The book follows Kit Owens and Diane Fleming, two postdoctoral research scientists studying premenstrual dysphoric disorder, as each grapples with the consequences of a secret the other has revealed to them.

Published by Little, Brown and Company on July 17, 2018, the novel parallels Gothic fiction, with references to Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth, physicist Marie Curie, poet Sylvia Plath, and Lizzie Borden.

It was praised by reviewers for subverting the themes of the hysterical woman and the femme fatale, instead analyzing gender, class, and the complex relationships between women.

Kit Owens is a postdoctoral research scientist in the lab of Dr. Lena Severin, who is preparing to begin a groundbreaking study on premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), an extreme form of PMS.

The five postdocs – Zell, Juwon, Maxim, Alex, and Kit – are competing for three spots on the study, when Severin announces a new hire, Diane Fleming.

In their senior year, Diane transfers to Kit's high school following the death of her father and her mother's move to Florida with her new boyfriend, and the two became lab partners in AP Chemistry.

She instead tells the school guidance counselor, Ms. Castro, who writes the Severin scholarship indicating Diane could have been responsible for her father's death.

In the present day, Kit and Alex go to a bar, where she gets drunk on Long Island iced teas and confesses Diane's secret to him before the two have sex.

She goes to the lab the next morning to convince him not to tell Severin and following an argument, he puts too much pressure on a flash column and the test tube explodes, killing him.

[5][6] Robards used barium acetate and her father's death was ruled a heart attack until she confessed her crime to her best friend, Stacey High, nearly a year later while the two were studying Claudius's soliloquy in Hamlet.

[5][6] The novel also took inspiration from the 2009 murder of graduate student Annie Le at a lab at Yale University, where the deceased victim was hidden in a wall.

[7][15] It makes several references, literary and otherwise, including to the novels Wuthering Heights (1847) and Carrie (1974), the films Casablanca (1942) and Hands on a Hard Body (1977), the singer Juice Newton, and the murder suspect Lizzie Borden.

[20] Abbott wrote the book during the 2016 United States presidential election, when she took remarks Donald Trump made about Megyn Kelly having "blood coming out of her wherever"[a] and Hillary Clinton using the restroom as a "metaphor for demonizing women".

[4][15] Severin draws reference in one scene to Lady Macbeth's command to "unsex me", a plea that femininity makes her less capable of murder.

[1] A review in The Washington Post praised the claustrophobic feeling that comes from these settings and the portrayal of the ambition and stress of the postdoctoral characters.

[30] Karen Brissette in the Los Angeles Review of Books praised the novel's haunting nature and the nuance of the relationships between the female characters, which were described as "intimate and feral" by Publishers Weekly.

[26][28] The New York Times's Ruth Ware compared the focus on female friendship and competition to Abbott's Dare Me and You Will Know Me, despite Give Me Your Hand's departure from teenage athletics.

[20] Ware described Kit and Diane's motives as sometimes appearing "opaque" and criticized some of the confusing actions that characters take during the scenes set in the present day, although she stated that this could have been a conscious choice by Abbott.