• First published in 1985, has always been in print ever since
• The writing started in the spring of 1984, while the author lived in Berlin, when the Berlin Wall was still standing
• The original title of the book was Offred
• The book was written by hand, then transcribed with the aid of a typewriter with still scribbles on the typed pages -> then a professional typist typed it in
• Atwood left Berlin in the JUne of 1984, and returned to Canada, spent a month on Galiano Island in British Columbia, then moved to Alabama and finished the book there
• In the US, when it was published, the reaction was “How long do we have left?”
• In Gilead, just in a ‘true’ theocracy a few passages from the Bible (Old Testament” are chosen to justify actions
• “I made a rule for myself: : I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)” – Atwood
• Femisinst dystopia? Not correct, since not all men has a greater right than all women <-> Gilead is a pyramid: the powerful of both sexes at the top, the men outranking the women on the same level

• The Handmaids: treasured for what they might could do, but untouchable <-> status symbol for the men owning them

• Interests of the writer inspiring the book:

1. Dystopian literature, starting with reading 1984
2. The study of 17th-18th century America at Harvard (her ancestors lived there,at those times)
3. Dictatorships and how they function (she was born in 1939, 3 months after the start of WWII)

Notes based on this article