In Megan Abbott’s latest novel, Give Me Your Hand, there is blood everywhere.
Blood is the reason that the characters in the book are where they are: In a lab, researching premenstrual dysphoric disorder, gunning for one of only two slots on the surely career-making research team led by the charismatic, stunning Dr. Lena Severin. Standard-issue PMS is to PMDD what a match is to a blowtorch, and everyone in the lab, almost all of whom are male, are enthralled and horrified by the possibility that women have something violent coursing inside; a violence that, on a regular basis, overrides every civilizing force in her body and makes her volatile and terrifying.
Kit — for a time, the only woman in the lab — sees blood even when it isn’t there. A girl she knew in high school — Diane, ethereal and strange, dazzling intellect, dazzling hair — told her a secret, and keeping that confidence has curdled something in Kit, who’d hoped to never see Diane again. But Diane shows up at the lab, complicating everything: Intensifying the competition for the Severin positions for a start, and unearthing that which Kit has studiously buried. For Kit, the blood is now everywhere: In the lab, in the mirror, in the cherry slushee machine that spits red syrup on the ground.
This is one of Abbott’s specialties: Illuminating the emotional bruises and ferocious intimacies between young women in a society designed to thwart their successes and undercut their freedoms. But there’s something extra-heightened about it in Give Me Your Hand, more so than in her previous novels. Maybe because she was writing during the 2016 election, when the particular cruelty with which girls live was displayed with so little subtlety, you could never have gotten away with it in fiction. Something about the daily feed of misogyny churning across the CNN chyron oozed into her sentences.
And now, amid the Me Too movement, the question at the crux of Give Me Your Hand — what does it do to you, to keep a painful secret? — carries an additional charge. The inverse of that question gets flung at survivors all the time: Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why did it take you so long to come forward? Why are you speaking out now? There’s not a lot of ruminating on what the alternative to going public would be, about what it might do to a person, to keep something sickening to themselves.
Abbott, who is also a writer on HBO’s The Deuce, spoke with ThinkProgress about the ideas behind Give Me Your Hand, the allure of dangerous women, and “how understudied and unexplored the feminine was and is, and remains so.”
I was describing your book to a guy friend the other day, and when I told him the scientists in the lab are studying premenstrual dysphoric disorder, he asked, “Is that real?” And it made me think about these non-fiction books that have come out lately with all this data on women’s health being understudied — how frequently women’s pain is misdiagnosed or ignored altogether. So much so that this relatively common and serious affliction isn’t known by the general public!
Yes! It also, it seems so strange that it would affect so many women and yet we wouldn’t know it like we know straight PMS. I think it’s probably under-diagnosed pretty dramatically. It’s amazing that it could be something that affects up to 10 percent of women and still be so mysterious! It’s been funny to be talking about it in bookstores, as you can imagine.
What’s that been like?
Someone has always come up to say they have it or they know someone who does. And they seem relieved about it. But there was one event I did at this big suburban Barnes and Noble and i’m on this microphone talking about it, and everyone in the whole store can hear me, just talking about periods and PMDD. I became aware that this is still very stigmatized! Even talking about women’s bodies. And I think in particular, the connection between their emotions and their bodies.
It reminds me of the presidential election, when Trump was saying that Megyn Kelly must have had “blood coming out of her wherever” — that when men want to undermine a woman, this is a place they routinely go to explain any of our emotions or anger, as if that diffuses it, somehow. You were writing this during the election, yes? How did that come up through the book?
Yes, absolutely. I was writing it during the presidential campaign. There was a feeling I think, in the air — simmering. I think we’re in this moment, the return of the repressed, all this stuff is coming forward. I was thinking that in the response to — and this is very different — but Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, people’s response to that in particular. People were saying things that you were just not supposed to say.
I’m surprised that women with PMDD weren’t put off by your book, or coming to you to say, “umm, we are not all murderers.”
I only had one person so far — I think something in some article, where it was just lightly, awkwardly worded, to suggest that’s what I was suggesting in the book. I wanted to make it clear to her on Twitter, that that’s not the case, but I didn’t want to spoil the book for her. I was like, “spoiler, this is definitely NOT what leads someone to murder.”
