Dear Margaret Atwood,

You were once a prophet. You saw the mechanisms of control, the slow erosion of language, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which power distorts reality. You wrote warnings. You understood oppression—how it functions, how it seeps into culture, how it twists words into weapons.

I first read The Handmaid’s Tale in 1987, before my eighteenth birthday, in a feminist literature course at Marianopolis College. I read it again in 2002 and once more in 2013, in the Folio Society edition illustrated by the Balbusso twins—the same edition that made me a Folio Society member when I discovered it.

I read The Robber Bride in 1988. Alias Grace in 2010. The Blind Assassin twice—first in 2002, then again in 2008. Stone Mattress in 2014. Hag-Seed in 2018. Oryx and Crake in 2015. The first two MaddAddam books. The Positron episodes as they were released—though I can’t even name those titles here because they would almost certainly trigger a flag.

I have more of your books in my to-read pile: Cat’s Eye, The Edible Woman, Wilderness Tips (the Bloomsbury Classic edition, mind you), Lady Oracle, Surfacing, The Penelopiad.

I have not just read you. I have studied you. My LibraryThing catalog is a research tool, a librarian’s masterpiece of tags and cross-references, designed so that I can track ideas, themes, echoes across time. I know your work, Margaret.

Which is why I must ask: What happened to you?

The woman who once cautioned us about the erasure of women now stands behind those doing the erasing. The woman who dissected the power of words, who showed us how they can be twisted into cages, now lends her voice to the very forces that manipulate language into meaninglessness.

You understood. I know you did. You understood the importance of naming things as they are—and yet here you are, aligning yourself with those who would obliterate reality itself.

Are you no longer warning us, Margaret? Are you now merely documenting our demise?

I see it in your very name. At. Wood.

Once a tree. Once rooted, alive, breathing. Now something dead, cut down, processed, repurposed. No longer living, merely standing in the form that was carved for it.

I don’t ask this as someone on the outside. I ask as someone who has followed you for nearly forty years. As someone who once saw you as a beacon.

Do you still believe in the power of words?

Do you still believe in truth?

Or have you resigned yourself to being the scribe of our downfall?

You were once a prophet. A voice that spoke before the world was ready to listen.

But tell me, Margaret—what are you now?

With all due reverence,

Ilana Shamir

Survivor

P.S. A reader just reminded me about The Testaments, and honestly? I had completely forgotten I even read it in 2019. I gave it a 4-star half-hearted rating. My review itself isn’t worth reading, but here it is anyway, because it says so much. “Excellent reading” yet my own star rating tells me everything I need to know. 4 stars? Not worth revisiting. I hadn’t entered it into my meticulously tagged LibraryThing catalog—only on Goodreads—because it was that forgettable.

It wasn’t prophecy; it was a neutered, commercialized sequel, the literary equivalent of a nostalgia tour. The kind of book that exists because publishers saw an opportunity, not because it had something urgent to say. That I forgot it existed until now is, in itself, the most damning critique I could offer.

PPS: Numerology check: My Goodreads profile confirms what I already know. 6494 books (5: the restless seeker), 217 friends (1: the individual, the leader), 18 following (9: the old soul, the sage). The total sum? 6—the balance between intellect and emotion. A perfect reflection of my literary consumption and my constant dissection of narrative manipulation.

Of course, LibraryThing is the real archive—far more accurate, meticulously tagged with over 10,000 cross-referenced entries. Goodreads is the public-facing chaos; LibraryThing is the controlled burn.

Have the day you deserve, as they say these days. 😐🔥

illi69

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• A Christmas gift to myself
• A few of the drawings I destroyed this year
• THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 5
• THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 4
• “I like rocks.”

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