Set during the Great Recession, Megan Abbott’s novel unpacks the seductive danger of multi-level marketing schemes—and the women they leave behind.

During the pandemic, we binged true crime and cult documentaries like they were comfort food to go along with our sourdough. But it wasn’t the murderers that stuck with crime novelist, Megan Abbott. It was the women. Broke, isolated, and still being sold empowerment—this time through a pyramid scheme.

The intersection of desperation, delusion, and feminism is at the heart of Abbott’s new novel, El Dorado Drive. Set during the Great Recession but pulsing with 2025-level anxiety, the book follows three sisters caught in a seductive web of a multi-level marketing (MLM) scam known as “The Wheel.” What looks like a lifeline unravels into a slow-motion collapse.

“I could feel it everywhere the last few years,” Abbott tells PROVOKED by susan. “Women being told they’re out of options and then sold a way out that’s built to fail.”

But El Dorado Drive isn’t just a thriller. It’s a social novel disguised as suspense. A story that asks why women are still blamed for believing the very myths they were raised to chase, and what happens when women midlife are told they’re out of options.

Megan Abbott Fiction Meets Financial Panic

Set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a once-affluent suburb that became ground zero in the subprime mortgage crisis, El Dorado Drive unfurls during the wreckage of the Great Recession. It’s a setting Megan Abbott knows well. She grew up just outside Detroit, where financial collapse was daily life.

Her characters—Harper, Pam, and Debra Bishop—aren’t chasing ambition. They’re chasing survival. One’s reeling from the financial pressures of her child going off to college. Another is stuck living with the sister she can’t stand, after a toxic divorce emptied her bank account. Their childhood was country clubs and lake houses. Now, they’re just scraping by.

“I became fascinated with women and their money in particular, which is something I feel isn’t written enough about in fiction,” Abbott said.

She’s right. We talk about women’s ambition, women’s empowerment, women’s rage—but we rarely talk about women’s bank accounts. Not the calls from bill collectors, the dried-up retirement funds, the threats of unemployment and homelessness. Not the moments you realize the financial safety net you thought you had—husband, house, hard work—is gone.

And that’s when The Wheel shows up.

The Wheel: When Feminism Gets Hijacked

The scheme starts quietly. It whispers “too good to be true.” The Wheel isn’t selling Tupperware or cosmetics. It’s selling the illusion of power. Women funding women. A financial sisterhood. Liberation—tax-free.

It feels feminist. Until it isn’t.

“Too good to be true is a big thing to me,” Abbott said. “But it’s not too good for someone in a desperate situation who’s looking for an out.”

That’s the engine of the book—and of real life. The Wheel doesn’t just promise money. It promises meaning. It flatters middle-aged women and offers connection in a world that has made them feel invisible. It tells them they’re still valuable, still useful, still wanted. All they have to do is buy in and get other women to do the same. And they’ll be richly rewarded. Maybe not with a stable future, but with something shinier, status, validation. A seat at the table, or in the case of Mary Kay, a pink Cadillac.

These schemes prey on what women are good at, “…sustaining their social network, in the old-fashioned sense of the word,” Abbott said. “You have cultivated many long-term and casual friendships so you don’t have to enter a workplace that thinks you lack the skills and that you are done.”

That’s the con. There’s something deeply cynical in how these scams operate. “It’s easy to get seduced by the co-opting of feminist language,” Abbott said. Solidarity—support women, lift each other up, don’t be afraid to say yes to wealth—but do it in a structure designed for failure. The Wheel spins on that lie. And once you’re in, you can’t afford to stop.

Class, Desperation, and the Girlboss Mirage

The genius of The Wheel isn’t what it offers. It’s who it targets.

Women who’ve done everything right. Women who once had the house, the husband, the savings account north of six figures. Women who’ve slipped, not far, but far enough to feel the panic set in. This isn’t about ambition. It’s about staying afloat.

“No one ever wants to talk about class in America,” Abbott contends. “The reason they don’t like to talk about it is because of the poisonous American Dream: The fantasy that if you work hard enough you can rise. It’s very hard to shake that. It’s in movies, novels, and advertising. The notion of a quick fix to restore your class position is irresistible.”

And no one’s been sold harder than women. Especially women in midlife—no longer shiny, no longer invincible, no longer seen.

That’s why El Dorado Drive hits such a nerve. It’s not just a thriller. It’s a diagnosis. Of the girlboss myth. Of the quiet grief that comes from realizing no one’s coming to save you and maybe never was.

Midlife Isn’t the End—It’s the Reckoning

“Women in that age range aren’t supposed to have ambition or want things for themselves,” Abbott said. “They’re supposed to be done with that—if they were ever allowed to want those things at all.”

That tension drives the novel. These women aren’t navigating high school politics or bad boyfriends like the characters in Abbott’s earlier books. They’re reckoning with everything they were told would protect them—marriage, motherhood, financial security—and realizing it didn’t. They were careful. They were good. And now they’re broke, erased, and being sold a second chance by women just as desperate as they are.

Abbott calls it an “inflection point”—the moment between clinging to everything you thought you knew and blowing it all up. “I felt liberated writing about women at that stage of life,” she said. “It’s a whole new set of concerns. But the same primal desires.”

The rage is still there. The longing. The hunger to be seen, to be chosen. This isn’t 20-something fiction. It’s midlife calamity—40-somethings furious in a quiet, dangerous way.

And it cuts deeper than teen drama ever could.

From Second Puberty to Second Acts

Abbott might have stepped into midlife with El Dorado Drive, but she’s already circling back to adolescence. Her next novel returns to teenage girls—her long-standing obsession. “I’m forever 14,” she said, laughing. “There’s something about that time—the intensity. Your feelings are laid bare and you can’t control them. Sex, aggression, longing, rage.”

But those feelings don’t vanish. They shift. If adolescence is the first explosion, menopause is the aftershock, and for many women, it’s so much louder.

Abbott sees it clearly: “It’s an opportunity for reinvention and rediscovery…”

That’s the power of El Dorado Drive. It refuses to pity its characters. It gives them rage and recklessness. It lets them want things—and screw things up—and claw their way out, even when the exit is messy. Especially when it’s messy.

We need more stories like this one. Ones that don’t sanitize midlife. That don’t turn reinvention into a cliché. That let women crack, collapse, and rebuild without apology.

Because if midlife is a second act, why are we writing it like a sequel?