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Celebrity Watch: Margaret Atwood is officially everywhere, from Twitter to Rob Ford: The Opera and more
| April 13, 2012
The recent release of Payback, a new feature documentary based on Margaret Atwood’s book of the same name, confirms it
She rehabilitates ex-cons
Payback the movie features Conrad Black reading from Payback the book. At the premiere, Atwood declared that Black had become “a new and different kind of Conrad.”
She’s a septuagenarian
Stephen King
Atwood has churned out roughly 60 books in her career, averaging more than one a year in the past decade.
She’s all over
your Twitter feed
Atwood, with her 300,000-plus followers, is an evangelist for social media: at a recent tech conference, she declared that Twitter and the Internet boost literacy, eliciting many an OMG and LOL among literacy experts.
She earned her wings
In Rob Ford: The Opera, which had a sold-out performance in January, Atwood was portrayed as an angel of judgment, come to show the mayor the error of his ways.
She humbles
the Ford brothers
After inviting ridicule for claiming not to know who Atwood was, Doug Ford was forced to admit that “she’s a great writer.” Sounds like an excellent book jacket blurb.
She’s bigger than Homer
A new production of Atwood’s The Penelopiad, starring Megan “Anne of Green Gables” Follows, opened in January. (Short version: men are shitty; ancient Greek men are shittier.)
She’s the Che Guavara
of the Annex
Spacing magazine has sold more than 1,400 “Atwood for Mayor” buttons, and at last fall’s Labour Day parade, some marchers wore homemade Atwood masks.
She sells popcorn
Even as Payback was screening at Sundance, Sarah Polley announced plans to direct a film version of Alias Grace. Atwood quickly tweeted her approval.
She’s an ice queen
During a recent Arctic cruise, Atwood stumbled across a two-billion-year-old fossil. The trip inspired her to write a short story for the New Yorker about a woman who kills men and dumps their bodies in the frozen north. (Wait: what?)
She’s big with baristas
The Atwood Blend, a brand of Fairtrade coffee from Balzac’s, is tart and stimulating, with no bitterly patriarchal aftertaste.
