English - Fiction Coursework
Liberator - Stimulus Text: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood Stories are important. A moment to become someone else. A hero, perhaps. They keep memories alive, entire lives turned into inky words on a page. While what I have to say isn't all bad, the beautiful moments are stained – made unclean by circumstance. For that I am sorry. My story is real, but I’m not a hero. I’m just a man who got away. I was born at winter’s end. Frosts were beginning to thaw, from beneath them new flowers made the most of the first sunlight of spring. I think of my birth often. Not because it was how I entered the world, but because it was how my mother left it. Atwood told me her every breath was jagged, unnatural, as if giving birth to another life was the most unorthodox situation a woman could find herself in. He was present for my birth. Not because he was my father – though he raised me as if he were – but because he was my mother’s greatest friend. The moment I had been expell...