But that was how I first became interested in it, the notion that attorneys were using, in very few cases, PMDD as a defense. Sort of playing on all of these myths and stereotypes about how fear-invoking female rage is, like this Medusa thing, that women have this sort of latent rage in them, and if it’s unleashed, everyone better beware.
I read in another interview you did that you learned, in your research, that there are not a lot of female murderers but then when one is out there, people tend to project this whole narrative onto them about their crime of passion. That we make them extraordinary.
That’s right! That’s something I have an ongoing fascination with. A recent example that was so interesting was the Amanda Knox case, this idea of women who don’t behave the way they’re supposed to behave when they are accused of these crimes, that don’t perform the expected response over these events. We see this a lot with mothers accused of things in true crimes, where they’re not responding as we want them to respond. We’ve seen it with every famous case of a female criminal. This is someone in a moment of trauma, whether they’re guilty or not. Even if they’re innocent, they’re not! Because they’re not behaving the way they’re supposed to.
Like the Slender Man girls!
Exactly. Especially that case because they are so young, they look like little girls. People don’t even talk about that so much. They whisper about it.
Your book gets at this idea that women have bodies that are just beyond control, even our own control. Which is a strange and alluring and also unnerving concept.
Yes! It was a lot of the response to Hillary Clinton and always has been: What if she’s having these sort of female emotions and it’s a time of crisis, it’s a red telephone moment, can we trust her? That’s always haunted female candidates. And I think Trump made a reference during a debate when Hillary went to the ladies room during a break, and he made a creepy joke about that.
It’s fascinating that that’s the go-to, and it’s fascinating how people respond to it, which is often, “how dare he talk about intimate female things?” We get hit both ways with that. He shouldn’t be doing it, because it’s disgusting and female bodies are disgusting. We get hit two ways in that moment: That he shouldn’t say it because it’s a grotesque thing, rather than that it’s patently ridiculous.
I love how in your book you talk about female bodies as being as mysterious and unexplored. That Freud quote about women’s bodies as a “dark continent,” unknown as outer space. Even though that is enraging, because the reason we know so little about women’s bodies is that so little research has been done, because not enough people care or invest in it.
I thought a lot about that. I thought a lot about Freud’s saying women are the dark continent. And I’m sort of fixated on Freud. I always think that’s a misinterpreted comment by a lot of people, that he’s suggesting women are innately mysterious or other. But in my interpretation, he’s talking about how understudied and unexplored the feminine was and is, and remains so!
I knew the characters were going to be scientists, and I knew I wanted it to be women’s health, because it’s so underfunded and it’s a world where women are so underrepresented on every level. And Dr. Severin, this mentor figure, she would be someone who gamed it. She figured out how to do it in this world, to find a way to rise, and is doing what a lot of women in power are doing now: Trying to use their position to make change happen without anyone really noticing — like, under the cover of night, so to speak. I think women in historically male-dominated fields, that’s the way they’re able to make change.
“I, like most women I know, spend at least half our life in a masquerade, without even knowing it. We smile and we nod and we agree and we make people feel better around us, and it’s just the way we survive.”
It’s interesting because there’s a way to think of the men in this lab as being feminists or something, the kind of men who are dedicating their brilliant minds to PMDD. But of course they are bringing all their weird, gendered baggage into the room, and they are not particularly welcoming to their female colleague, even though they are gunning to work under this female doctor.
Exactly, and most women who’ve been in any work experience where there’s more men than women, know that moment when an issue with women comes up and everyone looks at you to respond to it.
I had this fascinating conversation last night at a book event in Texas, on the signing line. There was a woman there who read the book, and we were talking about how Kit keeps being described as a hard worker, or worker bee. And that is straight from me. I’ve identified with that, and so did she. Some very nice men were around and they did not understand why that would be diminishing. They would say they take it as a compliment. I felt sorry for them. I needed to explain to them how different that is. If someone says it to a man, it does mean a different thing. Even when women say it about other women, it’s very loaded. It’s really suggesting that it’s not this great brain or these talents or these skills, it’s just this nose to the grindstone thing. Which isn’t something I would have articulated. That came out organically writing these scenes, and the fact that the election was going on.
What was that like, to be writing during the election? How did that affect you as a novelist? How do you let it in but also tune it out enough to focus?
