Margaret Atwood on the Multiple Personality of Writers

“Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double, Why there are always two” is the title of chapter 2 in Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (New York, Anchor Books, 2003).

She speaks, first of all, about herself, but considers it true of all creative writers. She says that the idea is not new and is no secret:

“There has been a widespread suspicion among writers—widespread over at least the past century and a half—that there are two of him sharing the same body, with a hard-to-predict and difficult-to-pinpoint moment during which the one turns into the other. When writers have spoken consciously of their own double natures, they’re likely to say that one half does the living, the other half the writing…”