In The Blind Assassin ,Atwood has an eye on the past and an ear on the ground. Her tracking ranges from old newspaper accounts of ocean liners in the 1930s to graffiti on the wall of washroom cubicles in the 1990s. She used old newspapers and magazines and the late Judith Merril's collection of pulp and science fiction that now belongs to the Toronto Public Library. She was an avid comic-book reader in her youth and much of that supposedly wasted time is stored in her own capacious memory. She laughingly acknowledges the suggestion that her memory is like an attic, stuffed with the accumulated experience and knowledge of six decades.
Nothing is discarded.
When she needs a character or a setting or a situation, she simply climbs the stairs and rummages around. As for the graffiti, which she likens to Chinese wall texts, she did her own sleuthing and made a lot of it up. I ask, doggedly. I say, 'Here is the entrance to the cave. Here is the thread.