You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Margaret Atwood.

It's the second interview we're doing on the occasion of her novel,

The Robert Bride, recently published by Doubleday.

We had ended up last time talking about World War II as being an origin point or a disruption

of families metaphorically and causing the defect or the vulnerability point in the women

in the book. Do you take that to be a political fact as well or simply a metaphor for this book?

It's a life fact. That's what war does and talk to anybody who has been through it as, you know, say a young married couple, the guy goes off to war, the woman is left with the small kids, the guy comes back, supposing you're lucky, and he has been through something that is so profoundly altered him that it's like a different person.

And they then have to deal with their altered relationship.

My husband's father was a general in the Second World War,

and he says that he doesn't know very many couples that actually survived,

not during the war, but the return.

And the ones that did did so by starting another family.

Otherwise, the life experiences had been so divergent

that it was very, very hard for the man to deal with peace.

You know, you find this a lot with people who have been through a war,

that this experience has been so devastating for them.

And the other thing that happens is they've had this hugely significant and altering

...