The Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is right around the corner. While we wait, a TV tie-in edition of the book will be released on April 18th! The edition will include a new introduction from Margaret Atwood and a cover inspired by the Hulu adaptation, with Elizabeth Moss front and center.
Margaret Atwood’s introduction first appeared in The New York Times and helps us understand her writing process.
Excerpt from new introduction:
In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called The Handmaid’s Tale. I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I’d rented.
The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in place, and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the East German Air Force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain — Czechoslovakia, East Germany — I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. “This used to belong to . . . but then they disappeared.” I heard such stories many times.
Read the rest at Entertainment Weekly and watch The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, April 26th.
Featured image courtesy of Spin