CANR
WORK TITLE: El Dorado Drive
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.meganabbott.com/
CITY: New York
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 330
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PERSONAL
Born August 21, 1971, in Detroit, MI; daughter of Patti Abbott (a writer); married Joshua Gaylord (a writer).
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, B.A.; New York University, Ph.D., 2000.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. Associated with the RAND Corporation; State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY, assistant professor of English, ending 2001; University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), University, MS, John Grisham Writer in Residence, 2013-14; writer for the series The Deuce, HBO. Also taught literature and film at New York University.
AWARDS:Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, 2008, for Queenpin; Best Book of 2012, Amazon.com and Entertainment Weekly, both 2012, both for Dare Me; Strand Critics Award for Best Novel, 2015, for The Fever; Mystery/Thriller Award, Los Angeles Times‘s Book Prizes, 2022, for The Turnout.
WRITINGS
Author of a blog; contributor to the crime fiction blog Rap Sheet. Work represented in anthologies, including Damn Near Dead, Best American Mystery Stories, and Wall Street Noir; contributor to numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Salon, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, Detroit Noir, Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, Storyglossia, Queens Noir, and Speed Chronicles.
SIDELIGHTS
Megan E. Abbott has taught English, film, and literature, and she has written for television. She is also the author of The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, a feminist study of the motifs in many novels and movies featuring the classic tough private eye. In 2005, she entered the realm of noir fiction with Die a Little.
Die a Little
Set in the 1950s, Die a Little takes place in a suburb of Los Angeles where Lora King, a prim schoolteacher, is determined to find out the truth about her brother Bill’s new wife, Alice Steel. At first, Lora finds life with Alice exciting, and she begins to visit the kind of bars and nightclubs she used to avoid. But when Lora starts running into some odd characters from Alice’s past, she grows suspicious of the glamorous beauty who has entered her quiet life. Lora begins her own private investigation of Alice’s friends and soon discovers a number of unsavory connections, including a trashy friend named Lois. When Lois is murdered, shortly after a friend of Bill’s commits suicide, Lora is convinced that Alice is caught up in something criminal. Harriet Klausner explained in MBR Bookwatch: “Lora is a fascinating character who loves her brother too much to let him throw his life away on a criminal and is a bit jealous of the hold Alice has on her sibling.” Soon Lora is “pocketing address books filled with cryptic code and tailing shady characters like a grown-up Nancy Drew,” in the words of Booklist contributor Frank Sennett.
Critics generally noted the moody atmosphere of the novel, reminiscent of the films and other works that Abbott had discussed in her nonfiction study The Street Was Mine. For Hollywood Reporter contributor Chris Barsanti, “this is a powerfully sexy tale that just reeks of classic noir paranoia—everyone has a secret to hide.” Similarly, a Publishers Weekly reviewer found that in Die a Little, Abbott “crafts a stylish, sensuous tale with picture-perfect period trappings.” At the same time, this is not simply a reconstruction of older motifs. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted: “Not for Abbott are the self-conscious pastiches of Chandler imitators or the crazed spewings of a James Ellroy, but instead she gives us the true dark heart of the city in sharply contrasted blacks and whites, dense with heartache.”
The Song Is You
Abbott’s second work in the noir fiction genre, The Song Is You, like Die a Little, takes place in Los Angeles in the 1950s. This “gritty, dark and desolate tale,” as described by Mostly Fiction Book Reviews website contributor Guy Savage, is based on the real-life unsolved mystery of Jean Spangler, a twenty-six-year-old model, dancer, and bit-part actress in Hollywood who vanished without a trace in 1949.
The novel’s protagonist is Gil “Hop” Hopkins, a former journalist who rapidly climbed his way up the Hollywood ladder to become a studio publicity man in the two years after Jean vanished. Hop and an African American actress named Iolene were with Jean at a seedy nightclub on the night she vanished. When Iolene also goes missing after she comes to Hop with concerns about the old scandal with Jean, it becomes clear that Hop’s career success is somehow connected to Jean’s disappearance. Driven by guilt and the fear of blackmail, he takes on the case of solving Jean’s disappearance himself. “Hop swims in the muck and slime of Hollywood scandal, as he travels on his journey to the truth,” as Savage put it in his review of the book for Mostly Fiction Book Reviews. Hop is “a marvelous noir character—a man who climbs to the top of the heap of tinsel town on the scandals of others, but who discovers the dying shreds of his conscience before it’s too late.” “Abbott channels the great pulp authors without aping them,” noted a contributor to Kirkus Reviews, adding that she avoids “the genre’s macho conventions to evoke the young women who live ‘in a gasp of tension.’”
Queenpin
In Abbott’s third noir fiction piece, Queenpin, the narrator is a nameless twenty-two-year-old woman working as an accountant for Club Tee Hee, a dive bar in Las Vegas. She catches the attention of the infamous mobster Gloria Denton. Denton takes the young woman under her wing and introduces her to a world of big money, filled with late-night casinos, racetracks, betting parlors, and inside heists. Things rapidly change between the two women when a degenerate gambler, Vic Riordan, enters the narrator’s life.
A critic for Kirkus Reviews felt that in Queenpin, Abbot successfully creates “another stunning hardboiled heroine.” “Abbott’s wonderfully amoral ending does not disappoint, and those of us who love noir fiction recognize that Abbott is an exciting new voice for this genre,” praised Savage.
Bury Me Deep
Abbott’s next noir crime novel, Bury Me Deep, was inspired by the true story of Winnie Ruth Judd, also known as the “Trunk Murderess.” Set in 1931, the novel follows protagonist Marion Steely, a young nurse whose doctor husband has gone abroad to work, leaving her alone in Phoenix. Marion soon becomes good friends with the head nurse at her clinic, Louise, and Louise’s roommate, Ginny. Soon, Marion becomes involved in an affair with Joe Lanigan, a good friend to many of the doctors at the clinic. At first Marion enjoys her new, scandalous life, full of parties and drug use. However, her life becomes chaotic when Ginny and Louise are murdered.
In a review of the work in the Denver Post, contributors Tom and Enid Schantz commented: “It’s an exquisite book, told in delicate, shimmering prose that heightens the nightmarish quality of the story. … This is noir mystery writing at its very best.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor stated: “Abbott takes readers on a wild thrill ride with an utterly believable and strangely sympathetic heroine.” “If you like time-traveling crime fiction, you’ll want to bury yourself in Bury Me Deep, ” recommended Kier Graff, a contributor to Booklist.
The End of Everything
Told from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old sleuth named Lizzie, The End of Everything uncovers the mystery behind the disappearance of Evie. As friends from early childhood—the girls have been lifelong next-door neighbors—Lizzie and Evie share a certain degree of intuition about one another. When Evie disappears one day, Lizzie springs to action, combing her memory in attempt to uncover clues that might lead to Evie’s return. Throughout the book, there are indications that Evie might be even be a conspirator in her own disappearance, but the end reveals a more sinister plot that involves many individuals close to the victim.
Writing in Kirkus Reviews, a critic called The End of Everything “a tangled tale that is more provocative than illuminating.” Daniel Kraus, writing in Booklist, commented on the writing of the novel: “Abbott … has crafted a unique mystery lush with sensory details.” In Library Journal, Jan Blodgett called the book “a fascinating twist on the coming-of-age story.” Dafna Izenberg wrote about The End of Everything in Maclean’s and commented on Abbott’s execution: “Beneath a story tight with suspense [Abbott] pokes at even spookier questions: What if a girl who was kidnapped wanted to be taken?”
Dare Me
In 2012, Abbott released Dare Me. This novel takes place in a high school that has just received a new cheerleader coach. It is the goal of Colette French to reshape the girls of Sutton Grove High into competition-ready cheerleaders. Addy Hanlon, a sixteen-year-old who has enjoyed all the trappings of popularity as the second lieutenant to her best friend, Beth Cassidy, finds herself thrust into the spotlight when the new coach transforms the squad from an adequate group of cheerleaders to top-notch athletes capable of competing at the highest levels of achievement. Things begin to unravel when Addy takes over as the head cheerleader. Beth resents the change, and events spiral out of control as the girls become more intimately acquainted with Coach French. The school’s National Guard recruiting officer is found dead in the coach’s apartment, and only days earlier did Addy and Beth witness their coach having sex with the officer in the teacher’s lounge. The investigation that follows the officer’s death twists and turns around friendship and rivalry, centering on the high-pressure life of high-school athletes and their mentors.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews commented: “The whodunit aspect surrounding [the officer’s] death pales against the dark sexual and psychological currents that ripple among the girls.” The contributor concluded that The End of Everything is “compelling, claustrophobic and slightly creepy in a can’t-put-it-down way.” Graff, writing in Booklist, stated: “This is cheerleading as blood sport, Bring It On meets Fight Club—just try putting it down.”
The Fever
Three best friends, who call themselves the “Trio Grande,” are the protagonists of Abbott’s 2014 book, The Fever: A Novel. Deenie, Lise, and Gabby are inseparable, but their bond is threatened when Lise and Gabby both experience strange illnesses. Soon, other girls become ill as well. There is a disconcerting lack of communication on what is happening to the girls. Deenie initially worries that she will become ill, too, but soon she wonders why she isn’t getting sick. In an interview with National Public Radio contributor Elizabeth Blair, Abbott stated: “Girls in threes, I think, are always dangerous. There’s a lot of wrestling for power and attention. And teenage boys, if they have arguments with their friends, you know, can push each other in a locker room or shout things at each other. And girls aren’t supposed to do that, so it can often take these more sinister forms. Or it can become internalized and turn into something else.”
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews commented: “The lives of teenage girls are dangerous, beautiful things in Abbott’s … stunning seventh novel.” “Once again, Abbott makes an unforgettable inquiry into the emotional lives of young people,” suggested Graff in Booklist. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly remarked: “What the narrative lacks in depth it makes up for in momentum and dark mystery.” The same reviewer described the volume as “a gripping story.”
