“Power-packed”: Margaret Atwood’s favourite opening line in the history of literature
The most important part of any piece of writing is its introduction.
One line of writing can be the difference between a reader actually giving your work the time of day and putting it aside in favour of something that grabs them. In the vast majority of cases, if the opening of a novel, or poem, or article turns someone off reading it, that reader will never come back to it. In so many ways, getting the opening right is what makes the sheer amount of work the writer put in worth it, so there’s a good reason that pretty much every writer who has ever lived agonises over their opening salvo.
Now, the direct result of this is that some of the most quoted, most beloved and most reread works in fiction, journalism, script-writing, you name it, are their openings. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, “Two households, both alike in dignity”, and “Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues”. Even outside of the most famous examples, everyone has one of their own that hooked them immediately.
Margaret Atwood has one of the greatest quotes from her masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale. Gripping the reader instantly with the line “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium”. Who is we? Why are they sleeping together? Why are they not sleeping at home, why a gymnasium and why is it no longer a gymnasium? So many questions packed into nine words that set the scene of her dystopian nightmare perfectly.
What opening line is the favourite of Margaret Atwood?
Clearly, Margaret Atwood is someone who knows the value of a good opening line. So, when writer Joe Fassler started putting an article together for The Atlantic asking the greatest writers alive what their favourite opening lines to a book were, Atwood was one of the writers asked. She was in some immense company, with Jonathan Franzen, Roxane Gay and David Gilbert also consulted. Yet Atwood’s pick, delivered as a tweet, was an opinion shared by many on the list.
When Fassler asked her on Twitter about her favourite opening line to a book, she replied, “‘Call me Ishmael.’ Three words. Power-packed. Why Ishmael? It’s not his real name. Who’s he speaking to? Eh?” She’s not wrong either. Atwood herself created a universe of questions with nine words. Herman Melville does it in three, introducing the reader to one of the greatest narrators in the history of fiction by, as Atwood makes clear, pointedly not introducing himself.
This is a man who is at the very least misdirecting us from the very beginning, and we’re about to spend the next 600-odd pages in his company. Yet, it’s a welcoming one. He clearly wants us to spend time with him, he wants us to think we’re getting to know him, why else would he tell us what to call him? The questions just spiral out of this one, almost throwaway line of text, yet one so spectacular that many other writers that Fassler asks point to the opening of Moby Dick as well.
Mona Simpson credits it as one of her picks. As does the aforementioned David Gilbert, who says the line “is both command and entreaty, a rechristening by way of pen scratching into paper. A second before this person was likely a John or a Philip, a Henry. A strange kind of pause lingers. An end before the beginning.”
A fitting monument to a work still inspiring writers centuries after its publication.
