“Believe all women? Women schwomen—I don’t think you should believe all anything,” Atwood recently told People magazine. “It’s more useful to say listen to all women and take what they’re saying seriously enough to actually do investigations.” The witnesses she portrays in her fiction aren’t saviors; they are (or hope to be) survivors, people constrained and compromised by circumstances, and especially worth listening to for that very reason. The Testaments highlights this fact by making a more loaded demand than its predecessor did—that readers place themselves in the seat of an oppressor, not one of the subjugated. “How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask,” Aunt Lydia writes to her imagined audience in her account of her role in Gilead’s establishment. “You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.” All along, though, she has been keeping receipts—records that she’s counting on to prove herself more than an opportunistic collaborator.

The idea that you can challenge systems of power by giving voice to the voiceless was creatively galvanizing for Atwood early on. Skirting political movements, she was drawn to myths. In “Circe/Mud Poems” from her 1974 collection, You Are Happy, she imagined The Odyssey from the perspective of Circe, and in doing so, pointed out how flimsily sketched the female characters of classical literature tend to be. “I search instead,” the narrator thinks, “for the others /… the ones who have escaped from these / mythologies with barely their lives.” Their tales begged to be told.

The year after her meeting with Forché, Atwood turned to more timely ordeals in a world she saw as fraught with danger. She published a dark, symbol-loaded novel, Bodily Harm, about a Canadian journalist recovering from breast cancer who ends up a political prisoner in a Caribbean jail. Ranging more widely in a collection of poems out the same year, True Stories, she tested the idea of the literature of witness. Free expression, and the stifling of it, is a recurring theme, in ways that predict the creation of Gilead. In the poem “Torture,” Atwood writes of a captive woman with her face sewn shut, her mouth closed “to a hole the size of a straw,” who’s released and put back on the streets as “a mute symbol.” The theft of the woman’s ability to communicate becomes its own ghastly message, a warning to other potential offenders. In “Christmas Carols,” Atwood uses the figure of the Virgin Mary, “the magic mother, in blue / & white, up on that pedestal, / perfect & intact,” to expose the discrepancy between what she sees as a Christian veneration for the emblematic power of motherhood and the historical reality of pregnant women’s suffering.

In these poems, Atwood was searching for a space to occupy between witness and fantasist. In “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written,” dedicated to Forché, Atwood considers the tension inherent in her quest, aware that it opens her to criticism. “In this country you can say what you like,” she writes, but “elsewhere, this poem is not invention. / Elsewhere, this poem takes courage. / Elsewhere, this poem must be written / because the poets are already dead.” She’s trying to assume—while acknowledging the awkwardness of it—the role of interlocutor for people denied the ability to speak, whose stories she sees as crucial. “Witness” is a burden, “is what you must bear.”