Literary Birthday – 21 August – Megan Abbott

Happy Birthday, Megan Abbott, born on 21 August 1971.

Megan Abbott Quotes

1. I read Helter Skelter as a kid and it terrified me, but I couldn’t put it down.
2. I was always attracted to crime fiction rather than mysteries. I really had to find my way.
3. I just knew once I started writing I couldn’t stop, whether people would publish me or not.
4. When I write in close third person, I really try to capture the voice, almost as I would in first person.
5. It’s a funny thing, but more than one person has noted the recurrence of scars in my novels. I think our battle wounds, and the things we hide or hope to, have a singular beauty.
6. I read James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely in grad school, and I was completely hooked. I’d always loved the film adaptations, but the books rocked me. They were so much more ambiguous, ambivalent, strange, humming with the writers’ own idiosyncrasies.
7. The first inspiration is almost always a character wanting something, desperately. My goal is to get that character’s voice in my head so well that I feel like they are real. Before I really start, I generally try to envision a three-act structure, but usually without any of the beats in between. The rest comes along the way. Surprise is one of the best parts of writing for me.
8. I used to only work at home, but now I tend to alternate. I have space at the Center for Fiction and I really like it. Very quiet, but not lonely. I like to see people, hear a little white noise now and then. And yes, sunlight!
9. I suppose I consider noir less as a genre and more of a mood, a feeling—one characterised by a kind of dark glamour. In noir, characters are beset by primal emotions—lust, greed, rage, fear—and those emotions get the better of them. They’re a way of exploring what might happen if we gave into those universal feelings without having to actually, say, murder our spouses or rob a bank.
10. I don’t have any interest in writing about empty femme fatales or nagging wives or other staple female characters of the tradition. I want to write about complicated women for the rest of my life!
11. You have to break up with the book to start a new relationship, with the script. You lose the intimacy and voice that novels alone offer, but you gain so much more in terms of the power of visual storytelling. You have to reorient yourself and start thinking in terms of images and what they can convey.

Source for quotes 1-3: CrimeReads and 4-6: Paris Review and 7-8: CenterForFiction and 9-11: Chicago Review Of Books

Megan Abbott is an award-winning American author of noir and hardboiled fiction, which are a sub-genres of crime fiction. She graduated with her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. Her noir fiction includes Queenpin and Bury Me Deep (nominated for the Edgar Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize). Her novel The End of Everything was a Richard and Judy selection and Dare Me was shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger. She is also the author of the gripping psychological thrillers, The Fever and You Will Know Me. Her latest novel is El Dorado Drive. She is co-writer of the smash-hit Sky Atlantic drama, The Deuce. Dare Me, the series she adapted from her own novel, is streaming on Netflix. She is also the author of a non-fiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. She also writes short fiction. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for photograph: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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