Margaret Atwood is doing her grocery shopping in her local supermarket in Toronto, and it is taking longer than usual. This is not because The Handmaid’s Tale author turns 86 this month, but because she is checking the provenance of every item before it goes in her trolley: California satsumas out; Canada spuds in. Atwood is a passionate environmentalist, but at the moment she is more worried about boycotting anything that comes from over the border in the US than air miles. “Elbows up!” she declares, taking a furious stance in the fruit and veg aisle.

Back in her kitchen she shows me a YouTube skit of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and comedian Mike Myers in the national hockey kit to explain the significance of “Elbows up”, a growing gesture of Canadian resistance. “Oh, they’re angry. They’re furious,” she says of the reaction to President Trump’s proposed plans to make Canada the 51st state of America. “We’ve not got a very big army. If they wanted to invade they could do so. But I don’t think they would. Do they have any idea what it would be like to try to occupy a hostile Canada? It would not be a joke.” Trump would have to deal with Atwood, for starters.

“I think they are worried I’m going to drop dead before the book is out,” she says of her publishers, wielding a large tray, laden with two coffee pots (one decaf), a plate of biscuits and a tin of muffins, down the stairs into her back garden, a late-summer wilderness, surrounded by maples, linden trees and silver birches. Her publishers are doing their best to stop her overexerting herself. It is an impossible task: just the week before my visit, Atwood made headlines by writing a short story in response to a proposed ban on books with “explicit sexual content” in Alberta. The plan was withdrawn. “The Albertans are an independent-minded bunch,” she says. She has recently been fitted with a pacemaker (hence the decaf) and is on medication that will make her turn blue if she goes in the sun. Last winter, her 88-year-old brother Harold was up on his roof with a chainsaw to deal with a fallen tree, she tells me. Their mother was still clearing leaves from the roof in her 80s. I hope you don’t go up on the roof, I say, looking up at the turrets. “Only the flat bits,” she shoots back.

The book in question is her memoir, Book of Lives, a whopping 624 pages edged in shocking pink to match her outfit on the cover. Since 1961, Atwood has published an average of a book a year, including much‑loved novels Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, the MaddAddam trilogy, and the now canonical The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments. She has turned her hand to every genre – poetry, essays, graphic novels, even libretti – except autobiography, always insisting that she had no interest in writing about herself.

“I’m an old-fashioned novelist. Everything in my novels came from looking at the world around,” she says. “I don’t think I have much of an inner psyche.” Two impressive water features threaten to drown out her distinctive low murmur. Everything she says is salted with irony. “I felt so left out during the age of neurosis, when everyone was supposed to go to a shrink. I went to therapy once. He was bored with me. I didn’t have anything interesting to say.”

She finally gave in to the new book on the condition that it would not be autobiography, but “a memoir of sorts”, as the subtitle has it. “The memoir is what you can remember,” she clarifies. “And what you mostly remember is catastrophes and stupid things.”

Written in the chatty, no-nonsense style of her essays, the book marches through the decades: the depression, the second world war, McCarthyism, the shooting of JFK, 9/11, the Iraq war, Trumpism and the pandemic all get a mention. But this is not her take on global affairs or the issues that matter most to her – women’s rights, the environment, freedom of expression, literature. She did all that in her 2022 collected essays Burning Questions, another doorstopper, to which Book of Lives is the personal companion piece. Here, novels are given genesis stories, debts are repaid, scores are settled: the college boys who spiked her drink; the writer who turned her into a man-killing octopus (“I know who you are, or were, male person”); the Globe journalist who said her kitchen was gloomy, and worse. “Dead people, mostly,” she says now. “But, as far as living people go, truth is an absolute defence.”

Was it as enjoyable to write as it is to read?

“It was fun in parts,” she says. “But the parts where people are dying were not fun.”

