1939: Margaret Eleanor Atwood. Born November 18 in Ottawa.

The place was the Ottawa General Hospital. About the exact hour,  my mother - to the despair of many astrologers since - is a little vague, that being a period when women were routinely conked out with ether. I do know that I was born after the end of the Grey Cup Football Game. The doctors thanked my mother for waiting; they’d all been following the game on the radio. My parents were economic refugees from Nova Scotia. We lived in a long, dark, railroad-car-shaped second story apartment on Patterson Avenue, near the Rideau Canal, an apartment in which my mother caused a flood by rinsing the diapers in the toilet, where they got stuck.