The 3 things that inspired Margaret Atwood to write The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood'sThe Handmaid's Talewas originally published in 1985 and its surprising cultural and political resonance in 2017 has brought it back to bestsellerlists. A televisionadaptation of the novel starring Elisabeth Mossand airing on Bravo has garnered 13 Emmy nominations, including outstanding drama series.

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What inspired Atwood to write this book more than 30 years ago? She revealed all to Indigo in a recent interview, which you can watch in the video player below.

A sequel to The Handmaid's Tale is coming out in Sept. 2019. It will be called The Testaments and will be set 15 years after the original story.

1. 17th-century American Puritan theocracy

"America was not initially founded as an 18th-century enlightenment republic. It was initially a 17th-century theocracy. That tendency keeps bubbling up in America from time to time."

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2. Utopias and dystopias

"I always wanted to write one, just to see if I could. The ones that I had been reading pretty much always had male narrators. I wondered how it would look if you switched that around."

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3. The political climate of the early 1980s

"People, even back then, were saying what they would like to do, should they ever have a chance to take power. Now that faction is in power in the United States."