Margaret Atwood on Envy and Friendship in Old Age

So this is something you don’t experience every day as a writer: You post a thread about your new story on Twitter, a medium with which you have a love-hate relationship at best (essential to publicity, but also a forum for cruelty, an open pasture for a firing squad), and suddenly, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale appears in your timeline. She has read your story. She has some thoughts.

Wait till you get Really old. It will all change again. :)

This is what Margaret Atwood wrote to me on February 9, about 14 hours after I’d tweeted an essay I’d just completed about the heartache and complexity of friendships in midlife. Weirdly, no one else had made this observation. Atwood is 82.

How? I asked.

How?

How?

Her reply: Your old enemies may become pals because there’s only the two of youse left who can remember the Dark Ages

before there were computers.  :D  Or pantyhose. :D :D

Or plastic bags.  :D :D :D

She added that she liked the part of my story about envy. I know no writers who’ve had some success who have not encountered