Reading this book over a decade after I read it the first time, gave me a different perspective on it. Reading it living in Massachusetts instead of Canada also made me think differently about the story.
I didn't pick up on the fact that the Rachel and Leah Centre where the women in this reproductive dystopia are taken for their retraining is actually Harvard University. When I first read it, I imagined it was set in a generic or Toronto-like city (Atwood after all seems to like Toronto), and recognizing the few features that are described made the second read through a very different experience than the first.
It was as creepily dystopic as I remember it, if anything, I think if was more eerie for me reading it as an adult rather than as a teenager. When the handmaid loses her job and is reduced to a nobody, an extension of her husband, his response to it hit me harder this time than the first time that I read it.
I also loved the "Historical Notes" at the end in which academics 150 years later attempt to reconstruct the history of Gilead, in part from the testimony of the handmaid (the narrative is revealed to have come from the transcription of a set of tapes found in a trunk in Maine - the researchers actually needed to construct a tape recorder to play them). It's so similar to what we frequently do in literary studies, and it made the relative nature of the story so much more realistic for me. Not only is the story fragmentary and unorganized, but it also clearly depends on the narrator's memory, which is demonstrably false sometimes, for example, when she tries to imagine what has happened to her husband, or when she writes, "I don't want to tell this story anymore".
I'm very glad I reread this book, aside from the fact I've included it in one of my reading lists.