Words matter. These are the best Megan Abbott Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they’re this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.
It feels like breaking rules is almost a given now on TV.
The speed of the TV stuff vs. the self-imposed pace of novel writing has been a big adjustment, and going back and forth often feels like whiplash.
There’s this notion of women’s bodies being out of control – so out of control that men don’t understand it at all.
I am an insomniac. I wake up at 6 or 6:30 and get out of bed immediately. The coffee starts right away. Then I get to the computer as quickly as possible. I like to start writing when I’m still half-asleep, in a state between dreaming and waking.
I don’t really consider any of my novels ‘crime’ novels.
I never quite know how to fill that anxious, semi-wasted time before a midday flight home.
Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.
If I have a writing problem, the minute I step away, there’s a solution.
I’m ashamed how little science fiction I’ve read.
I thought labs were such cinematic, spooky spaces.
I’ve consumed true crime since first discovering ‘Helter Skelter’ by Vincent Bugliosi in a used bookstore at age 9 or 10 and staring in fascination and horror at the crime-scene photos in the middle.
I think it was Freud who said that we’re all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.
I come from a family of readers. Our house smelled of book.
True crime has long been a passion for me, but I’m also a sucker for biographies, particularly of politicians, writers, or Hollywood icons.
I think watching TV has influenced my books, but I don’t think writing TV has.
When ‘Dare Me’ was first in development, it was hard to make the case for why it’d be interesting to anybody other than teenage girls. It’d often be treated, like, on first glance, ‘What is this? ‘Pretty Little Liars?’ ‘Mean Girls?” It never was that.
Before I write, I like to read obits in ‘The Times’ because they’re well written, and I like the little details. It gets the energy going in the morning. I really like the obits of old Hollywood actors and actresses.
I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.
I’ve come to believe that what draws women to true crime tales is an instinctual understanding that this is the world they live in.
I think we writers are very superstitious. We don’t know why it’s working when it’s working, so we attach cause and effect.
I’m always fascinated by how different writers’ rooms work.
I don’t think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in – I think that would be a terrible book.
I’m always surprised at the negative response to the women in my books who are openly ambitious or experience aggression.
On ‘The Deuce,’ the writers’ room gets like group therapy.
