leave behind a sense of security and devote his or her whole life describing people who does not exist. If it is make believe – which a lot of people who writes about writing often claims – how can one explain the overriding urge to do it, and that alone, and consider it as rationell as riding your bike over the Alps?

I walked absent mindely though the different stands at a market yesterday, waiting for my sister and mother to finish their shopping frenzy when I noticed a book in the bookstand. It caught my attention instantly and as I went in for a closer look I was surprised to see that it was written by my favorite author. A Canadian woman who makes the rest of us look really bad as we try to make sense of plotlines and purpose in our own writing. Turns out that I’ve stumbeled across her book about just that; writing. There, in a mist of bad novels and pretentious authors I find the best, offering her view on authors and writers.

The quote above is a part of the introduction in Margret Atwood’s book, Negotiating with the Dead. A Writer on Writing. It’s a quote from Mavis Gallant’s Selected Stories and she dives in to the passions and difficulties of writing. I’ve only read 70 pages so far but she strikes down to the very core of what I know and all that I want to know about but didn’t know I needed. She simply continues to amaze me.

I’ve read a lot of work from feminist author’s, most of them very old like the Brontë sister’s, Jane Austin and Kate Chopin but also more contemporary author’s such as Toni Morrisson and Bharati Mukehrejee but Margret Atwood is without a doubt the best one. I have no good way of describing it, she just writes it like it is. Her work is subjective of course becasue she writes about women in different situations but you can still detect her as the objective force holding the pen (or the keyboard in this case). She is never obvious but she gets her point across without ever explaining it to you. She is simply amazing, a true inspiration and I am very happy that I stumbeled across her take on reality.