It was, and remained, this very static-y, tumultuous mediascape we’re facing. It was hard. And what the media is reporting on, what we’re seeing around us, the arguments that we’re having — it seeped in more than it has with other books because it’s so much bigger.
One of the things that I did too, I listened to a lot of Sylvia Plath reading her poetry. I don’t even usually listen to lyrics when I write. It’s too distracting! So this seems insane. But she reads what are considered bleak poems, and I never thought they were, but she reads them with this vigor and delight that got me in this place to start writing each day. This very female and vital, angry, but exhilarating place.
It feels like that is a question a lot of creative people are dealing with now: what stories are important in this moment? What can I write about now while everything feels apocalyptic?
Right, right! I know so many people writing books during that where it sort of started to tilt the book. And in some ways I was glad. I write about female power almost always, but in this case, it was a book, in part, about gender. So I was able to push some of the feelings I was feeling into the book. Whereas if I were writing something about spies, something that would be very distinct, it would have been harder.
In the book, you return to this idea of “you don’t have a self until you have a secret,” and also how keeping a secret — yours or someone else’s — can really rot you from the inside. And it makes me think about Me Too, in that, we talk about victims having the courage to come forward. And it does take bravery to do that, at great personal cost. But we don’t really talk about the alternative: what it does to you to hold on to that secret, to not say anything.
That’s right. And that’s something that sort of haunted me. That was the original impetus for the book. Someone at a book event last week talked about how you make someone hostage to your secret, when you tell them it. I thought that was a great way to put it.
And with Me Too, thinking about complicity and knowing someone else’s secret and — like the Nanette documentary, the cost to her of keeping this secret, framing the narrative, leaving out the real event, to make the joke land, and how much it was costing her to do it. It was really a kind of wow moment for me.
“You think about that a lot when you get accused of writing unlikable characters — this is fiction, as opposed to real lives — would it be easier to just give reasons and make my characters ones that everybody feels comfortable with? I don’t really even know how to do that!”
I think most women and a lot of men are looking at all this and we are sort of in a moral crisis. I think people will look back on this moment and one thing they’ll say is, we are all really looking at our behavior, and our ethical and moral choices, more than I can recall in my lifetime.
I love that Kit asks Diane — as I think many women do or would assume — like, what happened to you? And Diane’s response is basically, no, no, no, it’s not what someone did to me. It’s what I did.
Yes! And that was actually a hard sell in some ways. Not to my editor, who just got the sort of, I wanted to double down on that. That was my interest in her. There’s always this impulse to try to justify that kind of stuff, especially if you’re writing with the people that do the bad things. But I really wanted to double down on that, and I found her fascinating and her refusal to play the part, which I guess goes back into that Amanda Knox thing, these other women, they refuse to do it, and they don’t even know how to do it.
Which I admire, because I, like most women I know, spend at least half our life in a masquerade, without even knowing it. We smile and we nod and we agree and we make people feel better around us, and it’s just the way we survive. And often advance.
I wonder all the time what I would be capable of if I weren’t expending all this energy and brainpower on exactly that.
Yes, right! That’s the thing, that’s the thing. Again, what is that costing us? And what would it be like to be free of all of that? I don’t know if it’s even possible, but I guess we’re kind of peering out and wondering what can happen when we don’t care anymore. What that means.
You think about that a lot when you get accused of writing unlikable characters — this is fiction, as opposed to real lives — would it be easier to just give reasons and make my characters ones that everybody feels comfortable with? I don’t really even know how to do that! I like them all! I don’t even really know what that means. So at least that’s not a quandary I can realistically think of, because I can’t do that masquerade.
One striking thing about this book to me is that there’s not a lot of lag time between any act of violence and the reveal of who is responsible for that violence. What really propels you through the book is figuring out motivation, why someone would do what they do. And I’m curious about that choice, and figuring out how much of these motivations you wanted to disclose.
In a sense it’s a book that’s easy to spoil and impossible to spoil, because a lot of it becomes clear — you know some things very early in the book and a lot of things by the middle. I was more interested in the why. I was trying to figure out the connection between Kit and Diane. That was my mystery, about why they were bound together in this way. And this unraveling of that and getting at all the ways that women in these — to use a very cliched and diminishing term — the frenemy thing.
