We file onto the wide lawn in front of what used to be the library. The white steps going up are still the same, the main entrance is unaltered. There’s a wooden stage erected on the lawn, something like the one they used every spring, for commencement, in the time before.

“Queen Victoria was not amused,” Atwood told me with glee, recalling the University’s reaction after her novel’s publication.

Atwood returned to Harvard last week to speak give a lecture titled “How I Became a Writer.” She began with her family history, then moved on to her childhood in northern Quebec and later Toronto, a time where she “read everything I could get my hands on.” Atwood placed the “literature” of her childhood into three categories: “acceptable” books read for school, “acceptable” books read out of school and, finally, True Romance novels. Grinning, she told her audience, “I learned many things about the seedier side of life from the printed page.” The odd combination between Atwood’s childhood literary curiosity, teenage titillation and embarrassment at contrived words and situations resurfaced in 1991’s Wilderness Tips, a collection of short stories:

What the [teenage] waitresses are reading is a True Romance magazine…True Trash, Hilary calls them. Joanne calls the Moan-o-dramas. Right now it’s Joanne reading. She reads in a serious, histrionic voice, like someone on the radio…She’s got her sunglasses perched on the end of her nose, like a teacher. For extra hilarity she’s thrown in a fake English accent…

‘I felt myself lifted. He was carrying me to the sofa. Then I felt the length of his hard, sinewy body pressing against mine. Feebly I tried to push his hands away, but I didn’t really want to. And then—dot dot dot—we were One, capital O, exclamation mark.’

There is a moment of silence. Then the waitresses laugh. Their laughter is outraged, disbelieving. One. Just like that. There has to be more to it.

The audience laughed at the prospect of being lured into writing by dimestore novels with shapely, off-color Fallen Women on the cover, but quickly became quiet at what Atwood said next. Her decision to become a writer, she recounted, “simply happened in 1956 while I was crossing the football field on the way home from school [and composed a poem in my head]. From that point on there was nothing else I wanted to do.” There was a moment of silence. Then the audience laughed, disbelieving. Just like that. There had to be more to it.

Atwood spared no detail in recounting her past embarrassments, both personal and public—her Home Economics opera in high school starring Orlon™ and Nylon™ (“Let’s just say that it concluded with the creation of a new synthetic fabric”); her first book signing, which took place in the men’s underwear department of the Hudson’s Bay department store in 1969 (“I sold two Edible Wom[e]n all day”); the scandalous extramarital affair that began her 30-year-strong marriage to Graeme Gibson (“I stole him away”). Despite all her self-deprecating, hilarious, self-disclosure, the mystery of how Atwood became a writer still remained. True, the events of her life play a large role in the content of her fictional works and her poetry, but how she made the leap between the football field and the Booker Prize was left largely undisclosed. She curtailed her story at the publication of her first novel, and finished her speech without instructions, only a warning and a smirk: “Beware…it’s a daunting, shark-filled lagoon out there.” Margaret Atwood knows the end of the story, but she’s not telling.