Advertisement

From the Print Edition

2 Comments

Celebrity Watch: Margaret Atwood is officially everywhere, from Twitter to Rob Ford: The Opera and more

The recent release of Payback, a new feature documentary based on Margaret Atwood’s book of the same name, confirms it

Celebrity Watch: the inescapable Atwood
Conrad Black
She rehabilitates ex-cons
Payback the movie features Conrad Black reading from Payback the book. At the premiere, Atwood declared that Black had become “a new and different kind of Conrad.”

Wandering Wenda
She’s a septuagenarian
Stephen King

Atwood has churned out roughly 60 books in her career, averaging more than one a year in the past decade.


Twitter
She’s all over
your Twitter feed

Atwood, with her 300,000-plus followers, is an evangelist for social media: at a recent tech conference, she declared that Twitter and the Internet boost literacy, eliciting many an OMG and LOL among literacy experts.

Rob Ford: The Opera
She earned her wings
In Rob Ford: The Opera, which had a sold-out performance in January, Atwood was portrayed as an angel of judgment, come to show the mayor the error of his ways.

Doug Ford
She humbles
the Ford brothers

After inviting ridicule for claiming not to know who Atwood was, Doug Ford was forced to admit that “she’s a great writer.” Sounds like an excellent book jacket blurb.

The Penelopiad
She’s bigger than Homer
A new production of Atwood’s The Penelopiad, starring Megan “Anne of Green Gables” Follows, opened in January. (Short version: men are shitty; ancient Greek men are shittier.)

Atwood for Mayor
She’s the Che Guavara
of the Annex

Spacing magazine has sold more than 1,400 “Atwood for Mayor” buttons, and at last fall’s Labour Day parade, some marchers wore homemade Atwood masks.

Sarah Polley
She sells popcorn
Even as Payback was screening at Sundance, Sarah Polley announced plans to direct a film version of Alias Grace. Atwood quickly tweeted her approval.

The New Yorker
She’s an ice queen
During a recent Arctic cruise, Atwood stumbled across a two-billion-year-old fossil. The trip inspired her to write a short story for the New Yorker about a woman who kills men and dumps their bodies in the frozen north. (Wait: what?)

The Atwood Blend
She’s big with baristas
The Atwood Blend, a brand of Fairtrade coffee from Balzac’s, is tart and stimulating, with no bitterly patriarchal aftertaste.

The Hype From the Print Edition

Want Toronto Life’s award-winning features delivered to your inbox?
Sign up for Preview newsletter »

  • Margaret Atwood

    Now, now, Toronto Life whippersnappers! Control yourselves!

    To be fair, Helen of Troy, Odysseus’s mother, and Euricleia are all women, and they too are shitty. How about “shit happens, but Greek myth shit happens more?”

    As for “Stone Mattress,” there is only one murder: “man,” not “men.” Is your paranoia showing? Would it be better or worse, in your nervous opinion, if a man had murdered a woman? Or are only same-sex murders allowed?

  • eva

    “Peggy” Atwood?

    Are you serious? You should be ashamed of your young, little immature selves.

    Have some respect for your intellectual superiors.

 

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement