“Beware the woman” sounds like a catchcry behind the dismantling of women’s rights, and that’s exactly what inspired the title of writer Megan Abbott’s new novel of the same name. “The book is so much about female anxiety about patriarchal control, but that comes from male anxiety about female control! The notion that a phrase can be flipped interested me,” Abbott tells Shondaland.
Set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Abbott’s latest novel follows pregnant Jacy as she navigates her changing body and changing relationship with her husband, Jed, and his widowed father, Doctor Ash, during a weekend away at Jed’s remote childhood compound, which slowly stretches into a longer stint of isolation reminiscent of Cabin Fever meets The Cabin in the Woods. But while Jacy’s high-risk pregnancy — or what she’s led to believe is increasing in risk by the male doctors who surround her but don’t address her directly, instead deferring to Jed — evokes the fall of Roe v. Wade, Abbott turned in her final draft to her editor the day before the Dobbs ruling was officially announced. The draft was in revisions prior to the leaked memo in May last year.
“It’s not in my brain to write directly at something; it’s more about the fear and anxiety surrounding it,” Abbott says.
Of course, the writing had been on the wall in the years earlier, since the 2016 election, the Me Too movement, and the backlash to it — all things that Abbott had been thinking about in the lead-up to writing Beware the Woman, which stemmed from a conversation with a man she was dating at the time who assumed things about her reproductive history. The man told her that her medical history (Abbott tells me she’s never been pregnant and never had an abortion) might color his opinion of her, despite the fact that they shared similar progressive politics.
“I’ve always been fascinated and terrified by the notion of having your body invaded,” Abbott says. “As a pregnant woman, you have all this stuff going on inside your body, but what if the terror itself is coming from outside? The idea kept haunting me — what it would feel like to be in that position.”
The body is a recurring theme in Abbott’s bibliography over the past 12 years. (Abbott’s first four books were in noir fiction and set in the mid-20th century, a “happy accident” while she was obtaining her Ph.D. in the genre from NYU.) “I was thinking a little bit strategically, but more than that I felt that I couldn’t keep [writing crime noir] and not taking any risks because it was so disconnected from my life and my experience, and I felt like I should be mining some other stuff and getting a little more raw with it,” she says.
The result was 2011’s The End of Everything, about the intense friendship between two teenage girls — until one of them goes missing. This was followed in 2012 by Dare Me, a cheerleading murder mystery that was adapted by Abbott into the Netflix series of the same name in 2019. (She’s also worked on the HBO 1970s sex-work drama The Deuce and has quite the slate of adaptations coming up, including a series based on the 1995 Julianne Moore movie Safe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, and adaptations of The Turnout and Beware the Woman. “Novels are so consuming and interior and reclusive. Screenwriting is so much more collaborative,” Abbott says. “I really like being able to stretch my writerly muscles [and] go back and forth.”)
Her novel The Fever, from 2014, is centered on seizures that spread throughout a small-town high school, while You Will Know Me (2016) is about an elite high school gymnastics team.
“I never had that comfort with the body that’s required in high-level sport or dance, or even in moderate level! I always felt so envious of being able to feel like you could master your body in some way, and what that must feel like — the power of that,” Abbott says. “And female bodies historically have been objectified and are for show, so to be able to turn that around and use it as a power was always what I would have wanted [as an adolescent], so that’s always going to be looming in my books.”
With her latest three novels — Give Me Your Hand from 2018, 2021’s The Turnout, and Beware the Woman — Abbott graduated to writing about adult women but is still very interested in concerns about the body. In Give Me Your Hand, one of the characters has premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), an extreme version of PMS, while The Turnout is set in a ballet school.
“When I moved to [writing about] adult women, in some ways [it was] just to have more [readers] looking for more worlds to enter,” she explains. “They’re still very insular worlds — because of the nature of their occupations — so I think there’s something about that that is very elemental to me.”
In Beware the Woman, the terror that Abbott speaks about is not only inside Jacy’s body but also in her relationship. Jed seems like a regular guy and loving new husband — don’t they all?, as her mother keeps warning her. That is, until he gets around his father, Doctor Ash, and starts acting strangely, forgetting things he’s said and done and gaslighting Jacy into the same. Conversely, at first blush, Doctor Ash presents himself as the picture of doting fatherhood.
“I think about this a lot with post-Boomer generations of men wanting to be better and not be like their fathers or their grandfathers or the men who came before. There’s a hangover from that era that goes really deep,” Abbott says. With Jed, though, because his own father was so attentive and values fatherhood so highly, it’s almost like he’s doing the opposite. “I was trying to get readers to keep changing their minds about Jed, because Jacy keeps being confused about what she’s experiencing.”
To add to that confusion, there are other voices in Jacy and Jed’s marriage: “Almost like a ghost story because there’s lots of other people, but they’re not there!” Abbott offers. In addition to Doctor Ash’s constant opinions about parenting, Jacy has the voice of her mother both in her head in the form of her own relationship history, and in her ear as Jacy’s calls to her mother grow more concerning about the predicament she finds herself in.
“In some ways, Beware the Woman is as much about Jacy’s mom and Jed’s dad as it is about Jacy and Jed, and maybe how our origin families never really fully release control,” Abbott says. “There’s something so chilling about being in a marriage, and this other person [or other people] is there, looming.”
This includes Jed’s mother, who died giving birth to him; Mrs. Brandt, the property’s caretaker; and a pregnant mountain lion who stalks the compound and could be read as a parallel to Jacy, all of whom add to the suffocating feeling that envelopes Jacy and the reader as we move toward the conclusion of Beware the Woman. Abbott says, “In some ways, everyone would be so focused on this danger instead of the danger within.”
Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris.
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