You Will Know Me
In You Will Know Me: A Novel, Abbott tells the story of the family of a gymnastics prodigy named Devon Knox. The book’s narrator and Devon’s mother, Katie, is smugly proud of her daughter’s success and accompanies her to BelStars gym nearly every day. In an interview with Isabella Biedenharn for Entertainment Weekly Online, Abbott explained that a viral video of the parents of Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman inspired the book. She stated: “Their intensity and nervousness, the way they would mimic the moves in the bar routine, you could feel your heart in your throat just watching. I began thinking about what it must be like to be the parent of a prodigy, to be in the family of a prodigy. How power must operate in those kinds of families. The books sprang from that.” Katie is shocked when she walks in on her daughter in a fight with another girl. Abbott told Jordan Foster in an interview for Library Journal Online: “The reason for the one scene that occurs in a high school is to have Katie face this part of her daughter’s world about which she realizes she knows nothing. It’s a more extreme version of what every parent goes through when they’re confronted with this experience of their child’s that is not theirs and over which they have minimal control.” Another storyline focuses on Katie’s husband’s somewhat inappropriate relationship with another gymnastics mom.
“Abbott proves herself a master of fingernails-digging-into-your-palms suspense,” asserted a Kirkus Reviews critic. Library Journal writer Frances Thorsen commented: “The plot consistently confounds expectations with its clever twists and turns.” Graff, writing in Booklist, remarked: “It’s vivid, troubling, and powerful—and Abbott totally sticks the landing.” School Library Journal contributor Diane Colson suggested: “Teens will get a hard-hitting look at competitive gymnastics, framed in a tale of gripping psychological suspense.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2005, Frank Sennett, review of Die a Little, p. 824; January 1, 2007, Frank Sennett, review of The Song Is You, p. 59; June 1, 2009, Kier Graff, review of Bury Me Deep, p. 40; May 1, 2011, Daniel Kraus, review of The End of Everything, p. 22; May 1, 2012, Keir Graff, review of Dare Me, p. 29; May 1, 2014, Keir Graff, review of The Fever: A Novel, p. 26; April 1, 2016, Keir Graff, review of You Will Know Me: A Novel, p. 26.
Denver Post, July 19, 2009, Tom and Enid Schantz, “Mystery,” p. 11.
Entertainment Weekly, February 18, 2005, Jennifer Reese, review of Die a Little, p. 81.
Hollywood Reporter, January 10, 2005, Chris Barsanti, review of Die a Little, p. 46.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2004, review of Die a Little, p. 1151; December 1, 2006, review of The Song Is You, p. 1183; April 15, 2007, review of Queenpin; May 15, 2009, review of Bury Me Deep; May 1, 2011, review of The End of Everything; June 1, 2012, review of Dare Me; May 15, 2014, review of The Fever; May 15, 2016, review of You Will Know Me.
Library Journal, June 15, 2009, Bob Lunn, review of Bury Me Deep, p. 64; June 1, 2011, Jan Blodgett, review of The End of Everything, p. 88; May 1, 2012, Amy Hoseth, review of Dare Me, p. 64; May 1, 2016, Frances Thoreson, review of You Will Know Me.
Maclean’s, July 25, 2011, Dafna Izenberg, review of The End of Everything, p. 59.
MBR Bookwatch, February, 2005, Harriet Klausner, review of Die a Little.
Publishers Weekly, January 10, 2005, review of Die a Little, p. 39; November 20, 2006, review of The Song Is You, p. 37; April 30, 2007, review of Queenpin, p. 141; April 27, 2009, review of Bury Me Deep, p. 108; May 7, 2012, review of Dare Me, p. 29; April 28, 2014, review of The Fever, p. 104; May 2, 2016, review of You Will Know Me, p. 34.
School Library Journal, November, 2016, Diane Colson, review of You Will Know Me, p. 107.
ONLINE
3:AM, http://www.3ammagazine.com/ (August 24, 2009), Alan Kelly, author interview.
Booklist Reader, http://www.booklistreader.com/ (July 13, 2015), Sarah Grant, article mentioning author.
Entertainment Weekly Online, http://ew.com/ (April 27, 2015), Isabella Biedenharn, article mentioning author; (November 19, 2015), Isabella Beidenharn, author interview.
January, http://januarymagazine.com/ (June 4, 2007), James R. Winter, review of Queenpin.
Library Journal Online, http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/ (May 2, 2016), Jordan Foster, author interview.
Megan Abbott Home Page, http://www.meganabbott.com (June 23, 2017).
Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, http://www.mostlyfiction.com/ (April 15, 2007), Guy Savage, review of The Song Is You; (June 17, 2007), Guy Savage, review of Queenpin.
National Public Radio Online, http://www.npr.org/ (June 20, 2014), Elizabeth Blair, author interview.
Noir Writer, http://www.noirwriter.blogspot.com/ (April 15, 2007), Stephen Allan, “Sunday Interview: Megan Abbott.”
Strand, https://strandmag.com/ (July 10, 2015), Andrew Gulli, article about author.
Thriller Awards Website, http://thrillerwriters.org/ (June 23, 2017), article mentioning author.
Megan Abbott is the Edgar-winning author of the novels Beware the Woman, The Turnout, Give Me Your Hand, You Will Know Me, The Fever, Dare Me, The End of Everything, Bury Me Deep, Queenpin, The Song Is You and Die a Little.
Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The Believer. Her stories have appeared in multiple collections, including the Best American Mystery Stories of 2014 and 2016.
Her work has won or been nominated for the CWA Steel Dagger, the International Thriller Writers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and five Edgar awards. Formerly a staff writer on HBO's David Simon show, The Deuce, she is now co-creator, executive producer and show-runner of Dare Me, based upon her novel, for the USA Network and, internationally, Netflix.
Born in the Detroit area, she graduated from the University of Michigan and received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. She has taught at NYU, the State University of New York and the New School University. In 2013-14, she served as the John Grisham Writer in Residence at Ole Miss.
She is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female crime fiction. She has been nominated for many awards, including three Edgar Awards, Hammett Prize, the Shirley Jackson Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Folio Prize.
Megan Abbott
USA flag
Wife of Joshua Gaylord
Megan Abbott has taught literature, writing and film at New York University and the State University of New York at Oswego. Born in the Detroit area, she graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English Literature. She received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University in 2000, and in 2002 Palgrave Macmillan published her nonfiction study, The Street Was Mine.
Awards: LA Times (2021), Anthony (2017), Macavity (2016), ITW (2015) see all
Genres: Mystery
Novels
Die a Little (2005)
The Song Is You (2007)
Queenpin (2007)
Bury Me Deep (2009)
The End of Everything (2011)
Dare Me (2012)
The Fever (2014)
You Will Know Me (2016)
Give Me Your Hand (2018)
The Turnout (2021)
Beware the Woman (2023)
El Dorado Drive (2025)
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A Hell of a Woman (2007)
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The Little Men (2015)
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Normandy Gold (2018) (with Alison Gaylin)
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The Street Was Mine (2002)
Megan Abbott
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Megan Abbott
Abbott in 2015
Abbott in 2015
Born August 21, 1971 (age 54)
Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Occupation Author, screenwriter, journalist
Language English
Citizenship United States
Education University of Michigan
New York University (PhD)
Genre Crime fiction
Notable awards Edgar Award
2008 Queenpin
Barry Award – Best Paperback Novel
2008 Queenpin
Relatives Philip Abbott (father)
Website
www.meganabbott.com
Megan Abbott (born August 21, 1971)[1] is an American screenwriter and author of crime fiction and non-fiction analyses of hardboiled crime fiction. Her novels and short stories have drawn from and reworked classic subgenres of crime writing from a female perspective.
Early life and education
Abbott grew up in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe.[2] She graduated with her bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan[3] and received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University.
Career
Abbott has taught at NYU, the State University of New York and New School University. In 2013 and 2014, she served as the John Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.[4]
In 2002, Abbott published her first book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. In it, Abbott challenges the archetypes of the "tough guy" and "femme fatale" common to noir literature.[5]
Three years later, Abbott published Die a Little,[6] the first of several novels presenting woman-centered takes on traditional noir tropes.[7] Set in midcentury Los Angeles, the story centered on Lora King, a schoolteacher whose brother Bill falls in love with Alice Steele, a former costumer for the film industry. Suspicious of Alice's motives and jealous of her hold over Bill, Lora sets out to investigate Alice's background, only to find herself pulled into the dark side of Hollywood.
In addition to literature, Abbott has written for major journals and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She also writes a blog with novelist Sara Gran.[8]
Abbott was a screenwriter for The Deuce,[9] an HBO show that premiered in 2017 and deals with pornography and the Mafia in New York in the 1970s and beyond.[10] In 2019, she adapted her bestselling novel Dare Me into a TV series on USA Network.[11] She served as co-showrunner on the series, along with Gina Fattore.[12]
Influences
Abbott was influenced by film noir, classic noir fiction, and Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides.[13] Two of her novels refer to notorious crimes. The Song Is You (2007) is based around the disappearance of Jean Spangler in 1949, and Bury Me Deep (2009) on the 1931 case of Winnie Ruth Judd, dubbed "the Trunk Murderess".[14]
Reception and awards
Abbott has won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for outstanding fiction. Time named her one of the "23 Authors That We Admire" in 2011.[15] Publishers Weekly gave her 2011 novel The End of Everything a starred review.[16]
Awards
Year Title Award Result Ref.
