Atwood has a sister, Ruth Atwood, born in 1951, and a brother who is two years older, Harold Leslie Atwood.[16] She has claimed that, according to her grandmother (maiden name Webster), the 17th-century witchcraft-lynching survivor Mary Webster might have been an ancestor: "On Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she wasn't ... So take your pick."[17] Webster is the subject of Atwood's poem "Half-Hanged Mary", as well as the subject of Atwood's dedication in her novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985).[18] At the beginning “The Handmaid’s Tale” was named after its main character, "Offred”.[19]
Atwood married Jim Polk, an American writer, in 1968, but divorced in 1973.[20][21] She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon afterward and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, where their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born in 1976.[20]
The family returned to Toronto in 1980.[22] Atwood and Gibson were together until September 18, 2019, when Gibson died after suffering from dementia.[23] She wrote about Gibson in the poem Dearly and in an accompanying essay on grief and poetry published in The Guardian in 2020.[24] Atwood said about Gibson "He wasn't an egotist, so he wasn't threatened by anything I was doing. He said to our daughter towards the end of his life, 'Your mum would still have been a writer if she hadn't met me, but she wouldn't have had as much fun'".[25]
Although she is an accomplished writer, Atwood says that she is "a terrible speller" who writes both on a computer and by hand.[26]
