Thirteen-year old Lizzie Hood and her next door neighbor Evie
Verver are inseparable. They are best friends who swap bathing
suits and field-hockey sticks, and share everything that's
happened to them. Together they live in the shadow of Evie's
glamorous older sister Dusty, who provides a window on the
exotic, intoxicating possibilities of their own teenage horizons.
To Lizzie, the Verver household, presided over by Evie's
big-hearted her, is the world's most perfect place.
And then, one afternoon, Evie disappears. The only clue: a maroon
sedan Lizzie spotted driving past the two girls earlier in the
day. As a rabid, giddy panic spreads through the Midwestern
suburban community, everyone looks to Lizzie for answers. Was
Evie unhappy, troubled, upset? Had she mentioned being followed?
Would she have gotten into the car of a stranger?
Lizzie takes up her own furtive pursuit of the truth, prowling
nights through backyards, peering through windows, pushing
herself to the dark center of Evie's world. Haunted by dreams of
her lost friend and titillated by her own new power at the center
of the disappearance, Lizzie uncovers secrets and lies that make
her wonder if she knew her best friend at all.
Author One-on-One: Megan Abbott and Sara Gran
In this Amazon.com exclusive, author Megan Abbott is
interviewed by Sara Gran (Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead)
about The End of Everything.
Megan AbbottSara Gran: The End of Everything shares common
themes with your previous four novels, yet stands out as a
departure—it takes place in the 1980s (your other novels took
place before you were born), the narrator is 13 years old (your
previous narrators were adult women), and it takes place in the
suburbs (as sed to the urban settings of your other books).
How is The End of Everything the same? How is it different?
Megan Abbott: I wanted to try something new, to shake things up
for myself. To move out of the world of nightclubs, racetracks,
movie studios and, most of all, to move out of the past, worlds I
never knew. When I first started writing, though, everything felt
foreign, puzzling. I didn’t know if I could adapt my style to
this new setting and time period. My past books were so
influenced by Golden Age Hollywood movies and that heightened
style. And I’d done this foolish thing, giving myself a
13-year-old girl as my narrator. But as I wrote, I just had this
revelation that, for most 13-year-old girls, life is dramatic and
the stakes feel dramatically high. It’s all desire and fear and
longing and disillusion. Everything feels big and terrifying and
thrilling. And my past books, I see now, are so much about women
feeling trapped and seeking a way out, at any cost. And feeling
trapped, and wanting out, is very much the state of being 13.
Gran: What were the body of influences you drew from in
creating this character and this story? Lizzie, your narrator, is
a bit of a girl detective, uncovering secrets about her pl
suburban town--were you a Nancy Drew fan?
Abbott: I never intended Lizzie to be such an active agent in
the book. My original thought was she would be a somewhat passive
observer. But, as she grew in my head, she began to want things,
and then she sort of took over. While I don’t think I precisely
had Nancy Drew in my head, I was a voracious reader of mysteries
as a kid and I do think there’s a natural affinity between
writers and detectives (and I don’t have to tell you this, in
light of all the magic you cast with your detective in Claire De
Witt and the City of the Dead). To me, that link is a desire to
look in places you’re not supposed to. To be a voyeur. And, as
with many voyeurs (and detectives), you can only peek so long
before you want "in." Which is the life of most 13 year olds
anyway, isn’t it? I see the adult world. I want "in."
Sara GranGran: How did you get back into the mind of a
13-year-old girl? Or is there a part of we adult women that has
never left?
Abbott: I’m alarmed at how natural it felt. I’ve heard it said
that we’re all arrested at a certain age, and for me it’s 13,
which is probably why I landed at that age. But I think it’s an
especially powerful age for girls. It’s the moment you peer with
widest eyes into womanhood, or are flung there. It’s an age of
constant push-pull, wanting to leap forward and yet often
retreating in the face of real adulthood, and the price of it. I
think many women look back on that age as the moment of great
anticipation and often painful revelation.