2006 Die a Little Anthony Award for Best Novel Finalist [17]
Barry Award for Best First Novel Finalist [18][17]
Edgar Award for Best First Novel Finalist [19][17]
2008 Queenpin Anthony Award for Best Paperback Finalist [17]
Barry Award for Best Paperback Original Won [18][17]
Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original Won [17]
2009 Bury Me Deep Hammett Prize Finalist [17]
2010 Anthony Award for Best Paperback Finalist [17]
Barry Award for Best Paperback Original Finalist [17]
Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original Finalist [17]
Macavity Award for Best Novel Finalist [17]
2012 The End of Everything Anthony Award for Best Mystery Finalist [17]
Dare Me Steel Dagger Award Finalist [17]
2013 Anthony Award for Best Mystery Finalist [17]
2014 The Fever Strand Critics Award for Best Novel Nominated
2015 ITW Thriller Award for Novel Won [17]
2016 "Little Men" Anthony Award for Best Short Story Won
2017 You Will Know Me Anthony Award for Best Mystery Finalist [17]
ITW Thriller Award for Best Novel Finalist [17]
Macavity Awards Finalist [17]
Steel Dagger Award Finalist [17]
2018 Give Me Your Hand Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller Nominated
2019 Anthony Award for Best Novel Finalist [17]
Steel Dagger Award Finalist [17]
2021 The Turnout Booklist Editors' Choice: Adult Books for Young Adults Selection [20]
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller Won [21]
2022 ITW Thriller Award for Hardcover Novel Finalist [22]
Booklist's Best Mysteries & Thrillers Top 10 [23]
Publications
As editor
—— (2007). A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir. ISBN 9780979270994.
Non-fiction
—— (2002). The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. ISBN 0312294816.
Novels
—— (2005). Die a Little. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9780743261708.
—— (2007). The Song Is You. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9780743291712.
—— (2007). Queenpin. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781416534280.
—— (2009). Bury Me Deep. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781416599098.
—— (2011). The End of Everything. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 9780316097796.
—— (2012). Dare Me. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 9780316097772.
—— (2014). The Fever. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 9780316231053.
—— (2016). You Will Know Me. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 9780316231077.
—— (2018). Give Me Your Hand. Pan Macmillan. ISBN 9781509855681.
—— (2021). The Turnout. G. P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 9780593084908.
—— (2023). Beware the Woman. G. P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 9780593084939.
—— (2025). El Dorado Drive. G. P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 978-0593084977.
Short stories
"Oxford Girl" (2016). Appeared in Mississippi Noir.[24]
"Girlie Show" (2016). Appeared in In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper.[25]
"Little Men" (2015). Appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2016.[26]
"My Heart Is Either Broken" (2013). Appeared in Dangerous Women.
Filmography
Television
Year Title Writer Producer Notes
2017-18 The Deuce Yes No also story editor
2019 Dare Me Yes Yes also executive producer
TBA The Turnout No Yes
Drinking With Crime Fiction Writer Megan Abbott
In anticipation of her ninth novel, Give Me Your Hand, the crime fiction writer Megan Abbott talks Raymond Chandler’s take on the Gimlet, “old man bars” and more.
June 29, 2018 story: Jason Diamond photo: Eric Medsker
Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott is comfortable holding court in a bar. The acclaimed crime fiction writer is from the Midwest, after all; being able to drink while shooting the shit about subjects like old noir films and how Stephen King can really churn ‘em out is sort of a necessity when you’re so often snowed in.
“I like bars even more than I like a cocktail,” she admits as she orders a Brooklyn Beauty (gin, St-Germain, lemon and club soda) from the corner booth at Williamsburg’s Hotel Delmano as the afternoon sun dies over her shoulder. Abbott’s slight with a welcoming smile and wavy auburn hair. She talks with her hands, casting shadows that dance along the table. “I just like to hang out at bars,” she continues. “I think that’s the crime writer in me.”
Abbott, whose forthcoming novel, Give Me Your Hand, will be her ninth, is known for her complex, literary approach to the classic thriller. “I don’t think they’re about obsession,” she says. “Occasionally they are. But, I think there’s a kind of intensity. That’s the thing that keeps me engaged in a book. I really do try to keep it sharp and to the point.”
Abbott’s evolution as a writer is easy to spot. Her early books were influenced by, and often set in, the 1930s and ‘40s—homages to old-school noir and pulp fiction with glamorous ladies and tough fellas with shady ties to the underworld, but with more of a psychological twist. Since 2011’s The End of Everything, she’s found a new formula, but there’s nothing formulaic about it. People, mostly young women, disappear in her novels; they have secrets; they die. While Gillian Flynn or Paula Hawkins have rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists with books that have “Girl” somewhere in the title, Abbott does something else entirely. Not content with being labeled as one kind of writer, she’s obsessed with intrigue and plot enough to satisfy mystery fans, but consumed by crafting the perfect sentence in such a way that any George Saunders or Donna Tartt-clutching MFA grad will appreciate. Give Me Your Hand is the latest in a string of great novels, and one that lands while Abbott has acquired another job title: television writer.
Her 2013 novel, Dare Me—which could appeal to anybody who likes either the films of David Lynch, 19th century Gothic novels or Heathers—is destined for the screen: director Steph Green, who has been behind the camera for shows like Billions and The Americans has signed on to turn the book into a pilot. In addition to that, Abbott works with David Simon on the gritty period drama The Deuce. Even though she grew up far away in the suburbs of Detroit, there was something about the show—which stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Franco in 1970s Manhattan flush with pimps, sex workers and drug dealers—that Abbott could relate to: the bars. More specifically, the “old man bars” her father talked about when she was a kid: dimly lit, smoke-filled establishments filled with retired cops and shady figures, a cigarette machine in the corner, dusty bottles behind the bar, maybe a jar of pickled eggs and a horse race on the television.
“Those are my favorite because they’re harder to find, in New York at least,” she says. “They’re all over Michigan.”
When she moved to New York City in the second half of the 1990s, she, like any good NYU grad student, dreamed of attending fancy literary parties and stumbling upon a modern-day version the gambling club in the 1945 film version of Raymond Chandler’s crime novel The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. But it didn’t take long for her to miss the bars that reminded her of home. Before moving to New York, she worked on Michigan State Senator John F. Kelly’s failed 1994 bid for the Senate, and spent a lot of time in “whatever the Irish bar was in that part of town—and there was always one,” she says. “There’d be $3 beers, so finding those would always be our goal.” The beer of choice? “We drank Stroh’s through that entire campaign.”
Of course, people grow up and move on; regional beer staples change hands. Stroh’s, Detroit’s iconic pilsner, is now owned by Pabst, while Abbott has another drink of choice: the Gimlet. “It was because of Raymond Chandler. Literally. I had never had one before. I read him, and it sounded so good,” she says. “He describes it really beautifully. In that case with gin and with Rose’s. But I do prefer fresh lime, too.” The server comes to check on us, apologizing for interrupting. I put in my order: a Negroni. Abbott, still savoring her drink, doesn’t miss a beat. “He has that great thing, it’s in The Long Goodbye, about coming to a bar when it’s opening for the day. And the bar’s just been polished and it’s this great sort of study, and he orders a Gimlet,” she says, as I consider running after the server to change my order.
Abbott nears the bottom of her drink and glances at the menu to decide if she wants another. She orders a Gimlet while wracking her brain to remember the name of a bar she used to like in the Upper West Side area once known as Needle Park. It had a connection to the crime novel and film Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which is what got her in the door in the first place. “I always kind of liked how you could sometimes find a skeleton in it,” she says, letting the ambiguity of the statement hang in the air.
Megan Abbott on Dreams, Dangers, and Going to Strange Places in Her Newest Novel
In 'Beware the Woman,' a pregnant woman travels to a remote stretch of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
May 30, 2023 By Dwyer Murphy
Graham Greene famously called Patricia Highsmith “a poet of apprehension,” a phrase that kept returning to mind as I read Megan Abbott’s newest book, Beware the Woman, a brilliant fever dream of a novel in which time and sensation are bent out of order and each turn of the page brings a quiet breath of dread. Abbott, known for her hothouse, atmospheric thrillers, is at her most visceral here, with the story of a woman, Jacy, in early pregnancy accompanying her new husband on a trip to his father’s remote house in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Immediately, the physical reality of Jacy’s new world— the smells, the pains, the appetites—overwhelms us, and we’re thrown headlong into a disorienting place where nothing is quite as it seems, or maybe that’s exactly what it is. In the weeks before the book’s release, I caught up with Abbott to discuss strange places, power struggles over the body, and writing about the space between fear and what she calls “a love glow, that gorgeous haze.”
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Dwyer Murphy: Why the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? It has such a distinct setting, this story.
Megan Abbott: I’m from suburban Detroit, which is nowhere near the UP. I went up there once when I was a kid. A lot of kids in Michigan end up in Mackinac Island, which is this Victorian resort between the lower and upper peninsulas, famous for being the setting of Somewhere in Time. Even in Michigan, the UP is sort of exotic. It’s really remote, and it’s so beautiful in the summer. I wanted a place that was foreign and remote but at the same time still felt very American.
Murphy: I didn’t know about the Cornish legacy up there. There was something unsettling in those details.
Abbott: There are these weird subcultures you can come across up there without really knowing it. Mostly, people know about the Cornish because of the pasties, those little hand pies that are famous, which come from the Cornish, though they’re thought of as mostly just coming from the UP.
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Murphy: It’s always hard to talk about the style of a book, but I’d like to try. I’m wondering how you developed the voice for this one. And how it helped create the atmosphere, which is so keen and visceral, but at the same time, dreamlike.
Abbott: It’s always organic for me, and then it takes a life of its own. For this story, there was something dreamlike about it. First of all, Jacy is in this romantic state: newly wed, newly pregnant. There’s an unreality to it. She’s not necessarily seeing with clear eyes. She’s in a love glow, that gorgeous haze. I was also trying to capture that feeling of being in a strange place and so far from home, a place has its own rules and ways of being. It can make you wonder, is any of this even real? In this case, with Jacy, she doesn’t know her father-in-law; her husband seems different. I wanted to keep the reader in that same state she’s feeling, which is something I generally do in my novels, but with this one, I think the location and the compressed timeline and the intensity of the situation enabled a more dreamlike, gothic quality.
Murphy: The gothic quality here is so interesting. I felt like I was locked into those first beautiful, dreadful lines of Rebecca. Were there other books or authors on your mind as you were writing?
Abbott: Rebecca was certainly on my mind. I’ve always been fascinated with Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, the servant woman. Rosemary’s Baby, too, and not just for the obvious reason that I have a pregnant main character. I love that book. The movie is great, but the book has a dreamlike quality that was so interesting to me. Also…do you know who Gavin de Becker is?
