Who wasn’t more than a tiny bit wild in their teens, the ache of more-the same one Abbott felt-pounding in their chests? But we know that’s not true, that plenty react to rules with rebellion, their primal urges released. If we control them, tell them what to do, keep them busy, they can’t get in trouble. In Dare Me, she writes: “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.” Such a statement could seem overwrought, but instead reflects a far too pervasive national fear about our girls. Most of Abbott’s work juxtaposes teenage restlessness and ambition, the complicated ways young women behave when their big dreams and reality collide. They can build and destroy you at the same time. It’s never what you think.”Īt that age, friendships and female mentorship set the stage for everything. You’re disillusioned every day about what you imagine these things will be like: what sex will be like, what going to a grown-up party will be like, what this drug will be like. “To me, that feeling is so beautiful, that yearning. “In the Midwest at that time, there was nothing to do except get in cars with strange boys with enormous amounts of alcohol, driving to Detroit or going to some party. That appetite for escape fueled a bout of risk-taking. It was a yearning to leave, which is in Addy on the show: How do I get out of here?” “I wanted a bohemian place to talk about books and movies. It seemed like all the art was there,” Abbott says. From as early as I can remember, I wanted to move to New York. (She also has an older brother, who's now a prosecutor in the area.) They lived near the freeway, and she still remembers the weight that the types of clothes you wore carried at her high school she was always the one in all-black amid a sea of Polo shirts and Coach bags. Her father was a political science professor at Wayne University and her mother a fiction writer. Abbott grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a waterfront enclave just outside of Detroit where she says she never truly fit.

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