you wrote The handmaid's Tale in a pre- interet age and I've read that you had press clippings with you about abortion Outlaws in Romania and declining birth rates in Canada how much did writing the handmaid's tale feel like an act of Journalism did it oh well the rule that I set myself for the handmaid's tail was that nothing goes in this that doesn't have a precedent somewhere in history uh or in real life right now going back and looking at some of the things that Hitler um had done for instance they're very similar he was
a a child stealer he he stole blonde children from Poland U and put them with German families hoping to augment the number of Aryans Etc so there these themes are uh they're human history themes and they're particularly 20th century history things themes quite a lot of genocide and um the rearrangement of populations went on in that century and I can say that we're not finished with that well I've heard you say that before that there had to be a precedent for everything that this had to be within the human schoras sport of things to do
why why was that an important rule for you because I wasn't writing um science fiction fantasy I was writing speculative fiction like 1984 and and 1984 as you know is just 1948 backward so so so what he was describing was uh what he knew about the kind of thing that was going on in the in the Soviet Union those that that process of show trials and and so forth is basically what Stalin was doing in the in the 30s I I made it a rule for myself that I wasn't going to make stuff up I
read that you said it's the new novel it scares me but I have to write it these Tendencies have been inherent in the United States since the 17th century and when you have a foundational pyramid like that it doesn't really ever go away Central Americans when they built pyramids they would have a pyramid and they wouldn't if they wanted a new one they wouldn't take that one down they would just build on top of it and then they would build another one on top of that and um you can see two Tendencies playing themselves out
in American history over time and one of them is the tendency towards a Fundamentalist theocracy uh and the other one is a tendency towards an a more egalitarian democracy um and you can see them going going back and forth so school children get told that the Puritans escaped from um England to get religious freedom that's only partly true they they did it to get religious freedom for themselves but not for anybody else and uh one of the next things they did was to was to persecute Quakers we had the hippies and we had the second
wave women's movement and we had the liberalization of a lot of laws in the 70s in the 80s there was a push back so the date of composition was 1984 when when people were already talking about what they would like to do if they got the chance which was to get rid of these liberalizing laws and put and and turn things back to the way they were in say 1955 or 1855 U so that was part of the scary thing the other scary thing was okay I'm going to write this book and then I'm going
to get death threats and people yell at me so there were two scary things at work one this is a tendency that I am noticing that other people might not believe is happening but I think is and the other one was therefore I I'll get in trouble can you remember reading the first review 1985 I can't remember which review was the first one um but they varied from country to Country so in England it was Jolie good yarn because they didn't believe this was actually going to happen in fact Europe didn't believe it would happen
because at that moment the wall had not yet come down the Cold War was still on and those people all wanted to think of as America as a beacon of light hope and and freedom and the idea that it could turn around and go the other way was just horrifying to them and they did not wish to believe that so the English having done their Civil War under Oliver Cromwell their religious Civil War weren't about to do that again and therefore they said jolly good yarn uh ho ho ho Margaret you're so inventive um the
Canadians in their nervous way said what Canadians usually say which is couldn't happen here and the answer to that is less likely because Canada has too many um diverse um pockets of population so um there there isn't a sort of Monolithic Canadian set of religious beliefs u in particularly Quebec which had had been under the thumb of the church for so many years and when they when they overturned that they overturned it really quite completely and they were not about to go back um so it would be hard to do in Canada in the states
it was mixed it was either um this will never happen because we're Beyond this and how could you even think that we would do such a thing um and on the other hand how long have we got so some people said how long have we got other people said surely not uh the people said who said surely not tended at that moment to be to be older um and the people who said how long have we got tended to be at that moment younger the the TV series launched three months after president Trump was inaugurated
three months after the women's March on Washington what did it feel like to have your work resurface and be reinterpreted in that CL so we knew we knew and on November the um 9th election is the eth yeah yeah no remember the nth everybody in the show and we were several months into shooting by that time um woke up on that morning and said to themselves we're in a different show not because anything changed nothing changed in the scripts in the first season um but the frame was going to be different and the frame was
different so instead of look what we just avoided people reacted to it as here it comes everybody was very unsettled around that time I think there was a very unsettled feeling I think there still is a very unsettled feeling and I think that the the creation of chaos and the feeling of um nobody can predict anything I think that's deliberate do you feel like the story you published 30 years ago is about to come true do I feel it's about to come true it's coming true in lumps so it's like what William Gibson said about
the future the future is already here but it's unevenly distributed U so there there have certainly been really quite astonishingly extreme uh attempts made in some states to to um squash women's rights uh not all of them have succeeded but some of them have and you're going to see more of them but as I said it's lumpy it's it's going to be state by state U I think you're probably okay in Los Angeles for the time being how long have people been asking you that question and has your answer changed no it's about the same
I think the United States is so large and diverse that it's it's not an an automatic rollover so if you have a much smaller more condensed Europe an country it's easier to get um to get your your hands on your totalitarian hands on um all of the methods of news distribution for instance it's it's easier to shut down uh an independent Judiciary uh not that attempts have not been made in this country uh but I I I don't think people are going to roll over so easily uh for that kind of a monolithic approach and
I think also that that a lot of people have been galvanized by recent events uh who previously would have just said oh well government who cares about that you know it's nothing to do with me I'm not going to vote um I I think they have uh realized that this could uh that unless they themselves participate in the choice of people who are running things oh they're going to get run you've said that it has been both inspiring and unsettling to see a Resurgence of interest in the handmaid's tail why why is that well in
inspiring because it means that people are paying attention uh to what could happen uh what some people would like to do to them let's put it that way uh unsettling because of course you would you would much prefer when you write a book like this that would act as a do not do this sign and that people would then not do it so that's what's unsettle it shouldn't be a blueprint your your book was banned when it came out and you appealed and and wrote uh appeals what did you say in in your in those
essays okay so I I only wrote One essay of that kind of it was actually an open letter to a school board and this was not a heroic story story about me it's a heroic story about some high school students of his school board attempted to ban the handmaid's tail in their school but they wanted to read it and study it and this was in the Texas Panhandle um so there was you know fairly conservative surround to the story and they argued their case to the school board and they won um so for me those
people are um you know Free Speech Heroes
