On Old Babes in the Wood

What a remarkable piece of literature. Like most of her readers, I first met Margaret Atwood through The Handmaid’s Tale, published when she was at mid-life, around forty-five or forty-six. Old Babes in the Wood appeared in 2023, some thirty-eight years later, and the Atwood we meet here, publishing at eighty-four, is a very different woman with a very different set of stories.

One through-line is the question of what it means to age — what it even means to grow old. It’s best illustrated by Tig and Nell, the couple we follow across several stories that bookend the collection: we watch their lives develop, and then Nell’s struggle to cope with life without Tig. But aging shapes other stories too. “My Evil Mother” ostensibly follows an adolescent girl and her mother (in the 1950s, which tells us something about the vantage), but we watch the young woman become more and more like her mother over time, especially once she has children of her own. “Bad Teeth” is a funny, low-stakes story about friendship between two elderly women, and it asks what we remember, when we dig in our feet, and when we embrace another person with love for who they are. Other stories, not explicitly about age, are really about the passage of time. “Airborne” looks at how older feminist professors handle the political shifts of the young — an interesting point, since the women now aging made enormous strides for women’s rights in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, strides so important they’ve become part of the landscape, while younger feminists have their own fights, and the older generation doesn’t always understand the needs or grievances of the young. We see cycles, and it increasingly seems that each socially significant innovation isn’t so significant after all — or perhaps it is, but what Atwood highlights is how people live out generational archetypes rather than producing anything truly new. I think Qoheleth, the author of Ecclesiastes, would be impressed.

As I said, Nell and Tig are the highlights of the whole collection. We see their lives in the first section, but the final third lands an enormous emotional punch. Where the early stories show them together in life, the later ones are something else entirely: Tig is central but no longer alive — a “ghost,” not in any spooky sense but a psychological one. In fact the later group carries something genuinely eerie, presence where there should be absence (characteristically “eerie” in Mark Fisher’s sense). Examining letters written by Tig’s also-deceased father, Nell finds pencil marks in Tig’s hand and wonders when he could have read them; she finds a small wooden box holding his sewing kit; she finds instructions he left in a mosquito net. The tone matters as much as the stories. Atwood is soft and tender and loving toward these two, but also wry — letting their inner voices pose a hopeful question or aside (“It would be comforting, she’d thought”) only to deflate it with blunt fact (“This hasn’t happened. The three blue shirts are not comforting”). That deadpan keeps the grief from going maudlin; it’s honest, and it shows that Atwood — or Nell, are they the same person? — can laugh at herself and her characters. We see how much they loved each other, and the power of a durable commitment between two people who truly care, and the stories are so touching, so beautiful, that they brought me to tears.

At the risk of being morbid, part of me wonders whether this collection is a way for Atwood to prepare for her own death — to approach it with warmth, compassion, and a measure of peace, reconciling who she was, the path she took, and what her loved ones gave her. At eighty-six, that may well be the case, and if so, I can only hope to prepare for my own inevitable dissolution half as well. Her fiction is iconic, and Old Babes in the Wood is proof that her skill has only grown with age; as her life has deepened, she offers insights I wish more authors could reach. Part of the trouble there is the cult of youth so pervasive in Western culture — an artist has to be hip, cutting-edge, fashionable, which too often just means young. This collection implodes that idea, and I wish older, more mature writers got the attention lavished on whoever just finished an MFA at some prestigious institution. I don’t need my own experience reflected back at me; I need wiser, more experienced insight that teaches me where to go and how to become, and Atwood offers it with patience, love, and grace. Old Babes in the Wood is one of my top reads of 2025, and I’m glad I waited until December for it — had I tried it any earlier, I’m not sure I’d have been ready.