My Atwood Project, Part 6: Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye (1988) is the book I was most looking forward to rereading for this project, and it turns out it may well be Atwood's most autobiographical novel. Almost every piece of the plot can be traced back to her own life as she presents it in the memoir, except that the protagonist Elaine is a painter rather than a writer. There is the girlhood spent frequently in the northern wilderness with her parents, her older brother who shares his comic books, the early failed marriage. But most important, the bullying that happened when Atwood was in grade school. She avoided naming names when the book came out, because the perpetrator was still alive. Now she is dead. The ringleader of the bullies, Cordelia, was a girl named Sandra, and her second, Grace, was actually named Muriel. I too was bullied, but in a far less systematic way, and sympathize painfully with the 9-year-old girl bullied by her only friends.

According to the memoir, just about everything that the girls do to Elaine was really done to young Margaret, including many terrifying walks on a weak wood bridge over a threatening ravine. Her coping mechanisms came from her real life as well: peeling the skin from her feet, and finally just ignoring her tormentors. After that “Alice in Wonderland moment” -- “Why, they’re only a pack of cards after all” -- the protagonist seems to block out the memory of this bullying and actually becomes friends again with the main perpetrator in high school. Years later, adult Elaine is helping her mother clean out the basement and finds the cat's eye marble that was her protective talisman during that time and all the memories come rushing back. 

The pretext for the flashbacks is Elaine’s return to Toronto, where the harassment happened, for a retrospective exhibit of her art. I love the descriptions of all the paintings, many of which feature the horrible mother of one of the girls. I also love Elaine’s refusal to be pigeonholed by the young interviewer, resulting in the headline “Crotchety Artist Still Has Power to Disturb.”

All in all it’s one of my favorite Atwood books, and now that I’ve read the memoir, perhaps it is because so much of it is true, or just because I can relate.

Next up, more short fiction: Wilderness Tips and Good Bones.