Margaret Atwood gets personal with "Inner Advice Columnist" in new memoir
Margaret Atwood's fiction tells of future worlds plagued by totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and global pandemic. At 86, she looks not forward but back at her her own life in a new memoir.
Updated on: August 16, 2026 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News
This is an updated version of a story first published on Nov. 9, 2025. The original video can be viewed here .
You're an 86-year-old titan of literature, have been for a half-century now. You're Canada's best known author, 64 books and counting. And increasingly you find your work on lists of banned books, scrubbed from 135 American school districts. Yes, that includes your breakthrough work, the dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale." But you've also been censored for work like "The Testaments" and "The Blind Assassin," both of which won the Booker Prize, the top award for English-language fiction. What to do? Sure, you take to the keyboard and write sternly-worded opinion pieces. But as we first told you last fall, if you're the indomitable Margaret Atwood, you don't stop there.
Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Atwood was firing back at would-be book-burners by torching an unburnable edition. It was all promotion for a charity auction to benefit PEN America — a nonprofit that champions free speech.
Atwood's books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. She told us she was particularly peeved when a recent ban came from Edmonton, Alberta, in her own country.
Margaret Atwood: The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? I don't know.