The world is full of Aunt Lydias. 
 
There are so many marvellous creations in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, so many moments of horror and shock and – ‘oh of course it would happen that way’. So many things that look very prescient now, as the gains of the women’s movement in the 70s, 80s and 90s are slowly being rolled back in the USA. 
 
But most of all, there are Aunt Lydias. In the novel, Aunt Lydia is a woman who takes the power given to her by the repressive state of Gilead and uses it against other women. Those women are everywhere in the world today. Bright, smiling women eagerly telling other women what’s wrong with their bodies and faces and how to fix it for only a few hundred or a few thousand pounds. Women who lead political organisations dedicated to taking away women’s rights or setting women against one another. When I was an Orthodox Jew, I once attended a talk entitled ‘The beauty of a woman is in her silence’. Of course, the talk was given by a woman. That’s Aunt Lydia. 

It’s not only about women, of course. Any member of any stigmatised minority can gain a little power by joining in the condemnation of their own group or some other stigmatised group. In the concentration camps, they called them kapos. It’s the worst thing a Jew can call another Jew. 
 
But ‘Aunt Lydia’ is a shorthand that works its way into your psyche. By the time I went to that talk on women and silence, I’d already read The Handmaid’s Tale. It was already there in my mind, a lifelong grenade, detonating again and again. It’s a sort of inoculation, a kind of guidebook to the things that go bad, a list of things to watch out for. Once I knew about Aunt Lydia, I knew that other women are not always to be trusted and not every woman in authority had my best interests at heart. 
 
If the novel did only that, if it were only a set of important warnings, that would be enough for it to deserve its place in the canon. 
 
But The Handmaid’s Tale is that extraordinary thing: a piece of literature which is perfectly observed but also gripping, which takes its time but is continually moving on. It’s literature with all the gifts: deeply-realised characterisation, thrilling plot, utterly convincing world-building, sentence-by-sentence majesty. It’s a master writer at the height of her powers throwing down the gauntlet. Did you think you had to pick between these things? You don’t. The best books do all of them. 

I had the great good fortune to be paired with Margaret Atwood in 2012 for two years of mentoring via the Rolex Mentor and Protégé scheme, sadly now ended. It was a wonderful setup, with mentors from across the artistic disciplines and with both mentors and protegees being funded to spend time together talking about art. I’d already published two novels when I was invited to apply and then flown to Toronto for the interview with Margaret herself. I had the feeling, waiting for that interview, that I had to be exactly who I am. Which is: mouthy. A bit confrontational, a friend said of me, but in a good way. I decided that probably everyone always tells Margaret Atwood that her work changed their life – because it did, because my life was never the same after reading The Handmaid’s Tale. Instead, I offered her my weirdest bit of the Bible. She offered me her weirdest bit of the Bible in return*. We were off to a good start. We’ve remained friends for more than a decade now, always with more strange tales to share. 
 
The Handmaid’s Tale, of course, is full of weird Bible. It’s based on one of the weirder things in there; that Jacob’s wives give him their handmaidens to sleep with and the children born by the handmaidens are then considered to be the children of the wives. No one apparently asks the handmaidens what they think about this. So maybe the wives are Aunt Lydias too.

I can’t emphasise enough how much I was an Orthodox Jew when I first read The Handmaid’s Tale. I’d learned that story about Jacob and his wives as if it were something beautiful. Stories of women sharing their fertility can certainly be beautiful – sisters, cousins, friends offering wombs or eggs or many other ways to support a woman to have a baby. But I’d never thought about what it meant to be a handmaiden in the Bible. I’d never thought of the word ‘slave’ in that context. The grenade went off. 
 
The novel still feels incredibly fresh, although it was published more than four decades ago. There are certainly people in the modern United States who would be very happy to see the country become a theocracy not far from Gilead. The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel that takes the United States seriously as a country founded by Puritans, a country filled with contradictions, which has already done terrible evils both to the Indigenous Native American population and to the millions of enslaved African Americans. As Margaret has said to me: ‘Canadians understand the United States because they’re right there’. Canada has to think about the United States in the same way that Offred has to think about the Commander. In the same way that any woman has to ask herself who around her is an Aunt Lydia. It is a novel that says: don’t trust too easily, either in the people who surround you or in the systems that appear to sustain you. It can all explode in an instant. 
 
 
*in case you’re wondering: my weirdest bit of the Bible is where Tzipporah hurls her son’s foreskin at Moses’ feet and declares ‘behold thou art a bloody bridegroom to me’. Margaret’s weirdest bit of the Bible is where the Philistines send a guilt offering of 12 golden mice and 12 golden haemorrhoids. Never say that reading the Bible didn’t do anything for anyone.  

© Naomi Alderman 2025