Megan Abbott made her name as a novelist with a series of crime novels set in the mid-Twentieth century. In books like “Die a Little,” “The Song Is You,” “Queenpin” and “Bury Me Deep” Abbott put her female protagonists through hell and back. They were innocents who found that they were...
more Megan Abbott made her name as a novelist with a series of crime novels set in the mid-Twentieth century. In books like “Die a Little,” “The Song Is You,” “Queenpin” and “Bury Me Deep” Abbott put her female protagonists through hell and back. They were innocents who found that they were darker and more complicated than they imagined, pushed to their limits and out of their comfort zones which often led to blackmail, murder, self-delusion and more. Last year saw the publication of “The End of Everything,” a book set in the 1980’s and featuring a thirteen year old protagonist whose best friend goes missing. The result is a brutal story that spares no one in the town.
Her new novel is “Dare Me,” a novel about a cheerleading squad who gets a new coach and upends the team and the girls’ social dynamics. Sex, drinking, betrayal, kicking another cheerleader in the stomach to purge, broken bones and ruined lives. This is not a warm and fuzzy book, but it is a great read. It’s also one of those books that’s very difficult to talk about without giving anything away, but when we reached Abbott over e-mail, we tried our best.
ALEX DUEBEN: Where did the idea for Dare Me come from?
MEGAN ABBOTT: In my last book, The End of Everything, one of the characters was a high school field hockey star. I started watching girls play and was struck by their ferocity on the field. Their aggression but also the kind of wild abandon they brought to it. That led me to cheerleading, the most dangerous sport for girls. Watching squads compete, I was fascinated by the girls’ willingness not only push themselves but to take tremendous, terrifying risks. I started thinking about it as this terrain to explore female friendship, rivalries, power, ambition. Adolescent girls feel things so powerfully and when the stakes are raised, as they are in this kind of sport, the possibilities for trouble are pretty immense.
AD: Why cheerleaders as opposed to another kind of sport?
MA: In part, the all-American-ness of it appealed. Cheerleaders are so iconic in our culture. They’re spectacles. But it’s an icon filled with contradictions: girl-next-door and sex object, an image of purity and one of titillation.
AD: Cheerleaders are also emblematic of an idea of femininity because they’re not seen as and can’t be seen as athletic in the way that women playing other sports do. Field hockey and softball players can sweat or are clearly working but cheerleaders can’t look like they’re putting in any effort.
MA: That’s a great distinction. They need to look perfect and the sparkled, smiling mask is both part of the spectacle and part of the pleasure but also becomes a way of concealing the strain, the effort, the will required.
AD: What do you think of the comparison that’s been made in calling Dare Me, “a Fight Club among girls”–flattering? accurate? puzzling?
MA: Oh, I’m flattered. Fight Club was so incisive about this crisis in masculinity—a perilous path to recover one’s manhood in a time of beset masculinity. And cheerleading to me says a great deal about femininity, womanhood, girlhood. These smiling masks that conceal these warrior selves.
AD: To what degree do you think that Dare Me has something to say about what it’s like to be a teenage girl and about the relationships between teenage girls
MA: I try not to think about that too much when I write, or you risk writing a “message” tale. And I think it really depends on each reader’s experiences, personal history. For me, though, the intensity of female friendships at that age is a rehearsal for every relationship that comes thereafter. And no relationship will ever feel quite so dramatic because you never have that intensity again. After high school, your world is bigger, your responsibilities greater. So there’s something powerful about those early friendships. They’re like an invisible tattoo you wear forever after.
AD: I find it hard to ask questions about the book just because I don’t want to give anything away, though I think that holds true for many of your books. You enjoy telling stories about characters who realize at one point that what they thought was happening isn’t happening and they don’t really know or understand the people around them. What do you find compelling about these kinds of stories?
MA: I tend to think every story is really a coming of age tale, no matter how old the characters are. All stories are, in some ways, about disillusionment, including self-disillusionment. I love that John Gardner quote: all stories have one of two plots: someone goes on a journey; or a stranger comes to town. They both involve you seeing a world you didn’t know, and the experience changes you. We can all identify with that. We’ve all had those moments, painful and powerful.
AD: Did you know what the last chapter of Dare Me would be from the beginning?
MA: Maybe halfway through the first draft. In my original conception, it wouldn’t have been possible. Both Addy and Beth changed dramatically from my early ideas of them. They each became more complicated and willful. They kept surprising me.
AD: Why did you go from telling stories about adults in period pieces to your last two novels which are set in contemporary times and focusing on young women?
MA: After writing four books set in the mid-century, I wanted to shake things up for myself. I’d never tried writing anything that had any connection to my own life, so I wondered what it would be like to set a book in a world I knew, that felt palpably real. And as for writing about young women girls, it felt like there was so much room to explore there. There’s still so much that, as a culture, we don’t want to think about when we think about teenage girls. There’s a yearning for them to be pure, unsullied, blank rather than reckon with their darker corners. Their desires, their aggression, their rage, their ambitions. So it’s ripe territory.
AD: I know that you have a background as an academic and received your Ph.D. from NYU. Did you always want to be a writer or at what point did you turn to novel writing?
MA: Growing up, I never could quite imagine how one would be lucky enough to be a novelist. It felt too impractical, a big dream. It really wasn’t until I was in grad school and I decided to focus on 1940s-50s hardboiled crime fiction and film noir for my dissertation. It was an excuse to read tons of these wonderful dark books. Reading them back to back, it was like falling in love. I found myself wanting to write my way into their glamorous world—movie studios, racetracks, nightclubs but also the big emotions of life laid bare. Longing, greed, envy, regret. So I began writing my first novel, Die a Little as a way to try to write myself into that world. And once I started, I was hooked. I couldn’t stop.
AD: Was part of the appeal in writing your earlier books the setting because it sounds as though you have a love for the period?
MA: Yes, transporting myself back in time was probably the primary appeal. Not necessarily the “real” past, but the past shimmering in my head from growing up on Golden-Age Hollywood. Writing in those worlds was, in part, a fantasy, a kind of dreaming on paper.
AD: You said that the other appeal for the crime novels you read was that the big emotions of life were laid bare and I couldn’t help but think that it’s when we’re young is when that tends to happen most. It’s easier to write such a story in a contemporary setting if you’re dealing with teenagers.
MA: Definitely. That’s what made the leap seem so natural. The world is a pretty noir place when you’re young. Everything feels so urgent, so overwhelming. You’re just consumed by your own urges. And you’re constantly prevented from doing what you want to do.
AD: You wrote a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine, about crime fiction and white masculinity. In what ways are your early novels–and even Dare Me and The End of Everything–a response to that book and the tradition and ideas that it identifies and analyzes?
MA: Not consciously. That’s two different parts of my head. I try not to analyze my own fiction or “make points” with it. Otherwise, it just kills it for me. The imaginative part of my head is so unconscious and I fear putting too much light on in there!
AD: Are you in the midst of another novel?
MA: Yes, it’s called The Fever and is about a mysterious outbreak among high schoolers in a small town.