***

The memoir is bookended by her childhood in the Canadian outback and the death, in 2019, of her partner of many decades, the writer Graeme Gibson, giving it an almost novelistic arc. Gibson died while Atwood was in the UK on a publicity tour for The Testaments. She carried on with the tour. Their relationship is the great love story of the book; his death the major catastrophe. “Boo-hoo,” she says quietly now. Her recent short stories, poems and especially the later chapters of the memoir are heartbreaking in their descriptions of loss. But she doesn’t do grief in public, she says.

The couple bought the house, now almost camouflaged by trees, in 1985. It was formerly a cult house, apparently, one of four on this wholesomely Canadian street. The walls were covered with orange shag-pile carpet, “so you couldn’t hear the screams”, she jokes grimly. Today, the walls are covered with paintings, including a large portrait of Gibson by an artist friend, Atwoodian publishing memorabilia – and books (a war section, a witches section, a Canadian history section). If there is anything cultish, it is in the many gifts that the author has been sent from fans: a knitted Atwood figure in Handmaid’s robes guarding the downstairs toilet; a tiny handmade library of all her novels, so miniature they need tweezers to be taken out. It’s not all good. “I get hate mail, just like everybody,” she says. “I don’t get quite as many weird sexual invitations as I used to, but I still get some.”

The cult of Atwood, 21st-century seer and saint, has been growing steadily. In 2019, she was the first female author to make the cover of Time magazine since Toni Morrison two decades before. Her name comes up every year around Nobel time – her popularity probably counts her out.

Having lived through a publishing epoch that was dominated by postwar male American novelists (Roth, Updike, Bellow) and then the Brits (Amis, McEwan, Rushdie), there is some satisfaction that a tiny female writer from Toronto, a city barely on the literary map when Atwood started out, should have the most enduring reach. “I expect it annoys a lot of people,” she says drily. But she shakes off her status as one of the most famous authors on the planet. “Number one, I’m still alive,” she reminds me. “Which makes me the oldest living whatnot of my generation. Number two, Canadians don’t do ‘most famous’.”

If she is “screamingly famous”, as she puts it in the memoir, “it’s an accident of history”, she says. “It’s because of the conjunction of the television series with actual political events.” The 2017 Hulu adaptation of her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale catapulted her on to the world stage. Filming began in the summer of 2016 and was still under way in November. “The election happened. Trump won,” she says. “Everybody involved woke up the next morning and thought, ‘We’re in a different show!’ Not because the show changed. It didn’t. Scripts did not change. The frame changed. Instead of thinking, ‘Oh, cute, fantasy’, people thought, ‘Oh my God, here it comes.’”

At a time when abortion has been made illegal in certain states, and people entering the US are having their phones checked for anti-Trump views, her vision of a future America as a totalitarian theocracy in The Handmaid’s Tale seemed terrifyingly prescient. The red handmaid gowns became a global symbol of female protest, phrases from the novel were printed on placards and T-shirts. “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again” became a rallying cry.

Nearly a decade since the TV series launched, filming has just finished in Toronto on the first season of The Testaments, in which the author has another cameo. For her first, she appeared, fleetingly, to give Elisabeth Moss a fierce slap as one of the aunts in the original. She is forbidden to say more about the new series. Naturally, Ann Dowd returns as Aunt Lydia.

“The States is not a totalitarianism – yet,” she says. “Though moving towards a concentrated-power structure. If it were a full totalitarianism we would not be filming The Testaments at all. We’d be in jail, in exile, or dead.”

Back in 1985, when The Handmaid’s Tale was published, the storming of the Capitol would have been unimaginable. “The wall was still up, the cold war was still on. America was a beacon of light, freedom, democracy, you name it.” she says. “The wall comes down in 1989. People think world conflict is over. We’re just going to go shopping and we’ll all be fine. Capitalism has won. But if you destabilise a world order like that, people come in to fill the vacuum.”

She pauses to allow a wasp that has settled on her pastry to fly away. “It’s this time of year. They’ve finished their reproductive cycle and they’ve got time on their hands,” she says, before taking a bite. “Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘I am the revolution’. Stalin, same thing. Trump, ‘America, c’est moi! Je suis America!’”

