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Reading this book at this time (post overturning of Roe v. Wade and Capitol Insurrection) was clearly intentional and obviously impacted my reading experience. For someone of my generation now seeing some rights of women in this country stripped, restricted and hear the rhetoric of a group of people conflating their distorted religious views with lies from a power-grabbing far-right this speculative fiction seems all the more possible.

This was a reread for me, though I think my original reading was 15-17 years ago? I have since watch the Hulu series as well, so I was surprised by how little I now remembered of the original book and maybe how much I had mingled the two as the same. The separate representations are of a same piece, but the departures from this the original are numerous and vast (which not that it matters, but for the media I think was very smart). There is a choppiness to the tale, an internal first-person narration that is full of remembrances and flashes of trauma, the narrator is also not simple or perfectly consistent, she is someone struggling with self-blame and her own barely tenable state of sanity. I think it is the flashes of emotion brought on by some reminder of what was or could still be - nothing is certain -, followed as it is on the heels of disconnection, that lends credibility to her narration - as a traumatized person, a prisoner, a mother, a rape-victim, a survivor. The story she shares is skeletal, an incomplete framework for us to understand her experiences in her position as a handmaid in Gilead, but certain things are described in minute detail, it's her reality, this not knowing or understanding everything that brought her here, but both remembering the feel of her child in her arms and the banter with a friend, as well as spending larges expanses of time staring at four walls, at a plaster wreath on the ceiling... once decorative moldings for a chandelier, an element removed for the possibilities it leant for escape of a certain variety. The sparseness plays to the books benefit, though I think this is something I would have found irritating as a younger reader; my one quibble is the final chapter, a conference in which The Handmaid's Tale is discussed as an historic document, I didn't want this explanation, while it still leaves much of the gaps of our protagonist's story unanswered, it was still more than I thought necessary and after all of this to end with academic neutrality... it irritates/rankles, but perhaps that is exactly what Atwood was after.

A speculative fiction of our time, from the incredible story-teller Margaret Atwood who first published this book in 1985! This book seems oddly prescient perhaps, but also has an 80's flavor at times. Not a particularly enjoyable read, in fact an uncomfortable read much of the time, but an unputdownable read none the less.