Margaret Atwood's Books Are Banned in 135 Districts. She Lit One on Fire.

The Woman, the Flamethrower, the Unburnable Book

CBS News's 60 Minutes caught up with Atwood last fall, and the interview is exactly what you'd hope for: a titan of English-language literature sitting in her Toronto home, calmly dissecting the people trying to erase her work while being funnier than anyone half her age.

The flamethrower stunt was for a charity auction benefiting PEN America, the free speech nonprofit. Atwood had a special fireproof edition made, then lit it up herself. The point was obvious. You can ban the book. You cannot burn the idea. And if you try, Margaret Atwood will make you look like a fool while doing it.

Her books have been pulled from shelves for being 'overly sexual,' 'morally corrupt,' and 'anti-Christian.' This includes The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, and The Blind Assassin. The Testaments and The Blind Assassin both won the Booker Prize. The Booker Prize is, for those keeping score at home, the single most prestigious award in English-language fiction. So yes, someone decided that a Booker Prize winner was too morally corrupt for a high school library. That happened.

Canada Got In On It Too, and That Really Annoyed Her

Atwood told CBS News that the ban that genuinely got under her skin came not from some Florida school board but from Edmonton, Alberta. Her own country. The Canadian government issued a directive ordering school boards to remove any book containing 'direct or indirect sex.'

Atwood's response to the phrase 'indirect sex' was a deadpan masterclass. 'What is indirect sex? I don't know,' she told interviewer Jon Wertheim. When he joked, 'Science fiction?' she fired back: 'Have you had indirect sex lately?'

This is the thing about Atwood that her censors seem not to understand. You do not win a war of ideas against someone who has been weaponizing language professionally since before most school board members were born. The flamethrower is a metaphor. The wit is the actual weapon.

The Handmaid's Tale Was Always Real. She Has the Receipts.

Published in 1985, The Handmaid's Tale depicts a near-future America consumed by religious dictatorship, where fertile women are forced into servitude as state-mandated child-bearers. It has sold more than 10 million copies, spawned an Emmy-winning Hulu series, and its red cloak became the unofficial uniform of reproductive rights protests across the country.

Atwood lives by a rule that makes the book more unsettling the more you think about it: if something didn't happen somewhere, at some point in actual human history, it does not go into her fiction. CBS News showed her research archive at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto. Folders upon folders of news clippings. Including this gem from a Communist-era directive: 'Persistent non-pregnancy will be considered a crime against the state.'

She is not predicting the future. She is cataloguing the past and showing you where the road leads. When Roe v. Wade fell in 2022, a book written in 1985 stopped feeling like dystopia and started feeling like a warning label. Atwood herself is clear-eyed about this: 'Had it been so that none of this ever got enacted, then it would probably be sitting on a shelf somewhere, and people would be saying, a jolly good yarn, but it didn't happen.'

They enacted it. Here we are.

Eighty-Six Years Old and Still Outpacing Everyone

Atwood has just published a memoir, Book of Lives, which traces her life from a free-range childhood in the Quebec wilderness to literary legend. Her father was an entomologist. The family road trip involved screeching to a halt at insect infestations so her dad could spread a tarpaulin under a tree, hit the trunk with an ax, and collect whatever fell out. The kids watched from outside the car.

She credits that upbringing with the meticulous specificity of her writing. You do not say 'butterfly.' You say which butterfly. You do not say 'tree.' You say which tree. It's the detail work that makes her fiction feel like reportage from a future that keeps arriving on schedule.

The memoir is her 64th book. The awards are over 50. The translations are over 50. When Wertheim asked her to confirm these numbers, she confirmed all of them in exactly the same flat tone. The woman contains multitudes, and she has the receipts for every single one of them.

The Banned List Is Growing, and She Is Not Worried

Across 135 American school districts, students cannot access Atwood's work through their school libraries. In a political moment where the party in power has decided that books are a threat, this is not a small number and it is not slowing down.

Atwood is aware of this. She writes op-eds. She does the 60 Minutes interview. She raises money for free speech organizations. And she takes a flamethrower to a fireproof copy of her own novel in front of a camera.

What she does not do is panic. This is someone who wrote about environmental collapse in 2003 and a global pandemic in the same book. She has been watching the warning signs for decades. The book bans are not a surprise to her. They are, if anything, confirmation that she has been doing her job correctly.