From Atwood, wisdom and a bit of wickedness
In preparing to chat with author Margaret Atwood A.M. ’62, John Lithgow told a Sanders Theatre crowd, he “fell madly in love” with her great mind and talent. On Thursday, the actor and the audience fell in love with her crisp, caustic wit, too. When Lithgow asked Atwood how it feels to craft a line like “their clothes look like they had covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred dollar bills,” this year’s Harvard Arts medalist said she doesn’t consider it wit. Instead, she thinks of it simply as “descriptive writing” and said the narrator in question “is a pretty mean old lady.” “You’re a kind person, so you would feel that you had surprised yourself” had he written those words, Atwood told Lithgow ’67. “With this amount of malice coming from me, it’s not really surprising.” But pressed about whether her sharp pen gives her any sense of joy, Atwood...