Post Olympic Gymnastics

Sat, 08/20/2016 - 9:47am by Lucy S

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

In her thrilling new novel, You Will Know Me, the world that Megan Abbott's characters inhabit will be familiar to her regular readers. This world of teenaged girls is truly Abbott’s domain, though the teenagers in this story are anything but typical. They spend most of their waking hours in the BelStars Gymnasium, opening a window to a second, equally fascinating world, that of competitive female gymnastics. As an explanation for why she chose this setting, Megan Abbott explained, in an interview on Electric Literature, that after watching the 2012 Olympics “I started to think about a novel centered on a pair of parents so devoted to their child’s talent. I started watching gymnastics obsessively, especially practices, and reading memoir after memoir — by gymnasts, former gymnasts and gymnast parents. And I started spending a lot of time in online forums devoted to parents, hearing their fears, anxieties, their pride and love.”

In You Will Know Me, Devon Knox is the star gymnast, a child prodigy headed for elite competition and possibly the Olympics. Her mother, Katie, is the closest thing we have to a narrator. Katie and her husband Eric have made Devon their world. Even Devon’s little brother, Drew, spends more time at the gym than anywhere else. Being Devon’s parents has provided the Knoxes with purpose and direction, “After all, who wouldn’t do anything for one’s child? Especially when that child worked harder and wanted something more than either of them ever had? Who wanted in ways they’d long forgotten how to want or had never known at all?”

Yet despite all the time they spend watching her, observing her, there remains something in Devon that is unknowable to the Knoxes, an innate determination and steeliness. “There Devon stood, on the competition floor. Four feet ten inches tall, nary a curve on her, but her dark eyes heavy with history, struggle. Squinting down, body pressing forward, Katie wondered at those eyes, that face. It was as if this weren’t her teenage daughter but a woman deepened by experience, a war-battered refugee, a KGB spy.” The core mystery that Abbott is offering is this idea of how well you can truly know somebody, and it is presented to us right away in Abbott’s apt and/or ironic title, almost as an imperative, You Will Know Me.

Parents may feel that they know their children and have difficulty recognizing when that intimacy diminishes. “‘Isn’t is a strange day, when you realize you have no idea what’s going on in your kid’s head? One morning you wake up and there’s this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They’re something else that you don’t know. And they keep changing. They never stop changing on you.” When the Knoxes son Drew gets sick, he recovers from his illness as someone unfamiliar to Katie. He seems to possess an adult understanding of his surroundings that he didn’t have before. As the rash caused by his illness peels off, he even looks different to Katie. Her children grow apart from her, and Katie is asked to redefine her role in their lives. Abbott nicely provides us with other families representing a range of parental sensibilities. The forceful parents of the booster club stand out in particular. We, as readers, are left to wonder what urges drive these parents, if they are propelled by love, competition, a desire to do what’s right, or a need to defend family honor. “All three of them becoming as one. A united front. Confederates. That’s what families were, weren’t they? The strong ones, the ones that last. Not supporters or enablers so much as collaborators, accomplices, co-conspirators.” How important to Katie and Eric is Devon’s success, how much does it help them define their own? To what lengths will they go to ensure it?

Abbott’s writing throughout the book keeps us on edge. Her sentences are tightly wound, pointedly descriptive and fluid, like a well executed floor routine. We don’t care too much about any one character, nor or we meant to. We aren’t overly concerned with who committed the murder (yes, there is a murder). That’s not the point. We are meant to be left asking how we know one another, as parents, spouses, and teammates. Do we always want to know everything? What do we do with the knowledge we have? Abbott’s answers to these questions offer the real revelation of You Will Know Me. The mystery is in the secrets these characters are keeping. In her review of You Will Know Me in The New York Times, author Sophie Hannah shrewdly states, “Here the truth is no gold medal, no ace waiting to be played; first it’s a dark haze of menace circling out of sight, and later it’s an ordeal to be survived, possibly even a punishment.”