The Handmaid’s Tale as Fictional Memoir

A master class on how real stories get gaslit and buried

Memoirs with Melissa shares bimonthly reviews intended to expose readers to diverse authors and life experiences. To see more of what I’m reading, browse my virtual memoir shelf on Goodreads.

This summer, my partner and I were tasked with choosing an audiobook to hold both our attentions through 24 hours of driving over two weeks of travel. He tends toward classic fiction, and I obviously gravitate toward memoir. After I nixed Don Quixote and he reminded me he’d already read Obama’s A Promised Land, we landed on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. 

I don’t usually review fiction, but hang with me, and you’ll see why it’s required reading and thinking, especially for people interested in real stories.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a fictional, first-person account of a woman who lives under the dystopian rule of Gilead, a neo-Puritanical regime that exercises extreme control over women and their prescribed roles in society. In a made-up future where birth rates are plummeting and abortion is forbidden, the narrator, Offred (think of Fred), is forced to serve as a reproductive surrogate for a high-ranking commander and his wife. A series of secret desires and actions ensues from a cast of characters. Offred remains at the center of it all, trying to appease each person without their or her secrets colliding in disaster.

Even though it was written in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale has enjoyed recent popularity thanks to a Hulu series based on the novel and the nescient comparison of the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade to the science fictional world the book depicts. But that’s not one of the two connections to real life I’m wanting to spotlight here.

What many outraged people overlooked in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling is that, as chilling of a read as The Handmaid’s Tale is in light of current events, we aren’t living in science fiction turned prophecy. Controlling the reproductive rights of people assigned female at birth, especially those who are BIPOC and/or trans, is nothing new. Nor is denying the stories of marginalized people who’ve lived them.

This has already been written about, but before I go on, it’s important to reiterate: Roe v. Wade is not the first or most egregious time The Handmaid’s Tale has come eerily close to mimicking real life. Varying degrees of controlling reproductive rights has been happening for centuries, and it’s rising in visibility, to the point that white cisgender women are once more being significantly affected (still disproportionately to the BIPOC and trans communities) and getting loud about it. Sound familiar to Tarana Burke’s memoir Unbound and how #MeToo exploded in 2017?

The second connection to real life, and what cinched my decision to review a novel this month on my Substack devoted to memoir, was the book’s ambiguous end.

**Warning: mild spoilers ahead.**

We don’t find out what happens to Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale. Instead, Atwood concludes in the distant future at a symposium on Gileadean studies, which is held at the University of Denay, Nunavut (pronounced Deny, None of It). At the symposium, a professor gives a talk entitled “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale.”

In the course of about 30 minutes, the professor manages to cast doubt on the validity of a 10.5 hour story told in the first person by someone who, up until that point, comes across as a highly reflective and reliable narrator. 

Among his reasons for caution in interpreting the manuscript as fact: We have no way of knowing Offred’s original name prior to her service as a handmaid. She couldn’t have been educated beyond the level of any graduate of a North American college at the time. The equipment she would have needed to record her story on the cassette tapes on which the manuscript was discovered did not exist at the time the story was purported to have occurred. Verification of historical facts in the transcribed manuscript are next to impossible given Gilead’s tendency to destroy records. What’s more is that she likely utilized pseudonyms in her story to protect herself and her family from retaliation. Perhaps some of her story was even coded, or parts left out intentionally. 

One can only imagine the risks Offred assumed in documenting her story. 

As I listened to the professor’s analysis, I was reminded why so many people’s stories never get documented, let alone believed. So many get told only in personal diaries or private conversations due to risks of lawsuits, fear of retaliation by abusers, or even lack of a visible platform and target audience (hello, publishing industry). Others do get told but aren’t believed due to no available corroborating evidence. (Know My Name, a memoir by Chanel Miller is a great example.) Is it any wonder we often have to turn to fiction to see approximations of the unspeakable stories people are forced to live?

This is one of many reasons why I function as a sort of memoir hype person. People’s experiences aren’t for judging and critiquing, as the professor does with Offred’s story-dubbed-tale. They contain first-hand accounts and warnings of realities we may never otherwise perceive or see coming. 

If you’re looking to incorporate fiction into your memoir diet, The Handmaid’s Tale is an excellent pairing. And in case you’re wondering, the Hulu series is no substitute for the book. Might I also suggest a follow-up game of Scrabble? (If you’ve read the book, you get it.)

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