In the preface to his Collected Stories, the writer John Cheever says that reading the work of a young writer is like watching someone learn how to perform basic skills for the first time: in their early work, “a writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork.” Even now that I can no longer qualify as a young writer, I come back to this line often, gratified by the vision it offers of an extended training program in craft.
But not every writer seems to experience this initiation phase. Clemence Michallon’s debut, The Quiet Tenant, was one of my favorite reads of 2023, with a confidence and sure-footedness that many older writers would wish for. I recently got to talk to her about another exceptional debut, Megan Abbott’s Die a Little, published in 2005. Michallon’s forthcoming second novel, Our Last Resort, is a propulsive and atmospheric thriller about two siblings at an exclusive resort in the desert whose vacation is interrupted by the discovery of a woman’s body, and after reading an early copy, I can tell you that it follows up on the promise of her early work in spectacular fasion.
Why did you choose Die a Little by Megan Abbott?
It had been on my radar for a very long time, because Megan Abbott is my favorite author. I love her work so much. I find her prose so unique to her: so beautiful, so poetic, so lyrical. I also love the fact that even though her books are set in real places and real time periods, they’re also in their own little worlds.
If I really love an author, I like to keep a couple of their books in reserve. I love Salinger, but I haven’t read Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters, and I haven’t read some of his short stories, because I’ve been saving them. I was thinking of Die a Little the same way, but my husband read it recently and really loved it, and so I finally picked it up. I think some books find you at just the right time, and this was exactly the right time for me. I was completely charmed by it and under its spell.
Part of what I found so fascinating is that when you think about the rest of Megan Abbott’s work, you can see the seeds of how she’s developed as an author here in her debut. There are some themes and some aesthetic choices in this novel that you can also see in her more recent work. Then the prose is always so good. There’s not one unnecessary sentence, and her descriptions are exquisite. To see that it was all here from the start, it’s incredible.
So you’re a Megan Abbott completist. Have you read all her other works?
I haven’t read Queenpin, which is her other noir, and I haven’t read El Dorado Drive, which is out in June.
I’ve said this before, but one reason I started this interview series was because I realized I was pretty poorly read in the crime novel, and classic noir in particular. On the back of the book, Lisa Scottoline describes it as “a modern noir that perfectly depicts Raymond Chandler’s 1950s L.A. in all its seamy, sexy corruption.” Have you read a lot of Raymond Chandler? Do you see the influence?
As a French person, my familiarity with noir was nonexistent. I didn’t even know noir was a thing until I started reading Megan Abbott and reading interviews with her and seeing how she talked about the genre. But it’s weird, because even though I hadn’t read noir, I think I knew its aesthetics from watching TV and movies. As far as novels go, it was a big blind spot for me as well. But even though Abbott’s work is so clearly inspired by that genre, it’s not based in it so heavily that it’s not accessible. And I’m not saying that it transcends genre, because that implies that genre is something that you need to get out of, and that’s not the case. I’m a genre writer, you’re a genre writer. I’m very comfortable and happy working in genre fiction, but I do think it’s a mark of excellent work when people enjoy it who aren’t already die-hard fans. A lot of people love The Sopranos who aren’t particularly into mob movies, because it’s just so good.
In the opening pages, the narrator, Lora King, describes a picture of her sister-in-law Alice, who “didn’t even need to show her face or have a voice to demand complete attention.” Did you find Alice as magnetic and hard to look away from as the narrator does?
I was so intrigued by the portrayal and characterization of Alice in the book. She’s described as always being in motion. There’s this manic current of energy around her. I love description like this, where it doesn’t focus so much on the actual physical attributes of a person, but on what it feels like to be around them. And we learn later that there’s a reason for her frantic energy that becomes relevant to the story. Another thing that struck me right away was how she’s introduced. She literally crashes into our characters’ lives, and that’s so appropriate for her.
Lora, by contrast, begins the novel as a stereotype of a nice girl–a teacher at a girls’ high school whose most important relationship is with her wholesome policeman brother, Bill. What did you think of Lora when you first met her?
Alice and Lora really seem at first to be a good pair, because Lora is such a nice girl. She’s so sheltered. I loved her quiet edge from the very beginning. You have a sense early on that she knows how she’s perceived, and she knows there is more to her than how she’s perceived. There are layers to her, and she discovers over the course of the narrative what she’s capable of. She has a very strong, particular bond with her brother going back to their childhood, and you feel that she would be skeptical of any woman who came to be important in her brother’s life. Alice could be the most straightforward, well-adjusted sister-in-law in the world, and Lora would still wonder if she was worthy of her brother. But what makes it interesting is that we get hints early on that Alice isn’t being straight with anyone. So Lora’s skepticism is justified, but to what degree, and where does her own agenda then begin?
I loved this moment toward the end where Lora is talking to a man she’s been seeing, and he mentions that she visits him drunk late at night and how much she enjoys sex. And that comes as a total surprise to the reader, because she hasn’t mentioned any of that to us. It makes it clear that she’s releasing information strategically, and maybe hiding as much as she reveals.
