The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for the month of May 2017.

I'm Katie Waldman, a staff writer at Slate, and I'm joined today by the New York Times Magazine's Emily Bazelon, who is also one of our

beloved hosts on the Slate Political Gab Fest. Hey, Emily. Hey, Katie. And by Megan O'Rourke, a writer and

critic and the original founder of the Slate Audio Book Club. So we're thrilled to have you back,

Megan. Hi. Hi, it's great to be here. Today we will be discussing Margaret

Atwood's 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, alongside its TV adaptation on Hulu. I'm hoping you guys

can help me convey the gist of the plot, but our setting is the Theocratic Republic of Jiliad,

a society that enshrines white male power and cracks down brutally on female agency.

Our protagonist, Offred, belongs to a class of women called Handmaids who are ritually raped by the country's political elite in order to ease a fertility crisis.

In addition to handmaids, there are wives who are these kind of pious showhorses and marthas who are servants. None of the women are allowed to read. They cannot own property.

Feminists are declared unwemomen and banished to toxic waste dumps. I don't know if you guys

want to jump in and add things that I've left out. Right after toxic waste dumps, Katie, you

thought not that'd jump in.

Just for us to book note, bookmark for later, in the book, she says that it's not rape, which is really

interesting. And I think sort of a legacy of the 1980s, but anyway, maybe we can circle back to that, that moment in the book.

Oh, yeah. That was really interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

But one thing I did want to say is that the show, a lot of reviews have said that it's quite

faithful to the novel, and that isn't, that wasn't my experience watching it right after

reading the novel.

It seems like the timeline is scrambled and it also departs in a lot of other important ways.

...