Books & Writers: Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Journalists, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers & Showrunners Talk Writing, Creativity & The Creative Process · Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers, Journalists & Showrunners Talk Writing - Creative Process Original Series

Exploring Family Dynamics & Fierce Female Friendships with Novelist MEGAN ABBOTT

·50 min·3 clips

Megan Abbott says young writers should "put your heart on the page" and ignore rules.

1. Books & Writers: Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Journalists, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers & Showrunners Talk Writing, Creativity & The Creative Process features Megan Abbott on family dynamics and fierce female friendships. 2. Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of 12 crime novels, and the host frames her as the writer of Beware the Woman, You Will Know Me, Give Me Your Hand, The Turnout, and El Dorado Drive. 3. The episode asks why Abbott keeps writing about childhood, sisters, rivalry, money, and power in women’s lives. 4. Abbott says art is “self-expression at its core,” rejects “rules” and “static criteria,” and tells young writers to “put your heart on the page.” 5. She says she has “always really writing about family” because childhood is “the original wound” and other relationships replicate early patterns. 6. Abbott reads from El Dorado Drive, where Pam stages a graduation party at a rental house on El Dorado Drive for her nephew Patrick. 7. The excerpt contrasts Pam’s current rental house with her earlier life in a five-bedroom, six-comma mansion near the lake and a schedule of parties, fundraisers, luncheons, and receptions. 8. Abbott describes the party as carrying “the weight of a coronation” and “the eerie desperation of D-Day,” while Harper notices candles, string lights, gold linen, and graduation decorations. 9. She connects El Dorado Drive to the pandemic, when women were drawn into multi-layer marketing and pyramid schemes because of money anxiety and child-care constraints. 10. Abbott says the scheme in the novel is a “women's entrepreneur circle or club” where members recruit more women so one person can collect the investment. 11. She argues that women are often told they are doing nothing wrong because they are using the same loopholes men have used for centuries. 12. Abbott says money in the United States is tied to security, independence, freedom, and power, not just cash. 13. She says Americans talk about money and not class, and links that contradiction to the “poisonous American dream” and “greed is good.” 14. Abbott says her athletic and dance novels work because the body becomes both “the prison and the escape” for women. 15. She says cheerleading, ballet, and other closed systems intensify competition, ambition, aggression, desire, and secretive communication. 16. Abbott says adolescence is a “dark fairy tale” where girls can reveal what they are not supposed to feel, including unbridled ambition and desire. 17. She says her books often use doubles, alphas and betas, and rivalry between women who may want to be each other, be with each other, or both. 18. Abbott says psychotherapy helps her notice patterns and remember what is “printed deep seared,” while David Lynch remains her favorite filmmaker because he understood dark interiors. 19. Listeners interested in female rivalry, adolescence, and the psychology of writing will find this episode especially useful. 20. Listeners wanting plot summary first or avoiding literary process talk may skip it.

As heard by us

A literary interview about family, rivalry, and the patterns people keep repeating.

Megan Abbott treats writing as a return to family and childhood, where rivalry, love, and ambition get set in place early. The piece keeps circling the way women on the page can become doubles or rivals, and that tension gives it its pull.

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Why you'd press play

For listeners who want family rivalry and craft to feel inseparable.

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