Murphy: No, I don’t.
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Abbott: He was very big in the Nineties. He was sort of a security person for the stars. He used to be on Oprah and other talk shows. His big thing was this book, The Gift of Fear, which was about women listening to their intuition, and how women are socialized to make people feel better, to just smile and feel friendly, and that works against their instincts in dangerous situations. He used to be everywhere. He was a fascinating figure. At that time, no one was saying that stuff to women. For women in my generation, he was omnipresent. There was something about Gavin de Becker that was on my mind—your body is telling you something, don’t let your mind get in the way.
Murphy: You’ve written so much about athletics, and those books always have this strong physical element. In this book, it seemed to me pregnancy was almost the sport, in the sense that it was exacting this intense, uncanny toll on Jacy’s body.
Abbott: I’m drawn to athletics, really, because of a fascination with the body. Sports and dance, they enable you to control and master your body. In a pregnancy, you feel in some ways like you lose control or mastery of your body for a time. That’s really frightening to me, that notion. Not just that having the child is this new force on your body, but also that other people have feelings about your body and want to manage your body and feel somehow like they’re allowed to because of your pregnancy. While I was writing this book, there were so many conversations about female bodies happening. The anxiety felt high, and the subject kept pushing its way in without me even knowing it: all those ways you can have control taken from you.
Murphy: As I was reading, I kept preparing for the story to veer into the supernatural. I don’t want to spoil anything, but how did you strike the right balance there—the suggestion of the supernatural, while keeping the story grounded in these very real, disturbing details?
Abbott: Because it was a dreamlike state, she feels almost drugged by this environment. She has no control over what she’s eating, the smells are strange. There’s a strangeness in her body but then also a strangeness all around her: this place, this wilderness and the animals, things you don’t understand.
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Rosemary’s Baby is so much scarier if it’s not Satan—if it’s fully real. Satan is how you get let off the hook. Isn’t it much scarier when your husband and your father-in-law are the only people around you. I felt it was so much scarier because it wasn’t supernatural. But I was using these tools to nudge the reader closer to that state. The supernatural realm, entering it, would be a relief.
Murphy: There’s a Poe story that creeps into the book: “Captain Murderer.” It’s really unnerving. I should have looked this up before rather than putting it on you, but…is that a real story?
Abbott: It is. You have to look a bit. I can’t remember when I first came upon it, but the title alone was so scary. It reminded me a lot of those big anthologies you would find when you were ready to read scary stories, ghastly tales, and they’re often gruesome and all packaged together in this book you’re given as a kid. I didn’t intend for it to have this large role in the book. You know how it is: you don’t know these things are going to be important when they appear in the beginning of the book. And then there was this notion—that she’s almost drifted into one of these gothic tales.
Murphy: Neon lights and sign-making play into the dynamic between Jacy and her husband. You have quite a lot of beautiful imagery and ideas packed in with it. Is neon a hobby of yours?
Abbott: I ran into someone at a party once whose brother was one of the last people who makes actual neon signs, and who had gone through and really studied at the foot of a master. There aren’t many people left in that field, and I wanted Jed to be, in his career, caught between the artist’s sensitive side and a practical mechanical side. I wanted it to be esoteric enough that his father could be dismissive of it, but artsy enough that Jacy would respond do it. And then there’s something fascinating about being a sign maker and not reading the signs.
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I always think this when I go back to Michigan. There are some jobs that are just really hard to explain to people. Writer is one. Neon artist is another.
Murphy: This is the part of the conversation where I ask what you’re working on next.
Abbott: I’m going to be adapting this book for a feature. I’m not allowed to say anything more.
(ed. note – this conversation was conducted before the start of the WGA strike.)
And did you ever see the Todd Haynes movie Safe? I’m going to be adapting that for television. Speaking of something that walks the line on horror…it’s sort of my dream project. It’s in the very early stages. That’s one of my favorite movies. And it feels so different now.
Most Likely to Succeed: A Conversation with Megan Abbott
by Lori Rader-Day
June 24, 2025
An interview with Megan Abbott about her new book “El Dorado Drive.”
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This will certainly reveal more about me than Megan Abbott, who, as the author of the new tense and atmospheric novel El Dorado Drive, is the true subject of this piece. But here we go: Megan Abbott is the source of an intense gothic ambivalence for me. I want to be her very best friend, have her teach me everything she knows as a writer—and, also, she scares me.
If you met her in person, you’d think I was telling you a slant tale. She’s small, elegant, delightful, funny. Personable.
But Megan Abbott is one of the darkest dark horses of crime fiction, popping up in the rearview mirror with a knife when you think you might be about to settle in with a nice rah-rah story about cheerleaders, about Olympic-hopeful gymnasts, about sisters who run a ballet school. Little girls in tutus? Cute.
Fiction is full of stories of best friends and sisters, but not best friends and sisters like Megan Abbott’s. Buckle up. No one writes about the secret lives and desires of girls and women quite like her. Girls and women in Tinseltown, in shady back offices of gangsters, but also the competitive environments of… childhood, high school, of parenting, of white-collar workplaces and suburban neighborhoods that seem a little too much like our own. She writes about the seething rage and desires of women that many people would like to disbelieve or disavow. Stephen King called Abbott’s novel about the ballet school, The Turnout, “Impossible to put down, creepy and claustrophobic. It’s ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’ in ballet shoes.” When The Turnout was chosen as a Today Show #ReadWithJenna pick, I remember wondering… Is Jenna doing OK?
Confession: It’s Megan Abbott’s talent that scares me. She’s been nominated for the gold standard of crime fiction writing, the Edgar Award, five times. (And won once, Best Paperback Original for her second novel, Queenpin.) More important than that sort of recognition is the reading experience. I have never finished one of her books without my own quiet, seething rage at how good she is, how effortless her prose feels, even as it cuts, deep, into the soft, fleshy bits of family bonds, friendships, and community—right through the thin ties that are supposed to keep society together.
Her latest, El Dorado Drive, is a work well worthy of writerly envy, as well as TODAY Show book club-level sales. The story centers on Harper, one of the three Bishop sisters born into the privilege of the golden era of suburban Detroit just as the luster of American-made wore off. But nothing shines like new money. Harper Bishop returns to town with a debt hanging over her head, only to find that her two sisters’ lives are looking up. Pam and Debra have tapped into their network of neighborhood ladies in a scheme known as “the Wheel” to finally get a slice of the American dream for themselves. Is it as easy as that?
You already know it won’t be. Jenna will freaking love it.
I talked with Megan Abbott by email about sisterhood, female ambition and desire, and the “nearly religious” experiences of Tupperware parties. At the end of the emailed answers to the interview to follow, Megan typed an “xo, see you soon” to me, remembering me from some past crime fiction community encounter. Like a switchblade, that one. We might be friends!
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Lori Rader-Day:
Harper Bishop is a horse girl, grown up. She’s actually still a horse girl. Before we get going here, I want to ask, because you write a lot about girlhood, what kind of girl was little Megan Abbott? What does it say next to your photo in the senior yearbook, or what did she care the most about?
Megan Abbott:
It turns out I write a lot about the girl I wasn’t (cheerleader, gymnast, ballet dancer, horse girl). I lacked the athleticism, the grace, and, in some cases, the budget. Instead, I was the editor of my high school newspaper, the North Pointe—that fact and my general studiousness are probably why I was voted “most likely to succeed.” At the time, I probably cared most about R.E.M., gangster movies, true-crime books, and biding my time before I moved to New York City—or at least the New York City of my movie-made fantasies.
Lori Rader-Day:
“Most Likely to Succeed” is probably what they say about ambitious girls. (That is also what it says in my yearbook, about me.)
Harper is one of three sisters raised in family wealth that couldn’t be sustained. She is pretty laid back, but she gets caught up in a money-making scheme alongside her sisters, Pam and Debra. What is it about sisterhood that drew you into writing about the Bishop sisters? (I get only child vibes from you, but I’m not sure why.)
Megan Abbott:
Not an only child! I have a brother Josh, a prosecuting attorney on whom I rely regularly for fact-checking purposes. We’re only a year apart and were even roommates at the University of Michigan for a while. Maybe for just that reason, I’ve written about siblings, sisters, a few times, most recently in The Turnout. I think they intrigue me in part because they are the ne plus ultra of complicated relationships between and among women. Competition, loyalty, microaggressions, decades-long grudges, and deep, unshakeable love. I was especially drawn to Harper as the sister who leads the least conventional life of the three, which frees her from some of the pressures Pam and Debra face, but also means she’s a little taken for granted, or even dismissed. It gives her a unique perspective, always a bit on the outside, looking in.
Lori Rader-Day:
The rise and fall of the Bishop family is tightly connected to the fate of the American car industry and the city and suburbs of Detroit. This is not just a setting, but where you’re from. What, if any, relationship did your family have to the auto industry or its failure? What was it like writing about your hometown in this way? What do you think the reaction will be back in Grosse Pointe?
Megan Abbott:
I grew up in suburban Detroit in the ’70s and ’80s and, while my parents were East Coast transplants, almost everyone we knew had been raised there. I just remember the constant feeling of “belatedness”—that the glory days of the city were past. Detroit had such a complicated history, steeped in troubling racial politics, but it was also a “company town” in many ways, and I remember the constant anxiety of the shrinking and even collapsing auto industry—layoffs, labor disputes, bankruptcies. Recently, Detroit has truly, beautifully reinvented itself, but in those years, it felt like nothing was working—all these efforts to revitalize the city (the Renaissance Center, the People Mover and, um, casino gambling) kept sinking. As a result, Detroit had a kind of haunted glamour to me. A reminder that empires end and the “good times” are really only good for some people.
I don’t know what the reaction back in Grosse Pointe will be—it’s changed so much since. But, back then, Grosse Pointe was in many ways this pocket of outsized privilege. Even though my family was solidly middle-class, I was always aware of what I didn’t have access to: country club memberships, a closet of Ralph Lauren clothing, BMWs, skiing trips, all these symbols of careless wealth. It really shaped my view of money, privilege, security. I never felt like I belonged and I guess that’s what makes so many of us writers, right?
