Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood is the story of Elaine, a painter who, on returning to her childhood city of Toronto for her grand retrospective exhibition, finds memories of her past flooding back to her – but happy memories they are not. The novel opens in a really clever and intriguing way – Elaine is looking back on her childhood friendships and the impression we are left with is that something traumatic happened, as Elaine relishes imagining tragic circumstances befalling a certain Cordelia. As Elaine’s past slowly unfolds for us, in particularly detailed and evocative storytelling tracing her unusual, peripatetic childhood and slowly revealing what eventually happened, Atwood conjures a chilling portrait of childhood and adolescence; of girlhood in particular, the treacherous dynamics and little cruelties that characterise some unlucky young friendships, and their repercussions through the years. As the memories come crashing back, Elaine is forced to finally face the tormentor who has been haunting her for 40 odd years. 

Atwood has an absolute knack for getting into her characters’ psyches in simple everyday moments that also capture the expanse of human experience and emotions. Exploring themes of innocence and awakening; of relentless bullying, betrayal, and the amnesia that trauma can induce; of how we can choose to suffer to belong; of how your bully can also be your best friend; and of how the tormentor can become the tormented. Contrasting these traumatic memories as they resurface with their consequences in the actions and relationships of later years, Cat’s Eye is a gut-punch of a novel about how we carry our childhood forward, and perhaps about how it is in our hands to face the more troubling parts of our childhood in our later years, in order to finally move further forward.

Listened to as an audiobook read by Laurel Lefkow. 

***

Cat’s Eye was published by Doubleday in 1988.

***

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade.
 
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.