“It's not due to me or the excellence of the book. It's partly in the twists and turns of history,” says Margaret Atwood, speaking about the success of “The Handmaid's Tale.” Published in 1985, the novel has sold more than 10 million copies and spawned an Emmy Award-winning Hulu series. It depicts a near-future America overtaken by religious dictatorship, where a dwindling number of fertile women are forced to cloak themselves in red and bear children for the elite. For many readers, “The Handmaid's Tale” began to feel eerily prescient. If it weren’t “the twists and turns of history,” including the rollback of reproductive rights in the U.S., and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Atwood says the book “would probably be sitting on a shelf somewhere, and people would be saying, ‘A jolly good yarn, but it didn't happen.’” #margaretatwood #handmaidstale #roevwade #reproductiverights #thehandmaidstale