From the introduction by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:
She certainly doesn’t want to be idolised as a saint – that rarely ends well, and besides, she holds grudges. She even chafes against her mantle as feminist icon, “expected to do the Right Thing for women in all circumstances, with many different Right Things projected on to me from readers and viewers”, as she writes in Book of Lives.
Atwood is as hard to pin down as the insects she and her brother, Harold, played with as children, encouraged by her father’s job as an entomologist. A natural scientist (many of her family were scientifically inclined) and sceptic, she is also a dabbler in palm-reading and the occult. There is nothing she can’t tell you about nature, from the sex lives of snails to rare birds (see questions from Jonathan Franzen and Anne Enright); or history – the Salem witch trials and the French Revolution are particular areas of expertise.
She can be silly and stern, sometimes within the same sentence, but there is a deep moral seriousness beneath all her work.
More here.
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