Lori Rader-Day:
The Midwestern sensibility gets a few pokes, too, in that Harper points out that Midwesterners don’t like to “talk about feelings, ever.” We don’t talk about money, either, as a matter of fact, but Harper comes to the realization that “Money is rarely about money.” What’s money about, for the Bishop sisters?
Megan Abbott:
What is it about for any of us, right? Security, independence, freedom, power, revenge. I think it’s different for each sister, but all those elements are constantly in play. For Pam, coming off a monstrous divorce, money promises a new beginning. For Harper, who’s in debt, it’s a boot off her neck. For Debra, it’s fundamentally practical. Her husband is sick and they’re drowning in bills. But what happens when money is flowing? Then it shifts again. It’s not just about survival anymore. They grew up in relative affluence and then saw it all taken away as the auto industry cratered. The fear of losing it again never goes away.
(By the way, I should confess that I didn’t mean to poke Midwesterners. Well, let’s call it a loving poke. For better or worse, I will always have that fundamental Midwestern reticence, and that respect for privacy and boundaries. Mind your own business. And I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of oversharing!)
Lori Rader-Day:
Midwesterners just like to be remembered in publishing.
Since we’re on the topic of taboos… women (and girls, as you have written elsewhere) are not supposed to want so much. But the Bishop sisters and the women pulled into the myth of the Wheel are freed up, in a way, to desire. What’s attractive to you about writing characters who desire—and take it too far?
Megan Abbott:
I think because desire is still so forbidden for women of middle age or beyond. They’re supposed to be content with what they have. They’re supposed to be selfless mothers, supportive wives, reliable coworkers. I think, as a culture, we’re still alarmed by any expression of open desire from a woman in her forties and beyond. It’s either pathologized, or turned into camp or comedy. What I wanted to do in El Dorado Drive is celebrate women—especially Pam, the “hungriest” sister—who refuse to conceal or tamp down their desires. I admire it so much.
Lori Rader-Day:
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I caught a whiff of the Tupperware and Avon parties I used to attend with my mom as I read about the Wheel parties upgrading their snack tables and finding creative ways to present the money. I can see the montage in the TV show very clearly. And it just seemed like you were having so much fun with this book in that moment. We’re just amusing ourselves, really, when we write. How do you keep having fun with your writing or keep stretching yourself?
Megan Abbott:
As you know, a novel is a long effort! We spend two years or more with these characters, this world. The story has to feel endlessly fascinating, full of layers and surprises, and—for me at least, and I suspect you too—each one has to present a new challenge. And, even in dark stories, it has to offer expressions of joy. That’s often the bigger stretch—tonally—when you’re dealing with crime. I loved writing the party scenes in El Dorado Drive because, to me, they were these ecstatic experiences—nearly religious—for these women. I wanted to bring readers to the parties too. All books are an invitation, after all. Come in, have a drink, take your shoes off.
Lori Rader-Day:
Your work gets called noir. What does that genre label mean to you? What are the hallmarks of noir, in your opinion, that fit your work and/or that you push against?
Megan Abbott:
I suppose I consider noir less as a genre and more of a mood, a feeling—one characterized by a kind of dark glamour. In noir, characters are beset by primal emotions—lust, greed, rage, fear—and those emotions get the better of them. They’re a way of exploring what might happen if we gave into those universal feelings without having to actually, say, murder our spouses or rob a bank. I confess that I consider all my books noir not because I set out to write a novel in that tradition, but because, for better or worse, it reflects my world view. Maybe it’s the Catholic (and Freudian) impulse in me!
That said, traditional noir—if you go back to the mid(last)century—was dominated by male protagonists, with scant full-blooded, realistic, complex female characters. I don’t have any interest in writing about empty femme fatales or nagging wives or other staple female characters of the tradition. I want to write about complicated women for the rest of my life!
Lori Rader-Day:
Which stories brought you to the crime fiction genre? What stories do you return to again and again for inspiration?
Megan Abbott:
First it was falling in love with film noir as a kid, then true crime and ultimately, in my 20s, the hardboiled masterpieces of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson—the big guns of the 1930s-50s. Then, the sinister works of Patricia Highsmith. Once I started reading those, I never looked back!
Lori Rader-Day:
You’ve worked in TV/film, had your own work translated to visual medium, and will be writing El Dorado Drive for TV. How do you have to think about your own novel differently to write the episodic script for it? What is exciting or daunting about the prospect?
Megan Abbott:
It’s always a little bit like a breakup. You have to break up with the book to start a new relationship, with the script. You lose the intimacy and voice that novels alone offer, but you gain so much more in terms of the power of visual storytelling. You have to reorient yourself and start thinking in terms of images and what they can convey. In El Dorado Drive, I’ve been loving writing all these chaotic party scenes, all these scenes with cash, luxury goods, imagining the way the camera can fetishize it all. And there’s such a thrill when you realize what took you six pages to set up in the book can come to life in one striking image on screen.
Megan Abbott on Criminal Conspiracies in the Fallen Suburbs
In Abbott's new thriller, three sisters in Grosse Pointe get drawn into an 'investment club.'
Dwyer Murphy
June 6, 2025
In Megan Abbott’s suburbia, there are always darker forces at play. In her new novel, El Dorado Drive (G.P. Putnam, June 24, 2025), a feeling of loss and decline permeates the once prosperous community of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the author’s own hometown. The auto industry has lost its sheen. The country clubs are hotbeds of anxiety, stirring up questions about who lost a job this month, whose bills are past due. A group of women in the community have turned to one another for support. Financial support, in the form of a shadowy investment club that purports to lift up and empower women. In other words, it’s the perfect setting for a simmering, evocative noir, a quintessential Megan Abbott story. I caught up with Abbott recently to discuss criminal conspiracies, suburban ennui, and why neither of us can seem to stop writing party scenes.
*
Dwyer Murphy: How did you end up deciding to finally write about the suburbs of Detroit?
Megan Abbott: In some ways, I thought I’d never explicitly write about my hometown. I’m not sure why. Maybe because of the self-revelation involved. But I got really interested in suburban women who got caught up in pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing schemes (MLMS). A lot of them rose during the pandemic and, prior to that, during the last recession. I kept thinking about these areas that were once securely middle or upper-middle class, or even affluent, and it made me think about growing up in Grosse Pointe in the 1980s, and how everyone I knew had a parent who had worked for the big auto companies, or ancillary to them.
It was this period of decline. A feeling that the sun was setting on the empire of Detroit. It seemed like a perfect setting for a story about women getting caught in these schemes. Women who grew up imagining a very secure life for themselves; now they’re in middle age, and they have to figure something out. It all seemed like I should definitely make this Grosse Pointe.
Dwyer Murphy: Did it feel different, writing about your hometown, actually using its name?
Megan Abbott: Memories of your childhood are the most vivid you ever get. I could just imagine walking into some of these restaurants and department stores. It felt like I was there. It had this piercing quality to me. Or I could picture the Hunt Club still. It’s different now, but when I was growing up it was the horse girl country club. Grosse Pointe was a town of competing country clubs. I had such memories of that place, from girl scout visits and having friends going there, I ended up having the main character work there.
Dwyer Murphy: Can you tell me more about horse girls, and how they factor into the story?
Megan Abbott: People in the past have told me I should write a horse girl book, and I haven’t yet, but I feel like I’m dipping into that. I was not a horse girl. I couldn’t have afforded to be a horse girl. Some girls who can’t afford it find a way to make it work—that wasn’t me. But I loved horse books as a kid. And horse girls fascinated me, the way they seemed very apart from other girls. They had their clothes, the way they broke down their bags. They were always going off to horse camp and competitions on the weekend. It wasn’t even snobbish. This wasn’t the equestrian kind of horse girl. They just had this aura of exclusivity. The way they talked to the horses. It all seemed glamorous and exotic to me. It felt like I had to place Harper, the main character, there. And I wanted to write about what it would be like to be a horse girl when the money is gone, when those dreams go away.
Dwyer Murphy: How did you devise “The Wheel,” this investment scheme the women get caught in?
Megan Abbott: I’ve always been interested in MLMS, then I found these other schemes, where you’re not even selling anything. In some ways they’re less legitimate, because there’s no product. I mean, you’re not even selling people bad essential oils. A lot of them go back to the Sixties and Seventies. There was one scheme called the airplane game. Another I read about was in Connecticut—a “gifting table”—where one of the women involved was murdered. There are so many schemes like this. You pay in, you recruit, you give the gift to the top. I got really into them.
I found some guidebooks and manuals—documents that were entered into evidence when these schemes were prosecuted. For a writer, those documents are gold. You get to see entirely how they operate: the secret language, the code words. That was when I felt like I entered David Mamet land. There were all these ways they would use language to skirt IRS gifting rules, to avoid the suggestion of illegality. It’s fascinating to see how people convince themselves this is okay. The manuals would instruct women: ‘don’t say invest, say gift.’ And they would use the language of feminism. ‘Women investing in other women.’ That seemed particularly insidious to me.
All the moral skirting of the issues at hand felt so rich. Really, the schemes are based entirely on recruitment. So, like all pyramid schemes, the only people who make money are the people who come in early. You’re never going to be able to recruit enough.
Dwyer Murphy: Did you have a conspiracy corkboard with profiles of all the women?
Megan Abbott: At one point I had an elaborate way of labeling the different levels of the scheme, but it got so complicated I lost track. I had to simplify. You’re describing something that’s intricate by nature, so that people can’t figure out what’s legal or illegal. I couldn’t stop reading about how they all operated. By the way, the first rule in my pyramid scheme would be to not create a manual.
Dwyer Murphy: I did enough doc reviews as a young lawyer to be forever wary of putting things in writing.
Megan Abbott: I kept thinking about Goodfellas, which was a secret influence on this book, how Paulie (played by Paul Sorvino) never talks on the phone. Everyone has use payphones and talk to somebody else who reports to him.
Dwyer Murphy: What are the other secret influences on the book? I try to remember to ask you that whenever we talk about a new book because you always give me surprising answers.
