Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of the novels Die a Little, Queenpin, The Song Is You, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything, Dare Me, The Fever, You Will Know Me and Give Me Your Hand.
Abbott is co-showrunner, writer and executive producer of DARE ME, the TV show adapated from her novel. She was also a staff writer on HBO's THE DEUCE. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Believer and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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, SUNY and the New School University and has served as the John Grisham Writer in Residence at The University of Mississippi.
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 is currently developing two of her novels, Dare Me and The Fever, for television.
“Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and the shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else? Could she see past all of that to something else, something quivering and real, something poised to be transformed, turned out, made? See that she could make us, stick her hands in our glitter-gritted insides and build us into magnificent teen gladiators?”
“There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
“The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever”
“Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.”
“If you didn't feel it on your body long after he'd left, was it really worth laying for him? I wanted to feel that.”
“You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.”
“time to put on your miner's hat and headed toward the bright light.”
“I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through.Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack, and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world.I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand.And my thunderbolt hit.”
“There wasn't much to know. Now there's less.”
“Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her.”
“Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.”
“Pretend you're me," she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.And it happens just like that.A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.And I'm her.And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette----that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath.”
“I think she might cry. In her way, she is.”
“No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.”
“When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all.”
“She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.”