She feels bad for the States right now. “They’re losing their world-leader status and China is going to take over if they keep on going this way,” she says. “People go, ‘Boo, Americans!’ It’s not Americans. Half of them, at least, are not at all in favour of what’s going on at all.”

In one of the essays in Burning Questions, Atwood recalls advice on how to escape a crocodile: zigzag. It might serve as a description of a conversation with the author, which can swerve alarmingly across subjects and centuries: from Brexit (“A mistake. Guess what!”) back 8,000 years to Doggerland (when Britain was physically joined to Europe), from the French Revolution to zombies. You have to be wary of the teeth and the tail. As she confesses in the memoir, she has a reputation for “eviscerating interviewers”. If she has mellowed it is because journalists no longer ask why she writes such miserable novels, or if she shouldn’t do something about her hair. You still know when you’ve asked a stupid question. “And why is that, Lisa?” she will ask in a querulous, slightly scary voice.

***

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on 18 November 1939. This historically ominous date, two and a half months after the onset of the second world war, shaped her worldview; the idea that power can shift quickly, devastatingly and anywhere informs nearly everything she has written.

Her father, Carl, was an entomologist, and her mother, Margaret, was a school teacher before she got married. Atwood’s first years were spent in a succession of cabins in the woods of Ontario and Quebec, playing with snakes and toads with her brother Harold. Her nickname was Peggy.

“You have no fear,” a later boyfriend would tell her. This fearlessness, put to tackling different sorts of snakes and toads in later life, is one of the most striking qualities of the memoir. “Not quite,” she says now. “I’m wary of bears and thunderstorms, particularly lightning.” Harold was nearly struck by lightning. “Up in the north, those are the things you’re afraid of. Drowning, a close third.”

When Atwood was nine, the family moved to Toronto after her father got a job at the university. Her sister Ruth was born. She attended a proper school for the first time. In her handed-down pinafores, she was unprepared for the “unpredictable, oblique, underhanded, and byzantine nature of the power politics practised by nine- and 10-year-old girls”, she writes in the memoir. It was here that she met Sandra Sanders, who, 40 years later, would become the fictional tormentor Cordelia in her novel Cat’s Eye (often described as Lord of the Flies for girls). She learned never to be afraid of bullies again.

The young Peggy was following in her father’s footsteps towards a career in biology. One Friday when she was 16, she was crossing the school football pitch when a four-line poem came into her head. And that was it. She was a poet. She still has the button from the dress she was wearing that day. “Never throw out anything that might be useful,” she advises now.

She won a scholarship to Harvard. Every building would later be immortalised in The Handmaid’s Tale, including the Harvard Wall where the executed bodies were displayed. The college was not amused. Her first job with a market research company made its way into her debut The Edible Woman, published in 1969. It was all material.

Finding a boyfriend was never a problem. “They just appeared, like mushrooms after the rain.” There’s her first teenage romance, “naturally he had a car”, the Very Nice Boyfriend of her early 20s (he’s still alive), a tryst with a poet one night in a park in Edmonton, and a prolific, nonfiction Canadian author, “The Ill-Omened Lover”, who made the mistake of considering himself the serious writer in the relationship. He’s still alive, too. She’s not telling.

“Nobody thought much of it. It just happened,” she says of the general jumping into bed. “I think we probably had more fun than this generation.” In the late 60s, she married her on-off boyfriend Jim Polk, whom she had met at Harvard, “one of the odder things to happen to both of us”.

She met Gibson for the first time at the Governor General’s Award for poetry party in 1969. He looked at Atwood and thought “canoe trips”. His first gift was a sturdy pair of work boots. They were both married to other people at the time. “In the 1970s everybody’s marriage exploded,” she says breezily.

