All Hail the 'Great Woman' Memoir

Margaret Atwood and Susan Orlean's recent books fill an undiscussed void: the story of how great women come to be (and what we can learn from their lives).

I found it hard to imagine Margaret Atwood as a young author.

She had always loomed larger than life for me, too big to even consider emulating her. Deciding to be the kind of person who writes something like The Handmaid’s Tale is just too much. Even when I first saw her recent memoir at the bookstore, I thought that on the one hand, it was probably int…