And that seems so much in keeping with Abbott’s other work. There’s so much about women’s desire and what they admit to themselves and what they try to hide both from themselves and others. It’s a theme that you can follow from book to book.
I think another noir trope she’s working with is this idea of doubling, and how Lora and Alice start to change places. At first Alice is the one with the secrets, and then it’s Lora. Can you talk about that theme?
I thought it was so seamlessly done. From the first page, there’s so much simmering under the surface. We don’t know what’s going to come out, but we feel that there’s something. I think she plants the seeds very early on for what’s going to be revealed in the end, both in terms of the secrets that are going to be revealed and the ways people surprise themselves and surprise us.
There’s something about the way Megan Abbott writes that makes me want to write. I read her and then my own writing flows better for some reason. It’s almost like hearing music and you start dancing, right? In regard to the plot, though, there were a few things about it that I found really striking. First of all, she never wastes time with big chunks of backstory. I don’t know this for a fact, but I have to imagine that her drafts always start five paragraphs earlier, and she cuts them out and keeps moving. There’s absolutely no throat clearing. When you do get backstory, it comes in these sharp little glimpses of the past. She’s always telling you a story. Her pacing is wonderful. Her characters can sometimes be a little confused or removed from reality, but it doesn’t affect the rhythm of the story. This is a short novel, only two hundred and thirty pages, and that brevity keeps it really sharp.
I wonder how much of that comes from her background in screenwriting—that instinct for going straight to the heart of the scene.
It’s funny, because I’m not sure how much screenwriting she’d done when she wrote this book. I have to wonder if it was more that she had success in screenwriting because she already had those skills. She’s so precise with detail. This novel is technically historical fiction, since it’s set in the 1940’s, but the descriptions are so perfect that you feel like it’s happening in front of you. There are a couple of party scenes that are just exquisite. This is a little off-topic, but I just read a book by this man who was the head of perfumes at Hermes, and made some of the best-known perfumes. He says in his book that if you want to make a perfume that smells like apples, you don’t use actual apples. You take other components and you make the smell that will conjure up the idea of apples in someone’s head. That made me think about literary description, and how if I’m trying to describe a person or a setting, it’s not necessarily about the actual physical attributes. It’s about what impression is conjured up. How does it feel to be in this setting, to be in that party, or to look at this person? This novel is like that—the descriptions are detailed where it’s necessary, but overall, they create an impression.
I know what you mean. There’s something Gatsby-like about this book, in its tightness and the way she’ll drop down into specific detail and then keep moving. I won’t spoil the ending, but I do want to talk about that last scene, where Lora remembers a conversation with Alice when Alice suggested that Lora enjoys the darker aspects of experience (drinking, sex, danger, etc.) more than she’s willing to admit to herself: “It’s something we’ve both got in us,” Alice says, and Lora responds by saying and then repeating to herself, “I don’t have it in me.” What did you think of that scene?
It’s enigmatic, but it’s also very rich. When Lora says, “I don’t have it in me,” it’s two things: it’s denial, but there’s also a wistfulness there, because she’d like to be more like Alice in some ways. Alice has bonded with Lora’s brother in a way that Lora never could. Lora is trying to reassure herself, “I’m not like you,” but at the same time, both she and the reader know that she’s more like Alice than she’ll ever admit.
I think it’s clear that part of what’s remarkable about Abbott’s work is the way she views noir through the lens of the female experience, and that there’s an implicit critique of the conventions of the genre, in particular in regard to the character of the femme fatale. My feeling watching those old movies has always been that the women are two-dimensional. They’re either good or they’re bad, but in Abbott’s work, women always have mixed motives, just like the men do. They’re complex. They have darkness, but also the desire to be good. Is there anything else you’d like to say about how that theme is operating here?
I adore it. It feels so true. I especially love that this is set in L.A., on the margins of the movie business, where so much of the action has to do with men and their power, and she’s giving the women in the story an agency and contradictions that they probably wouldn’t have had in classic noir.
What else have you learned from this novel that you might apply to your own work?
It made me want to start over everything I’ve ever done and rewrite it. Sometimes before I start writing, or if I’m already writing but I’ve lost my train of thought, I’ll take a book that speaks to me and read a couple of pages and then I’ll get back to work. This has become one of those books for me, where I’ll open it, I’ll read a little bit, and I just feel inspired. As we’ve discussed, the specificity of the descriptions really struck me. They’re a great reminder to myself to be as specific as I can get. And then there’s the power of culling the prose, cutting it down as much as you can. She can do so much with relatively few words, and that’s something I’m striving for in my own work. I’ve never been able to cut the word count in half or whatever it is people do, but I was reading Die a Little while I was working on final edits on my next novel, Our Last Resort, and I did end up cutting some lines. It wasn’t pages and pages of text, but at one point I was looking at three paragraphs, and I was like, “I don’t need them.” Reading this novel was such a great reminder of how spare good writing can be.
