a conversation with Margaret Atwood

'There are pluses and minuses [to celebrity]. But for a freelancer with no job prospects, what’s the alternative? You can't un-famous yourself.'

Everyone who lives in downtown Toronto has a brush-with-Margaret-Atwood story.

As a law student, the novelist Andrew Pyper once helped her push her car out of a snowbank and now has a photo of the moment on his website. Another journalist friend of mine unknowingly dropped her favourite mitten while hurrying down Avenue Road in a blizzard only to have h…