The Fever

"It’s funny that I picked my first two books about kids because I really don’t like them. I think other people’s kids are fine, but they’re not scintillating conversationalists. Particularly not babies. They can’t even hold their heads up. But I love this story, firstly because Megan Abbott is a phenomenal writer. I really feel that she doesn’t get the credit she’s due. I love her because she’s always hustling: she’s doing TV, she’s doing books, she’s doing all these different fascinating, interesting things. If she was a man, she would be the number one novelist in the entire world. This book is set in a high school, where there is a fever spreading among the girls. What Megan is so good at, particularly in this book, is that it’s so claustrophobic. You could be reading about an office complex instead of a high school. People don’t change after high school. They’re always the same. Part of it is told from the parents’ point of view. It’s so awful being a teenager. No wonder these mothers drink! It’s just so stressful, particularly for women, seeing girls go through the same shit you went through, with this wash of hormones. It made me think of the Salem witch trials. I don’t want to call these young women hysterical or all these other stereotypical things because guys can do crazy shit too. But women are so much more internalized about their anxiety at that age. When they strike out, it seems to be more surgical. Whereas when guys strike out—in America, they use AR-15s—no one calls them hysterical, they’re troubled young men. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s like a scalpel. Or like a prison scene where one prisoner shivs the other. Megan is so good at building that tension. There’s a mystery, but it’s not a conventional mystery—there’s no murder. It’s more like Flannery O’Connor’s mystery of character: What are they going to do? What’s going to happen next? As a fellow author, to be able to build suspense based on that is amazing. Again, she is talking about something very prescient. We have all these kids coming out of a pandemic, and their brains have been messed with. Everybody keeps saying, ‘The kids will be fine. Kids adapt.’ No, actually, this is very traumatizing. They don’t adapt; they learn to live with it. There’s a very big difference between the two. They’re not incorporating it and moving on. The memory of it is going to be in their bodies forever. We have scientific data about how childhood trauma leads to heart disease later in life, and that it can lead to depression and make you more susceptible to addiction and all these other things. I think we’re seeing a lot of what Megan talked about in The Fever , which was published in 2014. Girls are acting out in the same ways. You hear about suicide pacts, and all the crazy things they’re doing on TikTok—like eating detergent—and you think, ‘Of course they’re doing that, because that’s what kids do.’"