The next 48 years were filled with shared adventures: renovating farms, long visits to Europe and Australia, annual escapes to Pelee Island, in Ontario, for the spring migration, setting up various writerly and environmental projects – and canoe trips. He was so supportive of her writing that a journalist once wrote: “Every writer should be married to Graeme Gibson”, a slogan Atwood had printed on a T-shirt as a present.

Their daughter Jess (her first name is Eleanor, Atwood’s middle name) was born in 1976. For the first time, she didn’t embark on a novel for two years. “The baby was much more important.” She wanted more children. “I would have settled for three or four,” she says now. But Gibson already had two sons from his first marriage. He also didn’t want to marry again; she did. This bothered her greatly, especially as she was hailed as a feminist role model for “having a baby outside of wedlock”. Both these disappointments are dusted off by her alter ego, an “Inner Advice Columnist” she deploys in the memoir whenever anything threatens to get too intimate. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Many would give the shirt off their back to have your luck in men. Suck it up. Cherish your child. Get another cat.”

“Of course it rankled,” she says. “But who was going to support them?” At the time they were barely making ends meet on two writers’ incomes. Today she considers herself to have three children, including her two stepsons, and three “grandkids”. “That’s enough,” she says. Gibson’s eldest, Matthew “was a better son to me than most sons are to their mothers”. Jess, an art historian, lives in Brooklyn with her partner and nine-year-old son. They spent lockdown, which came shortly after Gibson’s death, with Atwood in Toronto. Jess’s first collection of short stories The Good Eye will be published next May, with a novel to come as part of a three-book deal. They are both wary of too much fuss being made of the connection, for fear it should “attract snipers”, she says. “I’ve had my child attacked in the press before.”

The Handmaid’s Tale came about thanks in part to a winter spent in a fisherman’s cottage in Blakeney, Norfolk, in 1983, which was so grim she abandoned the novel she was working on. The family left for West Berlin. She rented an electric typewriter with a German keyboard and finally began the novel that she had been putting off, because it was “too weird, even for me”.

Famously, the author’s rule was only to include atrocities that had actually happened. Th0e Pinochet regime in Chile, the baby-stealing of the Argentine generals, the fear and secrecy behind the iron curtain – all went in. When it was finished she sent the manuscript to the novelist Valerie Martin. “I think you are gonna make a lot of money,” she replied. She was right.

The Handmaid’s Tale was her first of six appearances on the Booker shortlist. In 1986, she lost out to Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils (who reads that now?). She won for The Blind Assassin in 2000, and again, controversially, for The Testaments in 2019, alongside Bernardine Evaristo, the first black female winner, for Girl, Woman, Other. “It couldn’t have gone better for me,” Evaristo has said of their joint win.

After the success of the TV show, Atwood was increasingly expected “to do the right thing for women in all circumstances”, she explains, “with many different right things projected on to me from readers and viewers”. She has always chafed against her role as high priestess of the sisterhood. “What do we mean exactly by equality?” she will say. “Equality for who?” And there are no shortage of morally repugnant female characters in her fiction, from Zenia in The Robber Bride to Cordelia and Aunt Lydia.

In 2017, she provoked a furore by weighing in on the case of the novelist and lecturer Steven Galloway who was suspended from the University of British Columbia after an accusation of sexual misconduct, later cleared of all but one of the accusations in an internal investigation, although “he was fired anyway”, Atwood says. It seemed “a clear case of guilty without trial”, she writes in the memoir. Galloway did admit to an affair with a student, for which he apologised.

“All I did was sign a letter asking for due process,” she says now. “Please read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You can find it on the internet. Note: women’s rights are a subset of human rights. You can’t have one without the other.”

Her views were seen as going against the growing #MeToo movement, which she described as “a symptom of a broken legal system” in a 2018 op-ed entitled “Am I a Bad Feminist?”. “#MeToo is no longer the unquestionable thing that it was for a while,” she says. “Now people are talking about the manosphere. There wasn’t a manosphere, now there is one.”

