A Conversation with Megan Abbott

Abstract

A Conversation with Megan Abbott Megan Abbott (bio) and Annie Adams (bio) The Edgar Award-winning author Megan Abbott feels at home writing about subjects most of us wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. Her newest novel, Give Me Your Hand, concerns a young scientist researching premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe, poorly understood form of PMS. Periods aren't the only taboo Abbott's intent on examining. Her previous novels engage parent-child relationships, mass hysteria, and the desires of young people with a Hitchcockian fluency and sense of urgency. Abbott is the author of nine novels and The Street Was Mine, a nonfiction study of gender and race in twentieth-century hardboiled fiction which grew out of her graduate studies at New York University. In time, Abbott's enthusiasm for detective novels led to a somewhat accidental career writing novels that inhabit the world of classic noir while tangling with contemporary issues. Her books are described as crime fiction, psychological thrillers, and domestic noirs, labels which disguise the fact Abbott's stories are first and foremost works of supremely consumable art. There is an art in sustained momentum, after all, an artfulness in telling a story so well that readers simply "can't put it down." Abbott is gracious but skeptical of the labels applied to her work, with a keen sense of the [End Page 397] impulses that drive us, often subconsciously, to use certain words or categories. Abbott traveled from her home in Queens to meet with me over two days in February in an office off of Times Square, now nearly unrecognizable as the grimy seventies setting of The Deuce, the David Simon HBO series about New York City police corruption, organized crime, and the dawn of the pornography industry, for which Abbott is a writer. Abbott's encyclopedic knowledge of film, psychology, and pop culture led our discussion to such fascinating and unlikely places as noir's popularity in times of tumult, the gothic nature of the suburbs, and why The Real Housewives reality-TV series reminds her of an Edith Wharton novel. SR: Your first book, The Street Was Mine, is a critical study of the white male hero figure in hard-boiled fiction. It grew out of your PhD dissertation at NYU, correct? Abbott: Yes. At that time, the late nineties, there was very little academic study of hard-boiled fiction being done — it was considered pulp, not to be taken seriously. But, for me, these books were — and are — so rich. I became very interested in the trope of the "tough guy" as we see it take shape in the genre. The "tough guy" persona derives primarily from writers like Mickey Spillane. His detective hero, Mike Hammer, is hypermacho, wildly violent: he'll take on the mob, the Russians. He's almost a Superman. But when you look at most hard-boiled heroes, they're not so tough. Instead, you find a kind of gender panic. Masculinity in crisis. Take Raymond Chandler's detective hero Philip Marlowe — in those books, manhood is constantly under threat. He risks violence at the hands of powerful men, emasculation at the hands of the femme fatale. Masculinity [End Page 398] doesn't feel secure, and it doesn't feel like the solution to anything. Alternately, Marlowe seems to find a fascination with — and fear of — the feminine. If Spillane has control over everything, Marlowe feels control over nothing, not even himself. Race is complicated in these books too. There's a great fear that whiteness doesn't mean what it once did — it no longer guarantees privilege. When these tough guys appeared in Hollywood movies, however, all that ambiguity and hysteria was erased. Instead, you have Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe, or as Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, and he's so cool and tough and can handle anything or anyone. People tend to remember the movies, but those books present a much more ambiguous and sometimes even subversive view of identity. During my research, I read nothing but noir for about two years, immersing myself in Chandler, Chester Himes, and James M. Cain. I just fell head over heels for these books, the world...