Excerpt from Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Carl learned to read and write in a one-room schoolhouse. There was no nearby high school, so he took his high-school classes by correspondence course, encouraged by my grandmother, who'd been a schoolteacher. His studies would have been in addition to his farm chores and his work as a teenager in the winter logging camps, something my grandfather had also done. It was in the logging camps that he picked up an extensive vocabulary of swear words, said my mother. She heard him use them only once, when he hit his thumb with a sledgehammer while sinking the sand point for a hand pump. "The air turned blue," she said with appreciation: here was a talent she hadn't known he had.

Carl was very musical. I don't know how he learned to play the fiddle, but he did. His younger brother, Uncle Elmer, played the banjo, and the two of them would provide the music for the local Saturday-night square dances, which could get rough—liquor consumed, fist fights outside. As the musicians, the two of them could avoid all that. Carl could sing at that time too: he was said to have had a beautiful baritone voice. But after he heard his first professional concerts as a young adult, once he was well and truly on his way to being a scientist, he never sang or played the fiddle again. My guess is that he tagged himself as an amateur. The furthest he would go was whistling: he was partial to Beethoven.

As a barefoot child walking from school, my father became fascinated by a giant green caterpillar he'd found, and it was this creature—the larval form of the cecropia moth—that drew his attention to the world of insects. He took the caterpillar home, made a little cage for it, fed it, and watched it transform, first into a pupa and then into a huge and colourful moth. This was the initial step in the process that led eventually to his career as an entomologist. Had he not followed this path he would never have met my mother and I would not have been born. So I owe my existence to a large green caterpillar.

One of Carl's steps along the way was a stint at the normal school in Truro, where you were taught to be a schoolteacher. (I used to think it was where you learned to be normal, but this was not the case.) His intention was to teach school until he'd saved up enough money to get himself to university, but he was able to take a shortcut via summer jobs in entomology and a scholarship to Acadia University in Wolfville. From there he jumped via another scholarship to Macdonald College, the agricultural wing of Montreal's McGill University, where he cleaned out rabbit hutches, lived in a tent and cooked for himself during the warmer months, and saved enough to send some money "home" so his three sisters could continue in school.

It was at the Truro normal school that my father first saw my mother, who was sliding down the main banister. He vowed then and there that she was the woman he would marry. It took him two tries—she turned him down the first time because she "was having too much fun"—but he managed it. He'd overcome so many barriers by then that he didn't take an initial no as definitive.

"He surprised me. I thought he was just a friend," said my mother of his first proposal. She had an abundance of swains and beaux swarming around, but my father was the only one who wasn't pronounced "a jackass" by her father. He himself had pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become a doctor. Possibly he recognized in Carl—an extreme bootstrap-puller—something of himself.

Excerpted from Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 2025 by Margaret Atwood. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.