You Will Know Me

A murder mystery set in the world of elite high school gymnastics competition, prolific crime fiction author Megan Abbott’s eighth novel, You Will Know Me (2016) follows events in the lives of a family whose teen daughter is potentially an Olympic-level athlete. Told from the point of view of her mother, whose intense knowledge of her daughter’s body and its capabilities belies her complete denial of her daughter’s interior life, the novel asks what parents – and a surrounding community – are willing to do to protect the child stars that put them on the map.

The Knox family – father Eric, mother Katie, fifteen-year-old Devon, and younger brother, Drew – live in a small, nondescript town. Devon is the highlight of her high school’s gymnastics program because her talent is potentially so limitless that even the Olympics isn’t too lofty a goal. To promote Devon’s natural abilities and further her competitive fitness, the Knoxes have made tremendous personal and financial sacrifices. Everything in their lives revolves around Devon, her training, and her future.

As Katie tells us more about her daughter, we get the sense that she doesn’t really know her child that well. Sure, Katie is deeply familiar with the musculature of Devon’s body, in a way that almost seems uncomfortably intimate. But at the same time, as Katie tells us aspects of the same biographical stories, not all the pieces add up. For example, we learn that when Devon was three, two of her toes were cut off by a lawnmower in a terrible accident where she was ostensibly left alone and the machine turned on somehow by itself. But as we hear about the details of that day, it’s clear that both Katie and Eric were there and could have possibly prevented what happened. It is evident that Katie is an unreliable narrator.



Since this lawnmower incident, Devon has spent her life driven by her deep-seated need to overcome her deformity, which for her took on the desire to excel at gymnastics. As her successes mount, she becomes the town’s wunderkind, drawing positive attention to the town and by extension to its leaders. At the same time, Katie and Eric rebuild their crumbling marriage around their dedication to Devon’s sport. The victim of this single-minded focus is Drew, whose existence is basically ignored by his family. When Drew has qualms about his sister, dreaming about her having talons instead of legs or about her ripping open his stomach to see the blood flow, his warnings are dismissed by his mother.

Devon becomes her high school’s gymnastics prodigy, and soon her coach and the town’s rich and influential parents start buying into her mystique. The town spends an inordinate amount of money upgrading the school gym to house state-of-the-art gymnastic equipment and facilities.

One of the construction workers who come to rebuild the gym and athletic area at the high school is twenty-four-year-old Ryan Beck, a handsome and charming guy whose smile immediately attracts both the teenage girls on the team and their mothers. Soon, rumor has it that he is dating Hailey, another gymnast who is also the coach’s niece.



Just weeks before the gymnastics team is supposed to perform at an important Elite Qualifiers tournament, Devon has a terrible performance during a competition routine, stumbling because of a weak ankle. Suddenly, her future and everything her family and the town has worked for seems at risk.

Then, the small community is rocked by news that Ryan has been killed in a hit-and-run accident in the middle of the night. All the girls on the team, including Devon, are devastated by the news. Meanwhile, initial gossip points the finger at Hailey, whose relationship with Ryan was apparently on the rocks. After the funeral, a witness emerges who seems to confirm that Hailey was responsible, confirming the town’s initial assumptions.

Suddenly, Devon’s life at school becomes complicated. She becomes the target of bullies, and Hailey, in particular, starts to harass her on social media. As Devon tells Eric and Katie, Hailey has been threatening to spill all of her secrets. Wondering what those secrets might be, Katie reads Devon’s diary, but all she finds are records of exercises and weight measurement. The usually blank-faced Devon has a diary just as emotionless as she typically is. Katie chalks the bullying up to jealousy and decides to just ignore it, focusing on Devon’s Elite Qualifiers training – someone who performs at her level will probably have to deal with the envy of others all her life.



Katie has a conversation with Helen, Ryan’s mother, in which Helen confesses that she often had no idea what was happening in her son’s head – it was like living with an alien. This jogs something in Katie, who knows that she is committed to doing whatever she can for her extraordinary child, but who starts to realize that she also has almost no sense of Devon’s personality or thought processes.

Katie starts to piece together snippets of what she has been repressing or denying all along. It turns out that Hailey and Ryan’s relationship unraveled when Ryan took an interested in Devon. Although they slept together and Ryan told her he loved her, Devon sensed that she would never really have those feelings for Ryan – all her emotional energy had always been directed at her gymnastics. This realization was compounded when her father, Eric, learned that Ryan and Devon were involved. Instead of being horrified that a grown man was in a relationship with basically a child, Eric just tells Devon that the emotional complications of sex could jeopardize her athletic career.

When Katie confronts Devon, the girl confesses that she is one who killed Ryan – in an accident caused by bad driving and darkness. However, we learn that Devon mowed Ryan down on purpose because she didn't love him and grew worried that being involved with him would ruin her reputation and her Olympic goals. Katie suspects that Devon isn’t really telling her the truth, and it’s clear that many in the town are also not convinced Hailey is to blame for Ryan’s death. Nevertheless, since the townspeople have invested so much in Devon and Eric has decided to back Devon no matter what, the conscience-stricken Katie feels she has no choice but to convince herself that the whole thing was an accident and to carry on with her life.



After helping their star get away with murder, the town gathers eagerly at the Elite Qualifiers to watch Devon compete. The novel ends just before Devon comes up to do her championship routine, so we never learn whether she succeeds or fails.