Margaret Atwood: the Price of Fame

Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 (I read it in 2015). Last year, Hulu aired a television series based on the book.

So, now, poor Margaret is famous, taking opprobrium from the new feminists who hadn’t even been born when Atwood was already fighting for women’s rights. She is also in rarified company: since a TV show now accompanies her book, she can be thrown into a list alongside Fifty Shades Freed (the last entry in the well-known feminist trilogy), the latest Maze Runner book and The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which extends the universe created in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series (that includes Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), a universe that was decent, but didn’t really need extending.

I was a bit surprised to see the NYC Public Library using the criteria “books from which audio-visual media have been produced” to come up with a list of recommendations for me. What did poor Margaret do to deserve this? She became popular, I guess. I imagine if Raskolnikov were to get his own TV series, Dostoyevsky would be consigned to the same fate of lining up with the latest YA authors and comic-book-movie novelizations.