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The not-biography >> Margaret Atwood throws off The Red Shoes by JULIET WATERS
Rosemary Sullivan, on the other hand, I would expect to be a diminutive, egoless vapour. As she's one of Canada's more respected literary biographers, I imagine her quietly absorbing every detail of a person, always retaining the ability to slip invisibly into the background so that her vivid portraits of writers like Elizabeth Smart and Gwendolyn MacEwan glow with their own lives, not hers. But Sullivan enters a room seeming to be about six feet tall, even if she isn't, and breathing fiery clouds of self-assurance. Immediately, it hits me that to take on the risks involved in writing the life of Canada's, and arguably one of the world's, most acid-tongued woman writers, one would need a pretty healthy ego. Which Sullivan has; in fact, she isn't dismissive of the idea of writing her own autobiography. "There's this notion that biographers are living vicariously through their subjects, but I think my life is a lot more interesting than Atwood's," she laughs. And on the surface, Atwood's life might not seem that interesting. Ours is a society that tends to feed on biographies for our daily dose of gossip, betrayal and the confirmation that to be famous and successful one has to be either fucked up or fucking other people up. Atwood's no saint, but her life is disappointingly healthy, complete with happily married, extremely supportive parents, a close bond with a loving older brother and a younger sister who currently works for Atwood as a researcher. Add to these facts a history of healthy romantic relationships and strong, loyal friendships and there's not much dirt in The Red Shoes. To her credit, Sullivan is honest about the possibility that there may very well be dirt on Atwood that might come out some day, but not in her biography or, as she calls it, her "not-biography." "That phrase is how I deal with the problem of writing about someone who is in mid-career and very much alive. There are certain figures who have biographies written about them during their lives--for instance Leonard Cohen or Gloria Steinem--because they turn out to be a certain product of their times, and they encapsulate something about that time. I've written 'real biography' as I call it: there are no diaries or journals, and when I spoke to people, I knew they would be guarded, usually out of affection. I also consider my title as an anti-title, because The Red Shoes symbolize not what Atwood is, but what she escaped." The title is taken from a movie Atwood saw as a child--about a ballerina who sacrifices love and marriage for her art and is destroyed for her decision. As Sullivan writes in her introduction to the book: "I wanted to write a third book to complete the narratives of two I had already written. Those had been real biographies. They were both about women writers. Though I hadn't expected it, they turned out to be stories about frustration, indeed agony, and finally, about silence... My books had celebrated them as remarkable writers, but secretly I felt a kind of guilt. Had I not, inadvertently, perpetuated the stereotype of the tragic female artist?... I felt compelled to write about a woman who had managed to take control of her artistry and her life." A project Sullivan succeeds at brilliantly, perhaps because there's more of her personality informing this not-biography than meets the eye. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out by Rosemary Sullivan, HarperCollins, hc, 359 pp, $32
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Often writers aren't what you expect. I've always imagined Margaret Atwood as an Amazonian figure, a brainy dragon whose presence would be the automatic centre of any room. But as Rosemary Sullivan describes her in The Red Shoes: "She is tiny, with a taut, electric intensity" and has "a way of slipping into a room quietly."