Give Me Your Hand (novel)

Kit Owens is a postdoctoral research scientist in the lab of Dr. Lena Severin, who is preparing to begin a groundbreaking study on premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), an extreme form of PMS. The five postdocs – Zell, Juwon, Maxim, Alex, and Kit – are competing for three spots on the study, when Severin announces a new hire, Diane Fleming. Switching between the present day and Kit's high school years, it is revealed that the summer before sophomore year, she met Diane at a cross-country camp. During an overnight trip, Kit shared a secret with Diane that she had a sexual encounter with an adult, nicknamed Stevie Shoes. In their senior year, Diane transferred to Kit's high school following the death of her father and her mother's move to Florida with her new boyfriend, and the two became lab partners in AP Chemistry. Diane encouraged Kit to apply for Severin's STEM scholarship for women.

While studying together, Diane told Kit that she had killed her father, with the hope that she would be able to move back in with her mother. Following the confession, Kit refuses to be friends with Diane but, following her mother's advice, does not report it to the police. She instead tells the school guidance counselor, Ms. Castro, writes the Severin scholarship indicating Diane could have been responsible for her father's death. Kit is awarded the scholarship and attends the state university where Severin works.

In the present day, Kit and Alex go to a bar, where she gets drunk on Long Island iced tea and confesses Diane's secret to him before the two have sex. The next day, Severin announces that one of the PMDD slots is going to Serge, the head lab tech. Diane tells Kit that she has been chosen for the other slot but, following her confession to Alex, he messages Kit that he is going to tell Severin about Diane's secret. She goes to the lab the next morning to convince him not to tell Severin and following an argument, he puts too much pressure on a flash column and the test tube explodes, killing him. Unbeknownst to her, Diane is in the lab and, believing that Kit killed Alex, tells her to leave the body to be discovered but remove any evidence that Kit was there.

When they return to the lab, the body is gone and no one knows that Alex is dead. The only one who seems concerned is Eleanor, who explains that she is Alex's fiancée. The police are brought in to investigate his disappearance and when they question Kit, they seem to know about her romantic involvement with Alex. She has two realizations: that Zell saw them at the bar and told the police, and that Diane was rejected as a participant for a previous study on PMDD. She goes to confront Diane but discovers Eleanor in the vivarium. Eleanor accuses Kit of killing Alex and after a struggle, a fan is unplugged and Kit hears noises from the ceiling. When Eleanor leaves, the ceiling breaks, dropping Alex's body onto Kit and Diane. Serge admits to hiding the body on behalf of Severin, as they both believed Diane had killed Alex. Diane puts cyanide in Serge's tea, killing him. Severin walks in and proposes that they blame Serge for Alex's death but when the police arrive, Diane confesses to killing her father, Alex and Serge. Severin reveals that Diane believed she suffered from PMDD and had undergone a hysterectomy. As Diane is leaving with the police, she kills herself with a specimen knife.

Ten years later, Kit is still working for Severin when she receives a letter from Diane's mother, Mrs. Fleming. The letter reveals that Diane had confessed that she had killed her father but Mrs. Fleming had not believed her. She also sends a photo and Kit realizes that Mrs. Fleming's boyfriend at the time was Stevie Shoes and that Diane had been kicked out of her mother's house for telling her about his affair with Kit.

Megan Abbott in 2009

The focus on sharing secrets was one of the first things that author Megan Abbott planned when writing Give Me Your Hand. The novel was originally intended to focus on teenagers but Abbott shied away from writing another story about sports and instead focused on a quote by physicist Marie Curie which is repeated throughout the book: "My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame".[1] She interviewed female scientists in order to describe the lab dynamics and read memoirs and biographies of scientists.[1][2] She was intrigued by the competitiveness of labs, particularly stories of scientists sabotaging each other.[1][3] The character of Severin was inspired by professors at New York University, where Abbott studied for her Ph.D.[2]

Abbott was first inspired to write about PMDD when she learned that it has previously been used as a criminal defense.[4] She drew inspiration from a 1996 Texas Monthly article about Marie Robards, who was a high school student who poisoned her father in February 1993.[5][6] Robards used barium acetate and her father's death was ruled a heart attack until she confessed her crime to her best friend, Stacey High, nearly a year later while the two were studying Claudius' soliloquy in Hamlet.[6] Unlike in Give Me Your Hand, High reported the crime to the police and Robards was arrested in October 1994.[5][6] The novel also took inspiration from the 2009 murder of graduate student Annie Le at a lab at Yale University, where the deceased victim was hidden in a wall.[7][8]

Give Me Your Hand was published on July 17, 2018, by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and by Picador in the United Kingdom.[9][10] The title comes from a quote by Lady Macbeth immediately before her sleepwalking scene.[11][12] It is Abbott's ninth novel.[4] The audiobook was read by Chloe Cannon and released by Hachette Audio in July 2018.[13] It was optioned by AMC for a potential television series before its publication date.[3][14]

