Gone Girl

by Gillian Flynn

and he wishes he could have told his high school self that he would be back here with the girl of his dreams someday.

I know it’s crazy even as I say it, but I can’t help myself – I have become the crazy woman who wants to get pregnant because it will save her marriage.

Amazing Amy and the Domestic Abuser.

up-by-the-bootstraps

Nonononono.

Nick has such a careless memory for other people’s problems, he just assumed it was true.

I want him to be forced to start the treasure hunt (his ego will make him finish it). Check.

Not Diary Amy, who is a work of fiction (and Nick said I wasn’t really a writer, and why did I ever listen to him?), but me, Actual Amy.

We can’t give up hope, Marybeth. But give up Hope is exactly what they did, over and over again.

(How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: ‘I like strong women.’ If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because ‘I like strong women’ is code for ‘I hate strong women.’)

I waited patiently – years – for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy.

Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you?

(Maybe you feel guilty for bringing me here / I must admit it felt a bit queer / But it’s not like we had the choice of many a place / We made the decision: We made this our space),

We’d never be able to undo it, that moment. For that alone, I hated my wife.

The beginning of a wonderful new story, Nick! ‘That’s the way to do it!’

I could no longer hope my wife was pregnant, but I couldn’t bring myself to hope she wasn’t either.

‘I’m reading . . . okay. Punch kills their baby.’ She looked up at me. ‘And then when Judy confronts him, he beats her. To death.’

I had a new persona, not of my choosing. I was Average Dumb Woman Married to Average Shitty Man. He had single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy.

smelled

watched

listened

tasted

I’ve felt

beyond the pale of

I’m not sure, exactly, how to be Dead Amy. I’m trying to figure out what that means for me, what I become for the next few months. Anyone, I suppose, except people I’ve already been: Amazing Amy. Preppy ’80s Girl. Ultimate-Frisbee Granola and Blushing Ingenue and Witty Hepburnian Sophisticate. Brainy Ironic Girl and Boho Babe (the latest version of Frisbee Granola). Cool Girl and Loved Wife and Unloved Wife and Vengeful Scorned Wife. Diary Amy.

post-mistress-coitus

I am married to an imbecile. I’m married to a man who will always choose that, and when he gets bored with this dumb twat, he’ll just find another girl who is pretending to be that girl, and he’ll never have to do anything hard in his life.

I want a divorce. I am in love with someone else. We have to end. I can’t pretend to love you, I can’t do the anniversary thing – it would actually be more wrong than cheating on you in the first place. (I know: debatable.)

Amy had preempted me with her speech about still loving me (lying bitch!),

But Andie was no longer the antidote to my nerves. Quite the opposite.

Andie couldn’t play the game on Amy’s level.

jack off on my tits because, poor you, your mean wife would never let you do that.’

have enough to live on until I kill myself.

The other one is considerably more extreme. I have decided I’m not going to die.

dutifully entered the strange small room dedicated to self-abuse: a place where hundreds of men had entered for no other purpose than to crank the shank, clean the rifle, jerk the gherkin, make the bald man cry, pound the flounder, sail the mayonnaise seas, wiggle the walrus, whitewash with Tom and Huck.

am a man who loves his wife and will find her. I am a man who loves his wife, and I am the good guy. I am the one to root for. I am a man who isn’t perfect, but my wife is, and I will be very, very obedient from now on.

Youfuckingbitchyoufuckingbitchyoufuckingbitch. Come home so I can kill you.

God, the idiot never learns.

With the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, there’s no such thing as an unbiased jury anymore. No clean slate.

Eighty, ninety percent of a case is decided before you get in the courtroom.

I know, suddenly, what I must do.

Oh, I’d definitely like to treat her how she deserves.

Answer: B. Amazing Amy always puts others first.