Red Shoes is a “not-biography.” Although Rosemary Sullivan has been lauded for sensitive work about Elizabeth Smart and Gwendolyn MacEwen, this time she wanted a writer not defined by the “tragic female artist” template. Because Margaret Atwood has “managed to take control of her artistry and her life,” Sullivan chose her as antidote – or counterpoint – to the sadness and isolation of Smart and MacEwen.

It is also not biographical in that it focuses on Atwood’s life only up to the late 1970s. Sullivan likes the “interfacing between the culture that had formed her and the mind of the writer” and so the book links emerging Canadian national identity with Atwood’s personal maturation. However, while the sixties and seventies rehash is fun, Red Shoes situates the births of both Canadian nationalism and CanLit in Atwood country – central Canada. Midwives across the country are mostly ignored.

For most, perceptions of Atwood are fuelled by her public persona post-1976, but Sullivan wants more than “arrogant and bitchy.” She pushes this heroic version: women writers were once childless and poor, but thanks to Atwood – supportive husband, Harvard degree, offspring, no self-doubt – they can “continue undevastated, with their creative explorations, without [a child] being a violation of the code of art.” Peggy did it. Except Peggy already had books, bucks, and 35 years experience at being Peggy when her daughter was born. She hired a babysitter for four hours a day, five days a week. Atwood rightly feared Sullivan would make her a role model. In Red Shoes, she is a bizarre superwoman who takes up global moral causes and reviews her needy friends’ books kindly; she breeds elegantly late in life, back to work in a few days; she bakes cookies and does laundry.

Still, Sullivan writes wisely and sensibly and well; she avoids gossip and generalization though much insight comes from Atwood’s first husband, Jim Polk. Unlike last year’s blowsy James King biography of Margaret Laurence, Red Shoes is without inane interpretations of family photos and unreadable sentences. This is an inspired and inspiring book, but more useful than the myths are the paradoxes. Atwood is self-assured but defensive and vulnerable, remembered by many as very shy. She kept a praying mantis as a a pet; Edmonton screwed up her first marriage. She instructed freshman engineers to write imitations of Kafka; her hair has always been a problem. That’s a role model.