Her reluctance to take a clear stand on the gender culture wars has also been seen as a betrayal by some feminists. By way of an answer now, she points out that one of the most “banned” books in the US is a children’s book called Tango Makes Three about two male penguins in a zoo who are given an egg to raise by the zoo keepers. “True story. The books being banned the most in the US right now are LGBTQ. As well as anything with race,” she says. “But I got in trouble with trans activists, too, for retweeting a piece that worried about the disappearance of the word ‘woman’. Go figure.”

She is wary of ideological absolutes. Is it true? Is it fair? And cui bono? Who profits? She will ask on any issue. As a novelist, it is her job to ask questions, and, as she likes to points out, she can’t get sacked for her answers.

Does she ever fear being cancelled, or being perceived to be on the wrong side of history? “People have been attacking me since 1972,” she replies. “Been there, done that, several times on different issues.” History doesn’t have “sides”, she corrects me. “It isn’t a road leading inevitably somewhere, as the Marxists and their Bible-induced teleology used to have it. Trends come and go. No one can predict the future with dead certainty.”

Her oracular reputation means she is often asked about where the world is going. “Is there hope?” has replaced “Why do you hate men?” as a favourite question at events. As someone with a special interest in the darkest periods of humanity, and who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, she usually brushes aside apocalyptic gloom. Not so much recently. “It’s really pretty unsettled right now,” she says. “World power is shifting, old certainties are no longer certain. Of course we have had unsettled times in the past but we forget. It is the scariest of times.”

She is often asked “quite stupidly”, she says, if she is the same person now as she was when she was young. “If I were, we would really be in trouble,” she says. “Your perspective changes as you move through time. How could it not? Time never stops.”

When an old person dies, “it is not a tragedy”, she reflects, “it is the culmination of their life”. An elderly friend has elected to die next month. Medically assisted dying has been legal in Canada since 2016. Gibson was diagnosed with dementia the following year. By the end he could no longer remember the names of his beloved birds. “Certainly, Graham would have done that had he not had a massive cerebral haemorrhage,” she says.

***

“I have used up my thread,” she writes at the end of the memoir, an allusion to the mice in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester. “No more twist.”

This does not mean no more books. “I’ve told my life up to the end of this chapter,” she makes clear. She is not about to retire anytime soon. “Who knows?” is all she will say. And then she is on to talking about her latest Substack. She started it as a distraction after Gibson died and to raise money for their Pelee Island bird centre. She loves being able to comment on the world, and anything else that takes her fancy (highlights include a Halloween video and one of her tap-dancing in a hospital gown after her pacemaker was fitted). “It’s fun.” How does she find the time? “I’m a writer,” she replies.

The next day we meet for the photoshoot at her old college, Victoria, at the University of Toronto (the students’ pub, The Cat’s Eye, was named in her honour). As she walks across the campus, there are audible gasps from students, and a boy politely asks for a selfie to send to his mum. If she were worried about her legacy – she’s not: “Other people decide that” – she clearly has a new generation of readers. The author gamely joins in a dance routine two girls are rehearsing on the lawns. One of the college staff recalls how on one visit a student produced a Sharpie and asked Atwood to sign his backside. She obliged, apparently. She can’t remember signing any bottoms, she says later, “but it sounds like the sort of thing I might do”.

She rifles through the clothes the stylist has bought, like Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada. “No. No. Maybe. Definitely not.” A couple of suitably gothic outfits are settled on. But she is not to be persuaded into heels. The makeup artist tells Atwood that she has launched her own range of products; finding Canadian-made cosmetics is tricky, apparently. Atwood insists on getting photos to post on Instagram. “Elbows up!” they chorus.

Having a cup of tea between pictures, in a long purple satin cloak, her sparkly trainers peeping out the bottom, she looks like an off-duty Elizabeth II. “I’ve had tea with the queen,” she says. “Not recently, obviously. Although I might be soon!”

• Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood is published by Chatto & Windus (£30). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply