Margaret Atwood has shared several details about her long-time heart condition.
The 85-year-old author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye opened up about her health in her new memoir, Book of Lives.
Writing about her experience of Covid, the Canadian author said that she contracted the virus more than once. “It was unpleasant, but it had no lasting effects,” she wrote.
At the same time, however, Atwood developed a “parallel ailment” concerning her heart, which she called “a galloping atrial fibrillation”.
Atrial fibrillation is a heart arrhythmia that causes an irregular heartbeat.
“I’d had an irregular heartbeat since the age of 12 – nothing to worry about, I was told, though it was sometimes annoying,” she wrote.
“Now I’d developed galloping atrial fibrillation, a progressive condition that can’t be cured. At first, medication controlled it a bit, though, over time, not nearly enough.”
Atwood went on to say that she did not know when an episode “might strike”, adding: “My heart would shoot up to 165, then plummet to 35, and my heart would stop for up to 10 seconds.”
On how the condition affected her life, she wrote: “I could get through public events as long as I had a chair and a table so I wouldn’t fall over.
“I would prop my head on one hand, as if I were thinking profound thoughts, whereas in reality I was briefly passing out.”
Atwood had a new pacemaker fitted at the end of 2023 and continues to control her condition with a medication that has one unusual side effect.
“Should I spend too much time in the sun, [it] will turn me blue,” she wrote. “Not a uniform Smurfy blue, which would be striking, but more like your face if you’ve walked into a wall. So I go in for sunblock and wide-brimmed hats, but then, I did anyway.”
Writing about her health, Atwood concluded: “Sooner or later, the body will decide to go off on an adventure of its own, no matter what I may wish. But so far, we are still together.”
The writer’s heart issues have been the focus of several poems, including “The Woman Who Could Not Live With her Faulty Heart” (1978) and “Heart” (2007).
Elsewhere in her memoir, Atwood speaks about her cameo in the hit TV adaptation of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, starring Elisabeth Moss in the lead role of Offred.
The scene in question required Atwood to slap Moss’s character across the face. “We did the scene four times because I wasn’t slapping hard enough,” she wrote. “It’s a surreal moment when your leading lady says, ‘Go on! Slap me harder!’”
In the end, a sound effect was added to the moment to emphasise the slap. “That isn’t really Offred’s neck cracking,” Atwood wrote.
In a career spanning more than six decades, Atwood has won several awards for her writing. She is the two-time recipient of the Booker Prize, winning in 2000 for her 10th novel, The Blind Assassin, and again in 2019 with The Testaments, a sequel to 1984’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