Gran: To what degree, especially compared to you other books,
is The End of Everything autobiographical?
Abbott: In terms of time and place, it’s definitely lifted
straight from my growing-up years in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in
the early 1980s. Before, I always wrote as an escape, a fantasy
exercise to enter these shimmering, foreign worlds. My own world
felt pretty mundane, not worthy of such an adventure. But
somehow, maybe it was the flush of nostalgia, I was able to crawl
my way back into some long-lost feeling from my childhood. That
feeling of possibility, mystery, risk that suffuses all your
surroundings. Also, I’m now at the age where the 1980s seems like
a lost era. And I’m a sentimentalist, of course!
Gran: Tell me a little about the suburbs, especially the
suburbs where this book takes place, a fictionalized version of
Grosse Pointe? What is it that we love and hate so much about
these liminal spaces (not urban, not rural)? Why do some of us
have something like a fear of the suburbs (as I do!)?
Abbott: I love that you, a Brooklyn girl, could feel that way!
I do think of suburbs as “halfway” places because it suggests a
sense of complication and mystery when I think the rap they get
is that they are places of conformity or hypocrisy or tedium. I
think they occupy this strangely contradictory place between
utter hidden-ness and this sense of vivid exposure. In the
Midwest, at least, it’s impolite to poke your nose in your
neighbor’s business. At the same time, there’s something
unbearably about them. Because of the way many suburbs
of my era were designed, as kids you would end up running through
each other’s backyards, hiding out in the basement, hearing all
the sounds in the upper floors, uncovering secrets. So there’s
this tug of war, the instinct to protect oneself, to hide one’s
desires or sorrows and the simultaneous desire to reach out, to
pry, to touch each other, to connect. That tension is palpable,
fascinating.
All that easy mockery of the suburbs drives me crazy. To me,
they’re places of yearning, which is maybe true of all places.
Gran: Throughout the course of The End of Everything, Lizzie
uncovers secret after secret about her pl town. What role do
secrets, in general, play in our lives? Are they gifts,
treasures, curses, or burdens?
Abbott: I think that being 13 is in many ways like an endless
process of revelation, and disillusionment. You carry all these
ideas of the world, and yourself, and in many ways they all get
punctured, one by one. But then somehow you manage to build new
ones up. And you start to carry your own secrets, which I guess
Lizzie will too.
Gran: You’re known for, among other things, pushing the
boundaries of genre definitions. While your previous books fit
well into the “crime” genre, they also contain elements of
literary fiction, historical fiction, and mystery. Where does
this new book fit in, both in terms of genre in general and in
terms of your own list? Is genre relevant to you as a writer—does
thinking about these categories help or hinder you as you work?
Abbott: My impulse is to say I don’t believe in genre
distinctions. But I guess I’ve come to think that all novels are
mysteries. Reading them, you are always that detective/voyeur,
peering in, sifting through its secrets, sometimes wanting to
enter the story itself, to sink yourself into those worlds. I
admit, I love that John Gardner quote: all stories have one of
two plots: someone goes on a journey; or a stranger comes to
town. Sometimes both. Usually both.
Gran: I find that for me, every book I write leads naturally
into the next on—every book is almost like a bus or a train that
takes me right where you need to go to catch the next bus—i.e.,
to write the next book. So what have you been working on since
The End of Everything? How did The End of Everything lead you to
the next book?
Abbott: I love that bus analogy. That’s exactly how it feels,
like the seed of the new book is sown at the very end of the last
one, though I never know how it got there. My next book, Dare Me,
comes directly from writing about girls’ field hockey in The End
of Everything. It’s set in the world of high school cheerleading.
The ferocity of that sport, the way it unleashes this inner rage,
fascinated me. I see something similar lurking in cheerleading.
It’s no longer dancing and pompom shaking. It’s rather dazzling
and frequently death defying and it speaks to the dark and bold
nature of girls, aspects of themselves that too often remain
hidden. In cheerleading, it’s given full reign. Which is
something to see.
Megan Abbott photo by Drew Reilly