Ana’s Reviews > Gone Girl > Status Update

I didn't worry about anything that came next.
Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment, and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber. But also happy.

Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl.
Men believed she existed--she wasn't just a dreamgirl one in a mil-lion. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren't, then there was something wrong with you.
But it's tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it's tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants.

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.
But it never happened.

And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they're pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
I would have done anything to feel real again.

We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.