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Washington Post

Megan Abbott and the lure of private worlds

NEW YORK — The first time the crime writer Megan Abbott set foot in a country club, she was about 13. A friend who had money had invited her to a cotillion. Abbott's left-wing parents — who didn't have money, not like that — bought her a white dress and kept their disapproval to themselves. She remembers looking up the word 'cotillion.' How smooth the other girls' hair looked. Going to the ladies' room and seeing perfumes laid out on a tray, and an attendant standing by, and not understanding any of it. 'And I thought, 'Well, I don't ever want to do this again,'' Abbott recently told me. 'It was a very useful moment for me. I realized not only did I not belong but that it wasn't for me — I had no desire to belong there.' Much of her fiction has circled around understanding that desire in others: What draws people to these insular subcultures, and what, exactly, will they do to stay? Abbott likes writing hothouse environments — 'to a fault sometimes,' she allowed. Her settings have a lush psychological and cultural specificity that's untethered from other markers of reality. The ballet studio, the research lab, elite youth sports: You can practically smell the sweat of these places, but you wouldn't be able to point to them on a map. Her new book swerves from that approach: 'El Dorado Drive,' out June 24, takes place in her hometown, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a suburb just northeast of Detroit. It tells the story of the three Bishop sisters, who are among the suburb's many families of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, brought low alongside the auto industry. Then an old frenemy invites them to join 'the Wheel' — a way to start bringing in cash, tax- (and husband-) free. Women helping women, goes the pitch, and I don't mean by sharing Valium. All they have to do is pay in with a one-time gift of five grand — and, of course, recruit more new members. The sisters climb the Wheel quickly. As pressure mounts, exploding into violence, they soon learn how precarious it is at the top. I met Abbott on a drizzly May afternoon in Times Square. She had staked out a table in the back of Jimmy's Corner, an old-school boxing bar where she's greeted by name. (It's a good place for a New Yorker to know, she said, because you always end up in Midtown one way or another — in her case, because she'd just come from a screening at MoMA hosted by the stylish independent production company A24, which is adapting 'El Dorado Drive' for TV.) She had the round and inquisitive eyes, the thin arched brows, of a silent-film star. Skull earrings dangled from her ears. Writing the new novel felt 'weirdly nostalgic,' she said, over a Corona. Like the Bishops, Abbott grew up in Grosse Pointe during Detroit's rapid decline. 'It was like the fall of Rome — slowly and all at once,' she said. 'Everybody's parents remembered this glory era.' Unusually for the time, her family often went into the city: Her parents worked in the political science department of Wayne State University and would take their kids to the movies or a museum. Detroit felt both exciting and forlorn — a place where streetlights, once they went out, never got fixed. Off the page, Abbott's never been a huge joiner: no sports, no secret societies, no sororal urges in general. But she was always driven and ambitious — a competitive person who hates competition, even avoiding board games. (She does take part in a jigsaw puzzle group: 'I'm gonna get a big chunk of that puzzle.') She chalks up her competitive streak to her older brother's long shadow — always the perfect student, and an athlete to boot. For a year in college, she lived with him and his buddies. 'I loved it,' she laughed. 'I didn't have to deal with any of the girl stuff.' Abbott graduated knowing only that she wanted to write and to move to New York, a city she'd fallen in love with through film. Attending grad school at New York University, she got both the city and the writing. While procrastinating on her dissertation about hard-boiled fiction, she wrote 'Die a Little,' a period noir narrated by an ordinary woman who, somewhat like Abbott, was a teacher with a much-admired older brother working in law enforcement. (Abbott's brother is a longtime attorney at the Macomb County prosecutor's office in Michigan.) Published in 2005, the novel won Abbott instant accolades from the mystery world. 'Everyone could tell she was going to be a star from the first book on,' said fellow crime novelist Laura Lippman. 'Some writers, especially when they have real literary cred, like a PhD, can be condescending to genre — even when they're in it. Sometimes especially when they're in it. But she was never that. You just felt that her love for the classic stories was utterly sincere, but she also was determined to make it fresh.' Two more novels and an Edgar Award later, 'it felt like I could do this forever, but it also felt in some ways — not to be super artsy about it — I didn't have skin in the game,' Abbott said. She shifted from writing about genre tropes to writing about adolescence, a time that seemed to Abbott — still seems — like the most dramatic and exciting phase of life. And who, after all, is more hard-boiled than a teenage girl? In 'Dare Me,' Abbott's breakout hit from 2012, one cheerleader, bent over the toilet, begs another 'to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of donut sticks, cheese powder, and haribo.' The narrator goes on: 'I kick, I do. She would do the same for me.' Thrillers are typically published in the summer; the true test of the page-turner is to be more alluring than the swimming pool. Abbott speaks, with winning candor, about how her stories always follow a simple three-act structure: temptation, followed by a reckoning (usually violent), followed by some form of payment or redemption. But atop this subfloor of plot, she builds worlds that feel murky, inviting, densely secretive. Her prose veers from sensuous to steely, delicious to revolting. You inhale it like freon-scented air. Abbott, who lives alone in the same Queens apartment she's had for decades, writes in four- to five-day sprints. She can be 'crazily ritualistic' in the thick of a manuscript: not talking to anyone, eating the same things for all her meals. She has totems — prayer candles, at one point a gold Furby — arranged on a shelf above her computer. A gymnast she talked to for her 2016 murder mystery, 'You Will Know Me,' told her: 'If something's working, don't do anything to change the routines. You don't know if some part of the routine is what's making it work.' Abbott understood the mindset: 'There can be no changes if I'm getting pages out.' She does take long walks, or will sneak out to a midday movie to jolt her senses. Horror is best, and a crowd that likes to scream. Often, in the infinite scroll and too-many-tabs of her research, an image will help jump-start her brain. For 'Dare Me,' it was the treadmark left on a squad mate's shoulder, nicknamed the 'cheer shoe hickey.' For 'El Dorado Drive,' it was YouTube videos of how to make 'money cakes,' dollar bills unfurling from inside the pastry. And though she's never written about Greek life, when she taught for a year at Ole Miss, she saw girls walking the campus in teeny shorts paired with giant sweatshirts. She couldn't figure out this look. Then a student finally let her in on it: The hoodies were trophies from boys they had hooked up with. 'And that was awesome to me,' Abbott said, her eyes gleaming. 'There's something so tribal about it — like conquering something.' Throughout Abbott's career, she's maintained an almost spooky feel for the zeitgeist. Novels like 'Dare Me' were the crest of a pop culture wave that treated the darker stirrings of adolescents with dead seriousness. More recently, there was 'Beware the Woman,' a Gothic pregnancy novel that seemed to channel the public's post-Dobbs anxieties. 'El Dorado Drive' explores the resentment and desperation left behind by the disappearance of American manufacturing. (Amazingly, on the heels of President Donald Trump's recent comments about toys, it even flashes back to a scene of spoiled children casually destroying their expensive dolls.) 'I know it sounds like a really small thing — she pays attention to the culture,' Lippman said. 'And her tastes run from low to high. She's not a snob.' On any given week, Lippman shared, Abbott might be texting their group chat about the latest 'Real Housewives' or writing an essay for the Criterion Collection. Abbott herself can't quite explain it, can't trace the roots of her obsessions. Perhaps, she suggests, group psychology is the code she always wants to crack but is never quite sure she does. 'I always want to go to a place I haven't gone. The old fascinations will find their way in, but if it feels too comfortable, what am I doing it for?' She smiles. 'The fear is what keeps you going.'