Megan Abbott on Dreams, Dangers, and Going to Strange Places in Her Newest Novel

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Graham Greene famously called Patricia Highsmith “a poet of apprehension,” a phrase that kept returning to mind as I read Megan Abbott’s newest book, Beware the Woman, a brilliant fever dream of a novel in which time and sensation are bent out of order and each turn of the page brings a quiet breath of dread. Abbott, known for her hothouse, atmospheric thrillers, is at her most visceral here, with the story of a woman, Jacy, in early pregnancy accompanying her new husband on a trip to his father’s remote house in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Immediately, the physical reality of Jacy’s new world— the smells, the pains, the appetites—overwhelms us, and we’re thrown headlong into a disorienting place where nothing is quite as it seems, or maybe that’s exactly what it is. In the weeks before the book’s release, I caught up with Abbott to discuss strange places, power struggles over the body, and writing about the space between fear and what she calls “a love glow, that gorgeous haze.”

Dwyer Murphy: Why the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? It has such a distinct setting, this story.

Megan Abbott: I’m from suburban Detroit, which is nowhere near the UP. I went up there once when I was a kid. A lot of kids in Michigan end up in Mackinac Island, which is this Victorian resort between the lower and upper peninsulas, famous for being the setting of Somewhere in Time. Even in Michigan, the UP is sort of exotic. It’s really remote, and it’s so beautiful in the summer. I wanted a place that was foreign and remote but at the same time still felt very American.

Murphy: I didn’t know about the Cornish legacy up there. There was something unsettling in those details.

Abbott: There are these weird subcultures you can come across up there without really knowing it. Mostly, people know about the Cornish because of the pasties, those little hand pies that are famous, which come from the Cornish, though they’re thought of as mostly just coming from the UP.

Murphy: It’s always hard to talk about the style of a book, but I’d like to try. I’m wondering how you developed the voice for this one. And how it helped create the atmosphere, which is so keen and visceral, but at the same time, dreamlike.

Abbott: It’s always organic for me, and then it takes a life of its own. For this story, there was something dreamlike about it. First of all, Jacy is in this romantic state: newly wed, newly pregnant. There’s an unreality to it. She’s not necessarily seeing with clear eyes. She’s in a love glow, that gorgeous haze. I was also trying to capture that feeling of being in a strange place and so far from home, a place has its own rules and ways of being. It can make you wonder, is any of this even real? In this case, with Jacy, she doesn’t know her father-in-law; her husband seems different. I wanted to keep the reader in that same state she’s feeling, which is something I generally do in my novels, but with this one, I think the location and the compressed timeline and the intensity of the situation enabled a more dreamlike, gothic quality.

Murphy: The gothic quality here is so interesting. I felt like I was locked into those first beautiful, dreadful lines of Rebecca. Were there other books or authors on your mind as you were writing?

Abbott: Rebecca was certainly on my mind. I’ve always been fascinated with Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, the servant woman. Rosemary’s Baby, too, and not just for the obvious reason that I have a pregnant main character. I love that book. The movie is great, but the book has a dreamlike quality that was so interesting to me. Also…do you know who Gavin de Becker is?

Murphy: No, I don’t.

Abbott: He was very big in the Nineties. He was sort of a security person for the stars. He used to be on Oprah and other talk shows. His big thing was this book, The Gift of Fear, which was about women listening to their intuition, and how women are socialized to make people feel better, to just smile and feel friendly, and that works against their instincts in dangerous situations. He used to be everywhere. He was a fascinating figure. At that time, no one was saying that stuff to women. For women in my generation, he was omnipresent. There was something about Gavin de Becker that was on my mind—your body is telling you something, don’t let your mind get in the way.

Murphy: You’ve written so much about athletics, and those books always have this strong physical element. In this book, it seemed to me pregnancy was almost the sport, in the sense that it was exacting this intense, uncanny toll on Jacy’s body.

Abbott: I’m drawn to athletics, really, because of a fascination with the body. Sports and dance, they enable you to control and master your body. In a pregnancy, you feel in some ways like you lose control or mastery of your body for a time. That’s really frightening to me, that notion. Not just that having the child is this new force on your body, but also that other people have feelings about your body and want to manage your body and feel somehow like they’re allowed to because of your pregnancy. While I was writing this book, there were so many conversations about female bodies happening. The anxiety felt high, and the subject kept pushing its way in without me even knowing it: all those ways you can have control taken from you.

Murphy: As I was reading, I kept preparing for the story to veer into the supernatural. I don’t want to spoil anything, but how did you strike the right balance there—the suggestion of the supernatural, while keeping the story grounded in these very real, disturbing details?

Abbott: Because it was a dreamlike state, she feels almost drugged by this environment. She has no control over what she’s eating, the smells are strange. There’s a strangeness in her body but then also a strangeness all around her: this place, this wilderness and the animals, things you don’t understand.

Rosemary’s Baby is so much scarier if it’s not Satan—if it’s fully real. Satan is how you get let off the hook. Isn’t it much scarier when your husband and your father-in-law are the only people around you. I felt it was so much scarier because it wasn’t supernatural. But I was using these tools to nudge the reader closer to that state. The supernatural realm, entering it, would be a relief.

Murphy: There’s a Poe story that creeps into the book: “Captain Murderer.” It’s really unnerving. I should have looked this up before rather than putting it on you, but…is that a real story?

Abbott: It is. You have to look a bit. I can’t remember when I first came upon it, but the title alone was so scary. It reminded me a lot of those big anthologies you would find when you were ready to read scary stories, ghastly tales, and they’re often gruesome and all packaged together in this book you’re given as a kid. I didn’t intend for it to have this large role in the book. You know how it is: you don’t know these things are going to be important when they appear in the beginning of the book. And then there was this notion—that she’s almost drifted into one of these gothic tales.

Murphy: Neon lights and sign-making play into the dynamic between Jacy and her husband. You have quite a lot of beautiful imagery and ideas packed in with it. Is neon a hobby of yours?

Abbott: I ran into someone at a party once whose brother was one of the last people who makes actual neon signs, and who had gone through and really studied at the foot of a master. There aren’t many people left in that field, and I wanted Jed to be, in his career, caught between the artist’s sensitive side and a practical mechanical side. I wanted it to be esoteric enough that his father could be dismissive of it, but artsy enough that Jacy would respond do it. And then there’s something fascinating about being a sign maker and not reading the signs.

I always think this when I go back to Michigan. There are some jobs that are just really hard to explain to people. Writer is one. Neon artist is another.

Murphy: This is the part of the conversation where I ask what you’re working on next.

Abbott: I’m going to be adapting this book for a feature. I’m not allowed to say anything more.

(ed. note – this conversation was conducted before the start of the WGA strike.)

And did you ever see the Todd Haynes movie Safe? I’m going to be adapting that for television. Speaking of something that walks the line on horror…it’s sort of my dream project. It’s in the very early stages. That’s one of my favorite movies. And it feels so different now.

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