Writing the first biography of a major living author is a daunting task that imposes severe restrictions even on the boldest biographers. Nathalie Cooke, an academic and Atwood scholar, bypasses the family dynamics that are fundamental to understanding character. She also avoids exploring the deeper patterns linking life and work, which are the hallmark of literary biography. Instead, she settles for a survey of the writing career of her subject. She is most successful in describing Atwood’s involvement with House of Anansi Press and the circumstances leading up to the publication of her early works.

At the beginning Cooke invokes the spectre of the tragic female artist as exemplified by Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn MacEwen, the Brontës, and others. Cooke’s main purpose is to show how Atwood, in scripting her own life, decisively rejected this stereotype.

Accordingly, we have Atwood The Well-Adjusted – the dutiful daughter, amicable sister and aunt, serene wife and mother, capable farmer, and loyal friend. One interviewee accounts for her “justifiable self-confidence” with the comment that “her parents must have loved her from the instant of her birth.” Cooke apparently interviewed only admiring friends or selected their adulatory remarks. The result is that she has exchanged one unfortunate stereotype for another. Instead of the Doomed Poet we have a modern Angel in the House. I do not believe that the Atwood depicted here could have written The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye.

Although this is not an authorized biography, it bears the marks of one. Cooke mentions notes that Atwood sent while the book was in progress. These include send-ups and journalistic criticisms of biography, and essays on life-writing by poets and novelists – those most threatened by the biographical enterprise. (There are none by expert practitioners such as Phyllis Grosskurth, Victoria Glendinning, or Leon Edel.) The missives clearly intimidate Cooke, who frames her book with apologetic remarks.

A biographer who feels that her protean subject defies representation has two options. She can abandon biography for a more appropriate genre, or she can struggle to forge a multi-vocal form to accomodate her vision. The least effective course is to present, as Cooke does, a monolithic figure and constantly bemoan its limitations.