Megan Abbott: On one level, this book involved a lot of plugging into WASP America and the nostalgia for that culture in its waning days. There was John Cheever, of course. And because the book is set in Grosse Point, The Virgin Suicides was on my mind. Eugenides is just a few years older than me—that book is really about my childhood. It’s a very different subject matter, but WASP world.
The other piece was really Glengarry Glen Ross. I did an early Mamet deep dive. And I was researching post-RICO organized crime networks. I really wanted to think of this as a criminal network. So much of the book is about family drama, but it’s enmeshed in criminal activity. I wanted each to be a red herring for the other.
Dwyer Murphy: I wanted to ask you about the opening scene. There’s an elaborate set-piece at a graduation party. I thought it was remarkable. It set the scene so vividly and threw us into this world.
Megan Abbott: The graduation party was so clear to me. I was very much thinking about these women at the age of becoming empty nesters. One, because they’re going to have to pay for their children’s college. And two, because being an empty nester creates the opportunity to reinvent your life.
A graduation party creates a lot of nostalgia. People are thinking about their own days in high school. So much of this book is about this complicated and rather dangerous nostalgia for a past and a community that’s gone forever. The sisters in this book had a terrible childhood, but they have nostalgia for it, because it’s this lost world. It’s like the Roman Empire: you lose it slowly and then all at once. This is the ‘all at once’ period.
It was also an excuse to write a party scene. I think we’ve talked about that before. I’m always looking for an excuse to write a party scene. This book is a series of parties. I think there are seven of them in there.
Dwyer Murphy: I got a note the other day on a project pointing out I had written three party scenes in a row. But honestly, I always just want more. Why do you think you’re drawn to party scenes?
Megan Abbott: It’s sort of like dream sequences: these things I can’t get away from. I suppose if I’m honest they feel very cinematic to me. And for me, the first big book of literature was The Great Gatsby. Also, in this book, there are more characters than I usually write, so it’s a way to bring everyone together. I wanted to create this ecstatic revelry that felt a little scary. All parties have that in a way. The energy of a party develops a life of its own. There’s something so mysterious about how a party works.
Give Me Your Hand.
By Megan Abbott.
July 2018. 352p. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316547185); e-book, $13.99 (9780316547284).
Kit Owens has a secret--actually, it's Diane Fleming's secret, shared when the two of them were teens, but the shocking revelation creates a burden and a twisted bond Kit wishes they didn't have. The adult Kit is a postdoc lab worker fighting for a spot on the research team of the spiky, darkly glamorous Dr. Severin, who's just won an NIH research grant to study premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). "Like PMS only much, much worse," according to Kit, PMDD, in its worst extremes, drives women to violent and destructive acts. When Diane makes an unexpected reappearance in Kit's life, in her lab, there are fatal consequences, and Kit finds that the cord connecting her to Diane may strangle them both. Once again, Abbott (You Will Know Me, 2016) plunges us deep into a vividly realized world of intense competition and creates life-or-death stakes where we wouldn't have known to look for them. There's claustrophobic tension between scrappy, striving Kit and Diane, the golden girl who always seemed a little bit off, even better is the nested power struggle between the three female characters, studying a misunderstood women's health issue in the mostly male milieu of research science. Procedural fans may have a few nitpicks, but this is a brilliant riff on hard science, human nature, and the ultimate unknowability of the human brain.--Keir Graff
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
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Graff, Keir. "Give Me Your Hand." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 17, 1 May 2018, p. 27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A539647217/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f123bf25. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Abbott, Megan GIVE ME YOUR HAND Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 17 ISBN: 978-0-316-54718-5
A rising star in a famous laboratory can track her success back to the one person in her life she'd like to forget.
As a teenager, Kit Owens is fine with doing just enough to set herself up for a comfortable life. She never had a compelling reason to push herself until Diane Fleming quietly stepped into her life. The new girl with a troubled past, Diane seems to care only about achieving perfection, and she doesn't understand why Kit wouldn't want the same. The two become each other's motivation to do better, go harder, working toward the common goal of a science scholarship funded by a doctor famous for her research on taboo disorders related to the female sex. Until one night, when Diane shares something with Kit that is terrible enough--"the worst thing anyone's ever told me"--to erase any bond they have. More than 10 years later, Kit is the hardest working member of Dr. Severin's lab, angling for a coveted spot on the new premenstrual dysphoric disorder research team. Her lab mates, all men, are convinced she has it in the bag. But then Dr. Severin drops the bomb that she's poached a stellar researcher from Harvard who will join the team immediately. That person is Diane. Kit has buried the memory of her old friend under years of pipetting, thousands of precisely cut samples, and days bent under a fume hood: "After a bad dream, a Diane dream, I avoid the mirror...certain that if I looked, she might be there." Who could truly forget Diane? And when she walks through the lab door the next day, "everything begins again." Abbott (You Will Know Me, 2016, etc.) has made the dark desires and secrets of the female psyche the life force of her novels. Under the surface of Kit and Diane's research on women plagued by an "unbearable push of feelings, feelings gone out of control...a wretched curse" lives their own shared curse, something strong enough to tip the balance of their carefully regimented, chemical-clean world.
In Abbott's deft hands, friendship is fused to rivalry, and ambition to fear, with an unsettling level of believability. It will take more than a cold shower to still the blood thumping in your ears when you finish this.
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"Abbott, Megan: GIVE ME YOUR HAND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A538294048/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0f26ca9f. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
GIVE ME YOUR HANDBy Megan Abbott352pp. Little Brown. $26
At the heart of Megan Abbott's new novel is blood. A lot of it. Heart's blood. Arterial blood. Animal blood. And, most of all, menstrual blood -- a subject that many writers would shy away from, but which Abbott examines in all its messy, hormonal, misunderstood complexity.
The protagonist of ''Give Me Your Hand'' is Kit Owens, a scientist working in the cutthroat world of academic postdoctoral research. If academia is a pyramid, postdocs are at the bottom; Kit is uncomfortably aware that she has limited time to prove her worth and amass enough high-profile research to attain her own lab. The first researcher into the lab every morning and the last out at night, Kit is not just hungry for professional success, she is voracious for it.
Abbott excels in evoking the strange mix of camaraderie and rivalry that exists in academic research, showing the links forged by long hours and proximity as well as the suspicion and desperation that grow like a bacterial culture in competitive environments. ''It's just nature,'' Kit remarks to a colleague. ''Put animals in a small, closed space, and the one with the sharpest nails, the pointiest teeth wins.''
When Kit's boss, the brusque and brilliant Dr. Severin, secures a significant grant for her research into a virulent form of PMS -- called premenstrual dysphoric disorder -- Kit's co-workers quickly bare their teeth and nails, and tensions in the lab mount to the breaking point. There are only two coveted spots on Severin's team for this project, and everyone, including Kit, is determined to snag one.
''The truth is, we all know PMDD's hot stuff. Rumor is Dr. Severin is closing in on something, maybe even approaching something that approaches a cure. A cure, that is, other than having your uterus and ovaries yanked out. A cure for a condition only marginally treatable. ... At its worst, it's led women to self-destructive acts. Or destructive ones. In the lab, we've all heard the horror stories: Women in its grip hitting their boyfriends over the head with frying pans. ... Road rage, baby shaking, worse.''
But a spanner is thrown into Kit's calculations when Dr. Severin recruits a high-flying prodigy to work on the grant, leaving just one slot open. Worse, the new staffer is another woman. For Kit, currently the only female in the lab, this is bad news. ''If there was a 'woman' spot,'' she notes with frustration, ''there no longer is.''
However, the real shock is the identity of the new recruit. Diane Fleming is gifted and driven. She is also Kit's old high school friend and rival, the person whose competitive edge lit in Kit a burning determination to succeed and helped to propel her from academic mediocrity. In many ways Kit knows that she has Diane to thank for what she has attained. But Diane has also provided Kit with a secret that has weighed on her conscience for more than a decade, a secret she has tried and failed to unload several times. The reader knows that it's only a matter of time before the truth begins to assert itself.
''Don't we all feel we have something banked down deep inside just waiting for its moment, the slow gathering of hot blood?''
Although at first sight ''Give Me Your Hand'' looks like a departure from the themes Abbott is best known for -- the world of teenage gymnasts in ''You Will Know Me'' and of cutthroat cheerleaders in ''Dare Me'' -- in many ways it's vintage territory. Female friendship and ambition are threaded throughout her work, and here they form a rich tapestry, as she contrasts the ''now'' of Kit's professional life as a postdoc in Dr. Severin's lab with the ''then'' of her high school relationship with Diane. The physicality is still there, too, both in Abbott's descriptive turn of phrase (a mouth is colored ''placenta red'' with lipstick, a bookmark hangs like a ''dark tongue''), and in the shape of Dr. Severin's work, which delves into the furrows and twists of the human brain.
The mazelike network of loyalties in the lab, the complicated truth of Kit's own past with Diane, their statuses as women in a male-dominated field -- all are masterfully portrayed, as is the scientific endeavor in which Dr. Severin's team is engaged, to discover why women with extreme PMS commit inexplicable acts of violence and self-sabotage. The motivations of Kit and Diane are sometimes equally opaque. The central mystery of the ''then'' narrative is convincingly constructed, but some of the actions in the ''now'' strand are harder to understand. Perhaps, in the end, that's the point. Like the women in the study, it is the split-second impulses that define them.
Ultimately, though, the reason to read this compelling and hypnotic novel is not the execution of the plot or the sleight-of-hand final revelation. What makes it stand out is Abbott's expert dissection of women's friendships and rivalries. She is an investigator of the human heart and mind, and ''Give Me Your Hand'' is a fine addition to her body of work -- one that should cement her position as one of the most intelligent and daring novelists working in the crime genre today.
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This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.
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DRAWING (DRAWING BY YUKO SHIMIZU)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
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Ware, Ruth. "Deadly Equation." The New York Times Book Review, 22 July 2018, p. 8(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547175468/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e9a42891. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Abbott, Megan THE TURNOUT Putnam (Fiction None) $14.99 7, 6 ISBN: 978-0-593-08490-8
The owners of a ballet school have their insular and delicate world torn open.
