What the final season of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ teaches us about storytelling, voice and the power of writing for someone – even if you don’t know who. By Dr Erin O’Dwyer
A million years ago, or so it seems, I did a PhD in English literature. One of my core texts was The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
It’s a book I’ve returned to many times since I first read it, in different guises: critic, editor, woman, mother. Last month, like millions of others worldwide, I wolfed down the sixth and final season of the TV version, starring Elisabeth Moss as June, the story’s main protagonist.
If you haven’t read the book or watched the series, here’s the short version: The Handmaid’s Taleis a dystopian novel, written in the early 1980s when Atwood was living in West Berlin, before the fall of the wall.
It imagines a future America – renamed Gilead – where fertility rates have collapsed, and a theocratic regime forces women into childbearing servitude. It’s a bleak and brilliant allegory, and one of the finest novels of the 20th century.
A literary hit becomes a television powerhouse
The book inspired the now-iconic television series, which ran from 2017 to May 2025, winning Golden Globes, Emmys, BAFTAs and a legion of devoted viewers. The show took Atwood’s simple story and expanded it into something epic – political, brutal, terrifyingly prophetic, and in a few places, unwatchable.
The TV series strays far from the novel. But in the very final episode, something wonderful happens. June begins to record her story into a dictaphone.
June picking up a dictaphone might seem like a small moment. But for anyone who has read the book – or studied it – it takes us back to the heart of Atwood’s novel. Not to the written word exactly – but to the spoken word, and thus to language which is at the heart of every story.
A perfect full circle
In the novel, June’s story is presented as a transcription of cassette tapes found in the year 2195 and shared at an academic conference on Gilead.
The entire novel is reconstructed from June’s preserved voice. We are not June’s intended audience exactly, but we may be. She records her story for an imagined listener: her lost partner Luke, a stranger, even maybe a future human race.
She has no guarantee that her story will ever be heard. She may live or she may die. But someone, somewhere, one day, may benefit from knowing what she has seen.
‘Dear You’
As Atwood writes in the book: “You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one… A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name.”
In the world of literary criticism, The Handmaid’s Taleis considered a work of epistolary fiction – a form based on letters.
The genius of Atwood’s book is that it reimagines the letter as a tape – a long-outdated technology now and also when the cassettes are discovered in 2195. June ‘speaks’ her ‘letter’ aloud, without any expectation of a reply. It is simply a record of what happened, told in the hope that someone, someday, might ‘receive’ it.
Which is why the final moments of the TV series – June picking up the recorder – feel like a perfect nod to the novel’s original form. The show may have gone places Atwood never imagined. But in the end, it returns to the source: a woman telling her story, in her own words, in her own voice. No one there to listen at first… but later everyone is listening.
Lessons for storytellers
In my editing consultancy, I have many clients who come to me with a personal story they are burning to get off their chest. Most of these memoirs are unpublishable – for now.
These are stories about lies, deceits and betrayals – violent husbands, extra-marital affairs, narcissistic mothers, estranged children. The perpetrators and victims are still alive, and if the story were to be published now, there would be more harm done than good.
But there is a good reason for telling every story, and every story will find its audience. If not now, then at the right place, at the right time.
Not all memoir I edit will be commercially published. Sometimes it deserves to be written, then left unread in the bottom drawer. Sometimes too the act of telling the story is enough – for clarity, catharsis, or simply survival.
Other times, an audience will come along later. That may be your future self – the person you’ll be in a year, or ten, who will look back and think how far you’ve come. Sometimes it’s your children, a stranger, or a great-grandchild who stumbles across a forgotten file.
What I say to my clients is: Never fear telling your story. Write it down. Record it. Save it. Get it off your chest, even if you think no one will ever hear it. Because one day at the right time, it will find the perfect audience.
Every story will find its audience
In the end, June found her audience. So did Atwood. Millions of them, all around the world. Just as in epistolary fiction every letter finds its reader, every story finds its audience.
That’s the quiet power of storytelling. You don’t always know who your audience is – or when your words will land. But when the story is true, and the voice is yours, it finds a way. Whether whispered into a dictaphone, bashed out on a laptop in the middle of the night, or written longhand on yellow legal pads in a divided city as Atwood did, the act of telling your story matters.
Somewhere, someday, someone will be listening.
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