Give Me Your Hand is noted for its parallels to Gothic and noir fiction although it subverts the typical role of women – in one scene while they are in high school, Kit chooses Hamlet as a role model rather than Ophelia.[15][7] It is full of references, literary and otherwise, including Wuthering Heights, Juice Newton, and the 1997 film Hands on a Hard Body.[1][16] While writing, Abbott listened to recordings of Sylvia Plath's poetry, which appears throughout the novel alongside references to Stephen King's Carrie and Lizzie Borden.[4][17] In a 2018 interview with The Sewanee Review, she said that Give Me Your Hand and her 2016 novel You Will Know Me were both influenced by Alfred Hitchcock.[12] An early line in the novel is a reference to the 1942 film Casablanca.[18]

Severin – unflappable and calm – is used as a foil to the women with PMDD that she studies.[19] The focus on the diagnosis is a metaphor for women's loss of control and a theme throughout the novel of women trying to distance themselves from the stereotypes of their gender.[20] Abbott wrote the book during the 2016 United States presidential election, during which Donald Trump made comments about Megyn Kelly having "blood coming out of her wherever", which critics took to be a reference to menstruation. (Trump said he had meant Kelly's nose.)[21] Abbott took that incident and a remark Trump made about Hillary Clinton using the restroom as a "metaphor for demonizing women".[7] Ruth Franklin in Vulture commented that Abbott "plays with cultural constructions of female 'blood rage,' often in a self-consciously ironic way".[4] In one scene, Severin is described as wearing lipstick that is "placenta red".[17] The trope of women succumbing to their hormones is similarly subverted, with Diane's behavior unaffected even after she undergoes a hysterectomy, as well as the classic trope of the femme fatale, which Abbott describes in an interview as "a projection of male anxiety".[4][15] Severin draws reference in one scene to Lady Macbeth's command to "unsex me", a plea that feminity makes her less capable of murder.[20]

Abbott acknowledged in an interview with Crime Reads that she focuses on insular communities.[1] A review in The Washington Post praised the claustrophobic feeling which comes from these settings and the portrayal of the ambition and stress of the postdoctoral characters.[17] The characters' internal lives and the lab itself dominate the story, rather than the unnamed American town which served as the outside world.[22] Rather than being a whodunit, a Slate review describes it as a "slower-paced Match Point–esque anxiety fest".[23] Although the setting enhances the tension, it could be replaced with any similarly demanding workplace.[24][25] Kit is described as an unreliable narrator, as her unceasing focus on success distracts her from the true nature of the lab, which Alex describes as "a nest of vipers".[19] The insular nature of the lab also affects the morality of those who work inside it.[11]

There is also a focus on class in the novel. The differences between Diane and Kit are typified by their class differences – Diane is wealthy and conveys an image of perfection while Kit, who has had to temper her expectations due to family circumstances, is hard-working.[11][20][24] While Kit's mother brings home the smell of the animal clinic where she works, Diane's mother picks up her daughter from cross-country summer camp in a luxury car.[26] This class focus affects how Kit views Diane throughout the novel, believing that because she was raised with money, she has had an easier life.[11] Kit sees Diane as wiser although, as a review for The A.V. Club notes, Kit has had to juggle her academics and a job at a fried-chicken restaurant.[20] There is a similar class tension in her relationships with her co-workers at the lab, especially with affluent Alex. In one scene where she gets drunk on Long Island iced teas, he assumes that she has had the drink, which is considered a social signifier, before. This scene undercuts the unspoken class divide that runs between them.[2]

Give Me Your Hand was generally well-received, including starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly.[18][27][28] It was listed as one of the best books of 2018 by The Observer,[29] Cosmopolitan,[30] Refinery29,[31] Marie Claire,[32] and the Financial Times.[33] The novel was described by Entertainment Weekly as "one of her biggest and best-reviewed titles to date".[34] The audiobook received similar praise, particularly for the narrator Cannon's performance portraying the varying characters and emotions in the novel.[35][36]

The book was commended for its detailed focus, suspenseful pace, and convincing villain.[18][37] A review in the Financial Times described the prose as having the "vividness of cinema".[33] Karen Brissette in the Los Angeles Review of Books praised the haunting nature of the book and the nuance of the relationships between the female characters, which were described as "intimate and feral" by Publishers Weekly.[26][28] Ruth Ware in The New York Times commented that while the novel may appear different than Abbott's previous focus on teenage athletics in Dare Me and You Will Know Me, it still focuses on female friendship and competition.[38] A review in Newsday praised the high school chapters and the balance between the character's teenage and adult years.[16]

The initial twist – the reveal of Diane's secret – has been described as predictable, although reviewers noted that the later twists were unexpected.[39][13] The A.V. Club gave the novel a B+, commending its portrayal of women's darker identities but arguing that the first third of the novel proceeds at too slow of a pace.[20] Ware described Kit and Diane's motives as sometimes appearing "opaque" and criticized some of the confusing actions that characters take during the scenes set in the present day, although she noted that this could have been a conscious choice on the part of Abbott.[38]