Novel: Cat's Eye

Overview
Cat's Eye follows the painter Elaine Risley as she returns to Toronto for a retrospective and finds herself drawn into a long and often painful excavation of memory. The narrative moves between the present and a series of childhood and adolescent recollections, revealing how early friendships, alliances and humiliations shaped Elaine's sense of self and the art she makes. A childhood marble known as a "cat's eye" and a broken mirror recur as motifs that stitch together episodes of cruelty, admiration and complicated intimacy.

Narrative and Structure
The story is told in the first person and unfolds nonlinearly, with the adult Elaine reflecting on scenes from her past that rise up around the present-day gallery visit. Flashbacks begin with early childhood experiences in a small Ontario town and progress through school years marked by shifting peer hierarchies, to Elaine's years as a young artist finding her voice. The frame of the retrospective provides a catalyst for memory, so the narrative alternates between the cool, observational perspective of an established artist and the raw urgency of recollected events.

Main Characters
Elaine Risley is observant, self-protective and artistically driven; she narrates with a mix of candor and ironic distance. Cordelia is the charismatic, merciless friend whose charm conceals a habit of psychological domination and bullying; their relationship forms the emotional center of the book. Other girls and women populate Elaine's childhood and adulthood as figures of rivalry, complicity or retreat, while family members and the art world create a broader social context that pressures choices about marriage, career and identity.

Major Themes
Memory and the instability of recollection are central. Elaine's attempts to reconstruct episodes expose the mutual rewriting of pasts that people perform to live with themselves. The novel probes female friendship as a terrain of admiration braided with competition, and it examines how cruelty can be communal rather than purely individual. Artistic creation functions as both a refuge and a method of interrogation: painting becomes a way for Elaine to order, resist and reframe what she has endured. Issues of power, gendered expectations and the compromises of adulthood, motherhood, marriage, the choice to pursue art, are threaded through personal history and public identity.

Motifs and Symbols
The cat's-eye marble recurs as a physical token of vision, value and childhood intimacy, while mirrors and reflections figure the difficulty of facing one's past and oneself. The gallery retrospective setting juxtaposes the public presentation of art with the private labor of memory, suggesting that artworks are sites where memory is both displayed and transformed. Everyday objects and small humiliations accumulate a weight that Elaine must learn to recognize and place into perspective.

Style and Legacy
Atwood's prose balances precision and wryness, delivering observation that is as often clinical as it is compassionate. The novel's structure, episodic, elliptical and attentive to detail, mirrors the way memory surfaces and shifts. Cat's Eye occupies a distinctive place in explorations of female psychology and memory, pairing literary subtlety with a persistent moral focus on responsibility, culpability and survival. It has been praised for its unsparing look at the ordinary cruelties of childhood and the complex, ongoing work required to understand and live with the past.