Sisters Marie and Dara Durant own the Durant School of Dance; with matching buns, long necks, and pink tights, they exemplify the traditions of ballet. The classic girl’s dream of becoming a ballerina is the reality they’ve lived since their late mother opened the school in the 1980s. But behind the delicate tulle-clad facade of every ballerina reside the grit, pain, and stamina that drive them to push their bodies to the limit day in and day out. “Ballet was full of dark fairy tales,” Abbott writes, and one of those dark tales belongs to Dara’s husband, Charlie, who was once her mother’s prize student. Charlie now runs the school's daily operations, no longer able to dance due to his chronic pain. With Nutcracker season upon them, tension runs high at the studio. While Marie, Dara, and Charlie have survived many Nutcrackers, this year is a little different—the dark fairy tale comes to life, first in the form of a fire, “brilliant and bright…eating the floor and spitting out kindling shards in its wake.” As in many of Abbott’s thrillers, a violent catalyst sets off a series of events that brings buried emotions and hidden desires to the surface. The physicality in Abbott’s prose gives the mounting tension a heartbeat, from “the clatter of phones” to “the slap of flip-flops.” The tension arrives next in the form of Derek, the contractor hired to fix the ruined studio—“the expanse of him was overwhelming.” Derek represents every contractor horror story you’ve ever heard. He takes over the sisters' space, “an invasion and a deconstruction” that threatens to break the delicate balance that keeps the studio—and Marie’s and Dara’s lives—functioning. Derek invades their mental as well as their physical space, twisting words and promises, making beautiful things unseemly: “Some people liked to make everything dirty. Some people liked to ruin everything.” While the life of a ballerina may be “mysterious and private,” many illusions are shattered by the end. Though this story lacks some of the unquenchable energy that is Abbott’s trademark, the mesmerizing prose will keep you turning the pages.
Abbott is a master of thinly veiled secrets often kept by women who rage underneath their delicate exteriors.
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"Abbott, Megan: THE TURNOUT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A659924972/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=35c2f639. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
* The Turnout. By Megan Abbott. Aug. 2021. 352p. Putnam, $27 (9780593084908).
From cheerleaders (Dare Me, 2012) through gymnasts (You Will Know Me, 2016) and now to ballerinas, Abbott continues to find lurking horror in the athletic obsessions of teenagers. "They came with their sprightly dreams and limber bodies and hard little muscles and hungry lean bellies and a desire to enter into the fairy tale that is dance to little girls and a few special little boys." An innocent rite of childhood or a vision of lambs to the slaughter? It's both, and way more, in Abbott's multifaceted story of the Durant School of Dance, run by two sisters, Dara and Marie, and Dara's husband, Charlie. The women teach the classes--each year's troupe working toward a Christmas performance of The Nutcracker--and Charlie handles the business, his wrecked, former dancer's body a reminder of "how beautiful things could be all broken inside." We sense immediately that there's still more breaking to come, inside and out, but the swirling turmoil needs a catalyst to ignite: cue the stranger who comes to town in the form of a contractor hired to repair the trio's house. Abbott brilliantly explores the psychosexual undercurrents throbbing throughout this haunting novel, from the dancers' pointe shoes, "pink satin fantasies we beat into submission," through even The Nutcracker itself, "a young girl's dream of peering over the precipice into the dark furrow of adulthood."--Bill Ott
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The success of the TV adaptation of Dare Me will spur additional interest in Abbott's latest.
YA: Teens drawn to ballet won't be able to resist this compelling, if unnerving tale. BO.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Ott, Bill. "The Turnout." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 19-20, 1 June 2021, p. 46. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666230176/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3c7fb81c. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
THE TURNOUTBy Megan Abbott
Ballet, as an art form, exists at a remove from realism. Dancers train their bodies into instruments of superhuman flexibility and athleticism, capable of exaggerated yet nuanced shapes and movements that form their medium of expression. Performances of the classics -- ''Swan Lake,'' for example, or ''Giselle,'' or ''Romeo and Juliet'' -- are retellings of melodramatic, sometimes magical stories of passion, betrayal, lost innocence and revenge. For the audience, too, ballet offers a knowingly artificial experience: the contrast of midnight-black theater and luminous stage, the swelling orchestral music, the sets and props that play with scale through tricks of perspective.
So maybe it's inevitable that novels, films and television series about the lives of dancers -- my own ballet novel included -- tend to blow past naturalism in favor of something that reaches for the heightened feeling of performance, something that might be soapy and earnest like the movie ''Center Stage'' or might, as in the case of Megan Abbott's new novel, ''The Turnout,'' be dark and juicy and tinged with horror.
After losing their violently unhappy parents to a car wreck as teenagers, the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, inherited a crumbling Victorian house as well as their mother's ballet school, the center of their universe, a ''cramped, sweaty, stenchy place, ripe as the hollow of a dancer's pointed foot.'' Dara, once orphaned, quickly married Charlie, a dance student whom their mother had taken into their household when he was 13, and whose career later ended in a series of injuries and surgeries, leaving a legacy of chronic pain. As Abbott portentously concludes her first chapter: ''It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn't. And that was when everything went wrong.'' When the novel begins, the three are in their early 30s, and Marie has abruptly moved out of the house and into her mother's private sanctum on the top floor of the school. A dreamy, childlike woman, Marie fails to consider the dangers of ancient space heaters and carelessly destroys one of the school's hardworking studios just as ''Nutcracker'' season, by far the Durants' busiest and most important time of year, is kicking off.
Enter Derek. A beefy middle-aged contractor who limps like ''John Wayne gone to seed,'' Derek not only persuades the sisters and Charlie to undertake a renovation far beyond the scope of the necessary repairs, but he also becomes the immediate object of Marie's erotic fixation (''the Big Bad Wolf,'' she calls him). An affair commences, conducted blatantly in the school while little bunheads come and go downstairs and Dara frets and seethes. Slowly, ominously, Derek begins to take over sex-addled Marie like a mind-controlling parasite. His work in the ruined studio drags on and on. He encroaches, insinuates. Questions of what he knows about and wants from the odd, triangular Durant family form the central tensions of the book's first half, while the second revolves around what, exactly, there is to know.
Abbott's novels are often described as crime fiction, and, while indeed she works with mystery and suspense and draws on noir and Gothic tropes, her goal seems less to construct intricate, double-crossing plot problems than to explore the dark side of femininity. Her prose is often incantatory, her dialogue lightly stylized. Frequently her tone has a strong flavor, pungent and fermented. In other words, Megan Abbott is a mood. Two of her best-known previous novels (''The Turnout'' is her 10th) featured teenage cheerleaders and gymnasts, spiritual cousins to ballet dancers. Her most recent, ''Give Me Your Hand,'' concerned rivalrous female scientists studying an extreme form of PMS. Blood is not rare in Abbott's work, both from sudden violence and the purposeful risks and sacrifices of her characters. ''The Turnout'' has a bit of gore, but its deepest preoccupation is with bodies and sex.
''How a dancer prepared her pointe shoes,'' Abbott writes, ''was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself.'' A shoe broken in by a hammer-wielding dancer had ''its pinkness split open, its soft center exposed.'' Not coincidentally, a dancer mastering the outward hip rotation called turnout that is essential to ballet finds herself ''split open, laid bare.'' When Dara glimpses Marie having sex with Derek, she sees him ''turning her inside out. Turning her out.'' These connections -- the pinkness of shoes and of women's genitals, the submissions required by ballet and by sex -- are neither subtle nor meant to be so, and the novel is so relentlessly saturated with sexual imagery and innuendo that at times it can feel like too much. ''It only hurts the first time,'' Derek says before driving a hammer through the wall of the damaged studio, and in life it would be almost impossible not to tell him to give it a rest. I found myself wondering if a dancer reading ''The Turnout'' might be made to feel uncomfortable, even stripped of some dignity, by the description of 10-year-old Dara recognizing the feeling of turnout from ''her own furtive confusions, in the claw-foot bathtub, under her bunk bed blankets, her hands tingling, her thighs gaping like a keyhole, and that feeling after, like her whole fist would not be enough.''
But the key to this novel is that while the narration sometimes feels omniscient, the story is refracted through one particular lens: Dara's. Her consciousness is given to the reader impressionistically, through memories and associations and washes of emotion, rather than through detailed accounts of her thoughts, partly because she is living in a habitual, self-protective fog and perhaps also, more practically, because the book's ambient mystery might otherwise be spoiled. What becomes clear is that the queasy, too-pervasive sexuality is inseparable from a haze of wrongness and trauma that suffuses Dara's mind. To Dara, pointe shoes are ''pink satin fantasies we beat into submission so they can be used and then discarded.'' To Dara, ''The Nutcracker'' is not a pleasant holiday entertainment but a story of a ''brave girl venturing into the adult world of dark magic, of broken things, of innocence lost.'' It's not that the novel is saying ballet is only about sex and degradation. It's that, for reasons that eventually become clear, Dara has lost her ability to see it any other way.
Like a ballet, ''The Turnout'' revels in its own bigness, its drama, its relish for cataclysmic passion and its appetite for the grotesque, but some of Abbott's deftest work involves an underlying interplay between strength and fragility. The Durant sisters are outwardly fortified by the rigid routines and conventions of ballet, but inwardly they are bending under the pressure of maintaining a facade. Anything might cause them to break or combust, just as a lone hairpin, fallen unnoticed to the stage, ''might bring down a dancer, might take everything away.'' The strain on the Durants is not unlike the inherent strain of ballet's artifice: To portray a vision of lightness and loveliness, a delicate swan or dainty Sugar Plum Fairy, a dancer must stoically endure years of hard work and frequent pain, must hide her calloused, sometimes bloody feet in pink satin fantasies. In Abbott's work, womanhood might be a grand illusion all its own, one we can't help suffering for. After all, according to the motto of the Durant School of Dance, ''Every girl wants to be a ballerina.''
