You Will Know Me Megan Abbott Summary
You Will Know Me
Megan Abbott's novel You Will Know Me, similar her other books, thrums with the edge and energy of teenage girlhood; the wild want, the wild daring, the wild selfishness that — as ane of the girls' moms says — you lot're only really immune when yous're young. "Remember that kind of wanting? That kind that's but for yourself? And you don't even have to feel guilty near it? You wouldn't know to."
Devon Knox is a gymnast, a proficient one. Her dream is the Olympics, and her parents make it theirs, too — practices and equipment and a second mortgage to pay for it all. And then, the handsome beau of her coach's niece, who always helped around the gym, holding doors for the moms, digging retainers out of the cream pit, is killed in a hit-and-run.
Devon's mom Katie, who narrates most of the book, begins to accept a harder wait at her family unit: Her bare-eyed daughter, 4'x" and muscled with legs like the trunks of trees. Her overworked husband, who does everything for Devon, for her chance at the Olympics. Why does her immature son have dreams of Devon flight, Devon sneaking out at nighttime, Devon with claws for feet, Devon filling his mouth with stones?
Katie knows her daughter'southward every knot and cord, and that gives a false sense of closeness, of her knowability. That is the book'south primal, eerie theme: Yous tin't know the people close to you, even if you spend your days focused on the minute details of their bodies, rubbing out muscle aches or adjusting leotards. "But your child's privacy, what did information technology even hateful after y'all'd spent and so many years with your daughter'due south body as the eye of your life?"
Megan Abbott has written a volume with the taut and muscular ruthlessness of a gymnast, a book that disorients with eerie countermelodies, constant reminders of the vulnerability of bodies, even in its festive moments: at a party, a glistening ham is "pink every bit a newborn."
She describes the bodies of the gymnasts with eerie, sinister precision; they get muscled machines, not the belongings of the girls merely of everyone. Devon is almost like a prize-winning horse — her family'due south connection to the extraordinary. Even in the womb, her parents experience her body "arching and minnowing and promising itself to them both."
The gymnasts feel doubly the mortification of flesh: The ordinary overwhelming sensation and embarrassment that washes over many teenagers at puberty, but also the knowledge that adulthood, inevitable and encroaching, will wreck all of their ambitions. The girls on the gymnastics team talk well-nigh it like an unimaginable horror; they see the expiration date and they try to ward off hips, breasts, periods. "We demand to go to her before she changes," says Devon's bus.
"It anile girls and kept them immature forever at the same time." Abbott writes. "Ages thirteen, xiv, fifteen, xvi, fifty-fifty seventeen came and went for the [gymnasts], and their bodies remained apartment and smooth and scythes except their perky muscled behinds."
"No i always tells you at that place'll be and then much claret." Devon murmurs in her slumber after her first menstruum. Or does this line, with its echo of Lady Macbeth'southward sleepwalking remorse, suggest something else altogether? "Fine art not without ambition," Lady Macbeth chides her husband, "But without / The illness should attend it." Devon'southward whole life is gymnastics; The gym "gray, severe, powerful," is her ascetic temple. And she knows she's supposed to practice annihilation to get to the Olympics. If ambition is an illness, Devon is ill. They all are.
Devon'due south inscrutability — on the beam, she is a "stone Artemis" — makes it hard to intendance too much what happens to her. And the answer to the book'southward puzzle — who killed Ryan? — is clear from far away. Merely the novel'due south draw is non really the mystery itself merely Katie's slow realization that her life is not what she thought it was. That is, after all, what frightens us near: Not unknown monsters but known ones.
Proficient gymnasts seem to flip effortlessly as coins. They make it look easy. Adept writers do, too. Like it isn't all chalk and blood, or laptop glow and paragraphs rewritten endlessly, but a natural expression of weightlessness, drive, flight. Yous Will Know Me takes swift, unsettling, apparently effortless flight.
Annalisa Quinn is a freelance announcer and critic covering books and culture.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2016/07/28/485865091/you-will-know-me-says-no-you-wont
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