Margaret Atwood: Self
Quotes
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Margaret Atwood : I set the Handmaid's Tale in Cambridge, Massachusetts home of Harvard, which prides itself on being the heart of liberal democracy but started as a 17th century Puritan theocracy. Nobody figured out that Handmaid's Tale is about the Harvard English Department. They didn't hire women at that time.
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Woman in audience : Did I understand correctly that when you were a student at Harvard there was a library you couldn't go into because you were a girl?
Margaret Atwood : [in a ghostly voice] When I was a student at Harvard. There was a library I couldn't go into because I was a girl. Uh. Yes.
[smiles]
Margaret Atwood : It was Lamont Library and it was for male undergraduates and it had all the modern poetry in it and I was a poet. I could get those books if I knew what they were. I could get them out. But I couldn't go in there and see what they had.
Woman in audience : How can you express that so calmly?
Margaret Atwood : Uh... because.
[in a ghostly voice]
Margaret Atwood : Because I'm old.