The women you’re not exactly friends with. You’re competitors. You serve an important function in each others’ lives. And what is behind that. For me, so much of it is about identification and seeing ourselves in other women in ways that both push us forward and make us deeply uncomfortable. I think we saw a lot of that in the election, too: Women who weren’t going to vote for Hillary for reasons they couldn’t quite express. And I think a lot of that is she’s not hiding her ambition, and that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, and why aren’t you hiding what I hide?
Do you think women bring something out of each other, in competition, that men don’t?
Yeah, I know male competition is very complicated, too, but much more explored and in fact explored almost ceaselessly. It is so funny, you wouldn’t even describe a book about men competing as a book about competition. You’d just describe it as a book. It is interesting how underground and swampy that is, female competition.
I also feel like there’s this — it’s not feminist, it’s really insidious, but it pretends to be feminist — this push to just support ALL women, all the time, no matter what. I see that a lot around someone like Ivanka Trump, and shouldn’t we all be behind this woman who is successful? And just “a woman succeeding” or what have you, that is not good enough. Just that she’s a woman.
That’s right! And does gender trump, no pun intended, everything? And of course there are people for whom it does. But all of these things intersect with one another as we all know now. And really, having the freedom to feel what we actually feel is important. That’s what we’re all fighting for.
“People haven’t been comfortable talking about, on a mass media level, these complicated relationships between and among women, feelings of aggression and desire, feelings that can’t be easily pinned down, all that messy stuff that’s great about ‘Killing Eve’ and ‘Sharp Objects,’ that doesn’t just line up in neat piles.”
As a reader, it was so cool to be reading your book while watching Killing Eve, which centers on this female psychopath and hitwoman, but also someone who is in this intense, I guess professional relationship with the woman who is chasing her. And also for Sharp Objects to be on, which, like your book, reckons with how women inflict and internalize trauma, and also with murders. I don’t mean to group all these together, like, “arbitrarily, all this is happening at the same time so they must be connected,” but I’m curious what you think about people watching and reading all this in a kind of wave.
Yeah, it is so funny! Because as you know, Gillian [Flynn] wrote that book a while ago, and the fact that it got made now feels very specific to me. That it’s coming out in the world now. It does feel like it’s both an interesting coincidence and not a coincidence at all.
I think Killing Eve came out also of a series of steps of using this moment to tell these stories that we all wanted to tell. I’m about to go to Toronto to shoot the pilot for Dare Me, and I don’t know how it would have been — it’s been in development for six years, and now it’s happening. I don’t think it’s an accident.
I do think that people’s response to it is also different because of what we’ve all been through the last few years. I think there’s more of an openness to it, which is kind of great. And it’s not just subjects. It’s not just that these are strong women characters, but the issues within it are — people haven’t been comfortable talking about on a mass media level, as you say, these complicated relationships between and among women, feelings of aggression and desire, feelings that can’t be easily pinned down, all that messy stuff that’s great about Killing Eve and Sharp Objects, that doesn’t just line up in neat piles.
As you know, a lot has been written about the “dead girl” trope, and how many movies and books and TV shows rely on a dead girl as a jumping off point for a story, and how often those dead girls are just ways for men to project their own fantasies and issues onto someone beautiful who can’t talk or move. I don’t know what this says about me, but I kind of love that there are so many dead boys in your books.
It was sort of a coincidence! I did this event with Alice Bolin, who has this book out and we were counting up the number of dead girls in my books, which I think is almost zero.
I love a lot of dead girl stories because I do think they’re actually interrogating this stuff, and I think that’s what David Lynch was and is doing, and what Gillian has done. You have to use a trope to overturn it, often. You have to get in the muck. But it is nice to be contributing to the dead boys world, too!
It’s different in a book, somehow, for the girl to be dead, than it is on screen. You don’t get those lingering shots of her lifeless body, in her underwear or whatever, because she got murdered on spring break.
The Ophelia stuff. It is funny that it’s even funny to say “dead boys.” It sounds like a joke. It makes you think about what that phrase really means, how infantilizing this is. I reference it in the book, this Ophelia thing, the fantasy of this beautiful dying or dead woman, that’s so iconic for us, so medieval.