The End of Everything tells the story of Lizzie, the disappearance of her best friend Evie, and the effect that disappearance has on the all the families involved.
Megan Abbott writes thirteen year old Lizzie’s story in first person, rushing forward, all feeling, the emotional impact of the plot points more important than the how and why. “Where is Evie? Who took her?” take a back seat to how everyone feels, where those feelings come from and where they lead.
Both The End of Everything and Dare Me, Abbott’s first entry into the young adult market, focus on the awfulness of girls wielding and experimenting with their power. This is not the “we can be engineers and astronauts!” kind of girl power promoted to get girls to take math and science or play with toys colored something other than pink.
Abbott’s girls are in the midst of confronting their social and sexual power. How can they make people love and worship them? How can they manipulate their peers into following them? How can they be the center of everything? How can they use their budding sexuality to get to that gooey center? And what are they willing to do? When Lizzie describes one of the female characters as bringing a male character to his knees, she wonders, “She has that power. What girl wouldn’t want that power?” (pg 186)
What grown woman wouldn’t want that? The adults and their disappointments are the catalysts for all that happens, the kids’ jumping off points for their inevitable therapy sessions. The women seem damaged by their own struggles for girl power and the male characters are a mess, muscled lumps of barely controlled need, making excuses, but not stopping. The women seeing it all and numbing themselves, but still wanting to be the center, still protecting their men.
I didn’t find The End of Everything as convincing as Dare Me. Its story isn’t as tight and intricate as Dare Me’s, but it has the same needy desperation at the root of every action. One of the things that took me out of the story was that the characters, especially Lizzie and Evie, felt older than their 13 years. Some of the text was italicized and in the past tense, so maybe those thoughts were from an older Lizzie. However, not all of the italicized text was in the past tense, and Lizzie’s non-italicized thoughts seemed as mature as the plain text ones. It was confusing and the book would have worked without it.
Still I found The End of Everything a compelling read. Like Dare Me, this is a very adult story, with complicated, edgy emotions and scenarios that push the boundaries, leaving an uncomfortable feeling. These girls seem awful and maybe even brutal, but in the end they’re powerless little girls frightened of their own desires.
Originally posted here.
