Margaret Atwood has a reputation for spookily accurate predictions about the future of humanity in her novels. This is quite strange, because—as her new memoir Book of Lives demonstrates—she is in fact quite obtuse when it comes to interpreting humans. She doesn’t clock male romantic interest, even when obvious; is blindsided by rivalrous feuding in an independent publishing house of all places; can’t work out why so many “good-looking, well-dressed single women” would be sitting alone at Prague bars in 1984, and has to be told.

When her father is gravely ill, she doesn’t “quite understand” why her mother goes to the hospital daily to play him his favorite Beethoven recordings: “Surely a couple of times a week would do.” Later, as her own partner lies dying, she finally gets the point.