Maggie Shipstead is the author, most recently, of ''Great Circle.'' THE TURNOUT By Megan Abbott 340 pp. G.P. Putnam's Sons. $27.
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Shipstead, Maggie. "Pas de Troix." The New York Times Book Review, 18 July 2021, p. 12(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A668828427/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=962c4d5e. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Beware the Woman
Megan Abbott. Putnam, $28 (304p) ISBN 978-0-593-08493-9
In this spine-tingling suspense yarn from Edgar Award winner Abbott (The Turnout), pregnant second grade teacher Jacy learns there's plenty she still doesn't know about her taciturn artist husband Jed or the family he rarely mentions--maybe a dangerous amount. The action unfolds during the couple's summer road trip from New York City to visit Jed's father, a retired physician, at his cottage on Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula. At first, Jacy feels transported by the surroundings and her father-in-law's near-courtly solicitousness. (His brusque caretaker, Mrs. Brandt, is a different story.) But things shift when Jacy has a miscarriage scare and, in the aftermath, Jed aligns with his father's alarmingly old-school notions about women and pregnancy. Rightly or wrongly, Jacy starts to feel like a prisoner. Manipulating the sense of menace like a virtuoso violinist, Abbott expettly foreshadows the wrenching family secrets that ate exposed in a ferocious finale. Sinewy prose and note-perfect pacing make this a masterful and provocative deep dive into desire, love, and gender politics. Readers will be left breathless. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (May)
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"Beware the Woman." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 10, 6 Mar. 2023, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A741557961/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=718fbb89. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Abbott, Megan BEWARE THE WOMAN Putnam (Fiction None) $28.00 5, 30 ISBN: 9780593084939
An expecting couple's whirlwind summer trip to reconnect with family unravels into something like a game of cat and mouse.
It's no spoiler to say that Jed and Jacy's trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to visit Jed's father, Dr. Ash, doesn't go as expected. Jacy, as first-person narrator, is not afraid to drop hints that all is not well in Jed's childhood home despite the happy reason for the trip--celebrating the newlyweds' pregnancy news. After a lucid dream in a roadside motel, Jacy suggests "we could go back and just explain it wasn't a good time. Not with the baby coming." How different things could have been. Instead, the couple pushes on, their nervous excitement brimming. "It was tempting fate, though, wasn't it? I see that now," says Jacy, a couple days into the visit and growing more aware. Dr. Ash shows a touching interest in Jacy's well-being, an eye always on her belly. It's only natural that Jed's mother would come up. She died in childbirth, Dr. Ash reveals. "Had Jed told me this and I'd missed it?" Jacy wonders. This is the first crack in the family facade, a chip in the paint that reveals layers of history underneath. The voice of Jacy's own mother rings in her head--"Honey we all marry strangers." Lurking in the background is Mrs. Brandt, the Ash household's longtime caretaker. Her formal nature suggests a strong loyalty to Jed's family. "It's hard enough seeing you," Mrs. Brandt says. "Pregnant, fulsome. Fecund, ripening." This ability to twist a good thing inside out until it feels shameful is classic Abbott. Jacy's belly is suddenly a trigger, the inevitability of birth like a bomb waiting to go off. Unease turns to discomfort turns to fear when Jacy wakes up bleeding one morning, and suddenly her body no longer feels like her own. Jacy wants to leave, but Dr. Ash wants her to do what's best for the baby. Who gets to decide? And what about Jed? Compared to Jacy, Jed reads like a ghost of a person, flat on the page. But maybe that's the point given this is Jacy's story to tell. Abbott masterfully uses the pretext of a pregnant woman's heightened senses--"I could smell everything now even the carpet glue, the wood paste in the staircase post"--to build a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity reminiscent of Get Out. You're sure to get chills.
An unsettling, nightmare-inducing morsel from a master of suspense.
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"Abbott, Megan: BEWARE THE WOMAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A743460673/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=44264db7. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Beware the Woman. By Megan Abbott. May 2023.304P. Putnam, $28.95 (9780593084939); e-book (9780593084946).
The author of You Will Know Me (2016), Give Me Your Hand (2018), The Turnout (2021), and many more outstanding crime novels delivers another knockout performance with her new thriller. New Yorkers Jacy and her husband, Jed, are happily anticipating the birth of their first child. A visit to Jed's father in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula feels a little stressful, but Jacy likes the man, a doctor, so she's not overly concerned. An unexpected bacterial infection adds a complication to the visit, but Jacy is sure it's nothing some antibiotics can't clear up. Then something changes in the small cottage--something seemingly insubstantial yet somehow claustrophobically threatening. A housekeeper who seemed a little standoffish now seems menacing. Jed's mother, dead for years and barely mentioned, becomes almost like an actual presence in the cottage. A sense of foreboding falls over the story, a feeling of something evil lurking just out of sight. Is Jacy simply imagining things, or are she and the baby inside her in real trouble? Abbott is an accomplished storyteller (she's won or been nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar and the Anthony), and this is one of her most compelling and well-constructed novels. A real treat for the authors many fans and for everyone who treasures that sense of Gothic-tinged trouble both within and without. Think Rebecca in the UP.--David Pitt
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Abbott was once a cult favorite, but those times are long gone. She's a crime-fiction A-lister now.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
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Pitt, David. "Beware the Woman." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 16, 15 Apr. 2023, pp. 22+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747135388/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1d232af5. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
El Dorado Drive
Megan Abbott. Putnam, $30 (368p)
ISBN 978-0-593-08496-0
Cash-strapped women fall prey to a pyramid scheme in this nerveshredding thriller from Edgar winner Abbott (Beware the Woman). Harper Bishop flees Grosse Pointe, Mich., in June 2008 to evade an increasingly persistent creditor, leaving behind her two older sisters, who are also deeply in debt--Debra due to her husband's medical bills, Pam because of her divorce from a thieving deadbeat. When Harper returns home in October, she's shocked to find Debra sporting "meticulous highlights" and Pam driving a Lexus. The duo attribute their windfalls to the Wheel, an all-female "circle of giving" that requires new members to contribute initial dues of five grand. Her siblings' enthusiasm is so contagious that Harper sets aside her misgivings and signs on, unwittingly sealing all their fates. Though the tale unfolds from Harper's POV, and her fraught relationships are its focus, the most fully realized cast member is Pam's daughter, Vivian, a surly teen whose resentment of her mother animates the proceedings. Elsewhere, Abbott probes the minefield of sisterhood to harrowing effect, using staccato prose to amplify the inherent apprehension and anxiety of the siblings' relationships. The result is a tense and twisty delight. Agent: Daniel Conaway, Writers House. (June)
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"El Dorado Drive." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 13, 31 Mar. 2025, p. 27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A834331628/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d351cf66. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Abbott, Megan. El Dorado Drive. Putnam. Jun. 2025.368p. ISBN 9780593084960. $30. SUSPENSE
Harper and her sisters, Pam and Debra, had privileged childhoods in suburban Detroit, but as adults they are struggling. After a series of personal setbacks, Harper moves in with Pam and her daughter Violet. Pam's ex-husband, Dave, has emptied their bank accounts, yet Harper is surprised to see Pam driving a new car. Pam lets Harper in on her secret: she and Debra have joined the Wheel, a clandestine, women-led financial support group that promises to make members rich. At first, the Wheel seems to be the answer to the sisters' troubles by offering financial freedom and a community of supportive women. But tensions mount as the Wheel begins to consume their lives with ever-increasing pressure to recruit and contribute. When an unthinkable crime occurs, the sisters rally to figure out what happened, while the other members of the Wheel work to preserve the group's secrecy at any cost. VERDICT Edgar Award winner Abbott (Beware the Woman) effortlessly excels at exploring the complexities of women's relationships with suspenseful, atmospheric storytelling. Unsettling and darkly clever, her latest will delight her many fans and attract new ones.--Anitra Gates
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Gates, Anitra. "Abbott, Megan. El Dorado Drive." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 4, Apr. 2025, p. 73. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835170922/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c4ff78f4. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Abbott, Megan EL DORADO DRIVE Putnam (Fiction None) $30.00 6, 24 ISBN: 9780593084960
Three sisters suffering from Detroit's auto industry collapse are drawn to a shiny new business opportunity that turns sinister.
Abbott's latest opens with a sense of foreboding--a feeling synonymous with Abbott and one that only grows as the hardships of three suburban Detroit women come to light. The Bishop sisters--Debra, Pam, and Harper--are resilient, but they rely on one another after the collapse of the auto industry creates a trickle-down effect of loss in their family. First, their father loses his job and dies not long after. Pam marries rich and loses it all in a divorce. Debra, the eldest, loses her strong facade as the stress of medical debt from her husband's cancer wears her down. And Harper feels her sense of control unraveling as a secret debt bears down on her and threatens to dismantle her relationships. When Pam's son leaves for college--"Somehow, Pam had gotten him out"--she feels proud but unmoored. How will she pay for tuition? Harper is very aware of Pam's struggles, so when she returns from a short-term job in another town and finds her sister beaming from the front seat of a new car, things don't add up. Pam tells Harper about the Wheel, a group of women helping women. Harper at first sees the Wheel as the pyramid scheme it is, but when she shares her concerns with Debra, she finds Debra is also drinking the wine-spiked Kool-Aid. Unwilling to tell her sisters the grim nature of her debts--"Secrets came naturally to her. She'd kept them all her life"--Harper soon finds herself deep in the Wheel, recruiting other desperate women with the allure of sisterhood and fortune. "Money isn't about money. It's about security, freedom, independence, a promise of wholeness." Before long, the champagne bubbles start to pop, and Pam, the most popular woman of the Wheel, starts to feel the pressure, and with it, some very warranted paranoia. Harper outlines her sister's downfall in a detached tone that reads as coming from a place of authentic trauma--she remembers the small details, her observations methodical--but it causes the mounting pressure to fizzle out with an impression of inevitability.
Abbott is the queen of charged atmospheres, where a restrained surface often hides a torrent of deception.
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Abbott, Megan: EL DORADO DRIVE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A843449788/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f22086e4. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.