Teen Noir Summer
On the drama in their very adult universes and the horniest ballet book of all time.
So for the past two years I’ve been trying to write a 17-year-old girl. And honestly I think it’s going okay. It’s an easy space for me to occupy because I think a lot of things get crystalized during that period, probably moreso when you’ve got some trauma. And like. I do, have that. It’s fine, whatever.
There’s something that happens around that age or just before it, I think, where everything gets suffused with meaning and simultaneously driven inward. The shape and size of your body MEANS something about you, something important. The green of that particular tree makes you cry because it is TELLING YOU something, something only you can hear or understand. The song you just heard has changed you forever and you have to listen to it over and over again to make that feeling imprint on your heart permanently.
They’re intense, teen girls, especially the damaged ones. They guard their secrets closely, hold them tight. They take their emotions seriously, they feel things deeply. They take pains to appear precisely the way they have decided is correct, while a torrent of rage and chaos churns underneath. They’re also—most of them—absolutely horny as hell.
Nobody understands this quite like Megan Abbott.
I love Megan Abbott’s books. I love them so much I wasn’t sure how to even approach this “newsletter” (lol) because I want to write thousands of words but also I just want to say READ THEM and hit send. (I also feel a strange pressure to only talk about authors that aren’t, like, being reviewed by the NYT but that’s probably in my head and I’m trying, okay, I’m trying to chill about this newsletter.)
This review of her new one, The Turnout, leans heavy on the horniness, and it isn’t wrong. In fact it’s precisely correct. It’s the horniest ballet book that’s probably ever existed. I think it’s because this new one features adults who have been preserved in that amber of adolescent horniness forever. Everything they see is sex. Like teenagers.
The adult women in question are sisters Dara and Marie, plus their third, Dara’s husband and their mother’s former student Charlie. Dara and Marie lost their parents when they were—you guessed it—teens, and that trauma cemented their personalities, their drives, their dynamic. They inherit the house, they all move in together, Dara and Charlie marry young, they run the crumbling ballet studio their mother once ran, they dance. They’re frozen, almost, as adults, their lives a simple extrapolation of that moment, the ballerina spinning in the jewelry box. And when the contractor Derek comes in to fix the studio, he invades their bubble, he makes them see their life the way it really is: dark, cultic, toxic. And the wheels come off.
And through it all, Abbott writes with a gruesome physicality: you feel the crunch of bones and wince at the tearing of muscles. You can feel her books in your body, and not just because of ballet. In You Will Know Me, it’s gymnastics; in Dare Me, it’s cheerleading. Women’s bodies in her worlds are strong and terrifying, a bruised and bloody machine that keeps every fucking score, the barrier between her secrets and the atmosphere. Or between her feelings and the people in her life.
Because there’s always one. Always a toxic friendship, or, in this case, sisterhood. Two women finding their edges, learning where their similarities end. What I love is that she takes teen girls seriously enough to write them for an adult audience, showing their warts and their machinations and their beautiful frailty. Showing the way the world warps them, and the way they warp themselves for the world.
The way Megan Abbott was first sold to me was “noir, but about teen girls.” And yeah, that’s basically it. Her prose is like a chant, staccato and impactful. Her worlds are are full of shadows and grotesqueries and obsessions. Her girls are dark and gritty and scarred and mysterious and flawed. And they fuck.
They’re teen girls. Every facet.
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The Turnout comes out in two weeks. Order it here, or order it from my local bookshop and donate to their prison books project.
Also please check out literally all of her other books. I love Dare Me, and I love the TV show they made out of it, which is now on Netflix, even if it is a little cheesy. I love You Will Know Me, and I love The Fever.
I also really love Bury Me Deep, a fictionalized retelling of a depression-era murder that takes place largely inside a medical clinic for wayward women.
But really I love them all and you sort of can’t go wrong. There’s nobody doing it like her.
Drinking: Tomato martinis. I stole this from Dan Saltzstein’s Twitter last year and plan to do so again for every tomato season in perpetuity. Slice tomato, salt, drain in a colander set over a bowl for 20 or 30min. Then: .5oz tomato juice, 3oz gin, 1oz dry vermouth, served ice ice ice cold. Divine.
Reading: All about how they made the Coffin Flop magic happen
Listening: Jamie Loftus’s Cathy podcast, Aack Cast, is everything I’ve ever wanted and I promise: even if you don’t care about Cathy you’ll love it.
Cooking: honestly i have made like 8 pies from this book in recent months and i cannot overstate how fucking good every single one of them is. Here is sour cherry.
Fairy Tale: Here’s a weird Siberian one about the literal sun and his many children. Also the pod has a gram now, for fairytale shitposting purposes.