Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

24:15And I think Gillian Flynn is interested in us interrogating that as well.

24:19Jeff:Yes. It's like layers on layers on layers. She did kick off a new age of unlikable female narrator, but it's really female antihero. And 2012, when this book comes out, we are at peak male antihero in entertainment. We've had The Sopranos and we're in the middle of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. And now we get a female antihero. And it launched a ton, a ton of discourse about whether or not the story was actually feminist. Flynn identifies as a feminist. I think any intelligent reading of this book can see that. I don't think I don't accept even as a possibility of non-feminist reading. Amy gets to be angry, which is a win for feminism.

24:58Jeff:And also she gets to be a sociopath, which is a real thing that some women are. And it made a lot of readers mad to see a woman depicted this way, that she's angry for real reasons that are totally valid inside the patriarchal systems and social expectations of gender that she lives in. And at the same time, she is crazy. And that she is both and that Flynn holds both and expects us as readers to hold both to make this work. And I think she does it masterfully. But as you were saying, the big twist here is not the only important contribution. We'll talk about the cool girl speech, but Amy identifies, Gillian Flynn really identifies this phenomenon of the cool girl, the girl who like can just be one of the guys.

25:47Jeff:And so she's like low maintenance and a fun hang. And she's rewarded for that, but she's sacrificing something of herself. And Amy is mad about the things that she has been asked to perform and the things that she's been asked to sacrifice. And I think that that's a huge reason for the book's success. It wasn't just that the twist was really fun. And like book media did a good job of containing it. None of the reviewers spoiled what the details of the twist were. I remember like Twitter did a pretty good job. People on Twitter were like, oh, my gosh, don't spoil it. Like, we want you to have this experience.

26:22Jeff:But women and I think especially white women, because gender like the interplays of gender and race work differently for non-white women. But white women can really see the ways that our social groups function and the gender expectations that function here and that we have felt mad about, that I have felt angry about to see Amy be angry about those things on the page and, like, take her revenge, even if it is in a psychotic way. Like there is something validating and exciting and just really, really sharp about it. And it landed, Jeff. It sold 2 million copies in the first year. Another 4 million before the book came out in paperback in 2014 alongside the film adaptation.

27:05Two years of a hardcover run. Amazing.

27:07Jeff:A big deal. As of 2019, sales exceeded 20 million copies. So no wonder it's number nine on Amazon's bestselling books of all time. And this would have been the big publishing story of 2012 were it not for Fifty Shades of Grey, which was also big that year. And the companion pieces of Fifty Shades of Grey and Gone Girl and what's going on with public conversations about womanhood and desire and relationships. Like, I hope there's a master's thesis out there. Are we sure we've recovered from 2012? I feel like we might still be living in the long wake of 2012. In so many ways. Gender discourse in so many ways.

27:48Jeff:Yeah, and it just hangs on. This is number 22 on the most popular books on Goodreads. It has three and a half million ratings with an average of 4.15 stars, which is really high. A good Goodreads rating is about 3.75. Number 49 on New York Times Reader's Best Books of the 21st Century so far. It didn't make the critics list. And I think that's part of a bigger trend. This book did not get nominated for any of the big mainstream fiction awards in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize, but didn't get nominated for the National Book Award, didn't get nominated for the Pulitzer. Just something to note.

28:29Jeff:I can't be that mad about it. Like The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich won the National Book Award in 2012, and The Orphan Master's Son took home the Pulitzer, both excellent books. But I think that really also speaks, that snubbing speaks to, we were still in the early days of literary genre being taken seriously. This is a masterful work of crime fiction, and it is also incredibly well written. And we didn't have language. We weren't talking about literary genre yet. Yeah, it's almost beyond these awards and these lists for that particular year. Like it's almost immaterial. It's cultural impact, the quality of the experience and the durability of its pleasures and questions.

29:11I can't feel mad about it because I feel like it's beneath the book to sort of enter into, well, it should have been 47 on the critics list or something like that. though I will say I didn't really consider it hardcore for my own vote in the New York Times best because we get 10. I didn't either. It's really made my top 50, but 10's a lot. But you know, there's a part of me that maybe it's recency bias having read it again. I'm like, how was it not in the top 10? How, Jeff? I don't understand.

29:36Jeff:Also, though, like this show is kind of a microcosm of that thinking. Gone Girl was not in our first 10 episodes, but is in our top 50. Sure. Our first 50. But the only thing I have to add here is like, I think it's in the running for the most influential books of my lifetime in terms of the comps, the discourse initiated. It still feels very current here now 14 years later. I think if this book hadn't been written and it came out today, I think it goes bananas again. A hundred percent agree. Yeah. I think it plays extremely close. There's something kind of timeless about it or it has a very extended relevancy.

30:08Jeff:Yeah. And it stays influential in publishing. I searched Publishers Marketplace and found dozens of book announcements that like this deal has been announced. So and so has sold a thriller compared to readers of Gone Girl to this editor at Random House. Dozens of those. You can find it in marketing copy. I think this has started to wane like it now has been 14 years since Gone Girl. But until a couple of years ago, I was still hearing it's the next Gone Girl. And it's just worth saying nothing has been the next Gone Girl. And I don't think anything will be this is really a pretty singular achievement.

30:43Yeah. Gillian Flynn. Rebecca, we have a Jayhawk on our hands. You'll love to hear it. Far above the Golden Valley, glorious to view. Rock chalk. Gillian Flynn was born in Kansas City in 1971. Her parents were educators. If you don't know, a Jayhawk is the mascot of the University of Kansas, of which Rebecca and I are both one-time attendees. Her parents were educators, and one specialized in teaching reading. So another writer who spent a lot of time around books as a kid. Listeners, it's not rocket science. You read as a kid. There are books around as a kid. Good things happen. And good things happen in the form of writing Gone Girl.

31:16She was a voracious reader from a year ago. She was quite quiet, shy, and reading was a respite from that. Who among us, at least this particular podcaster, can relate to that? She wrote her first story at the age of eight called The Outhouse.

31:31Jeff:Great title, Gillian. Yeah, she went to L.A. right after college, then went to Northwestern to study journalism, spent 10 years covering the entertainment industry, doing like big feature stuff. For example, she spent a couple of weeks with Peter Jackson while he was shooting The Hobbit for a big feature story. So she, I think that's interesting. But also when you read the book, you need to start realizing she's seen all the movies and read all the books and read all the think pieces and seen all the things. Like, it's interesting, Amy and Nick present sort of two sides of a modern, I said, educated sort of cosmopolitan person of their demographic, which is Nick is a, he's seen the movies and he's listened to Franz Ferdinand.

32:12I'll have more to say about Franz Ferdinand in a second. And Amy's like read the book. She's like more of a classically trained intellectual kind of person. But together they form this neo-cosmitella, well-read, well-seen, well-listened to kind of person. But then Gillian Flynn also knows about the tropes of that kind of person, which very much becomes part of the stew here.

32:32Jeff:And that the characters and Flynn herself are versed in both highbrow and lower forms of culture. That Nick tells us about Amy reading Murakami on the beach. But Amy's last job was writing quizzes that sound like basically BuzzFeed quizzes from 2011. And Nick had been a journalist covering the entertainment beat. So he is, you know, listening to the records, seeing the movies, but he doesn't think of himself as an intellectual. And Flynn's being conversant in everything up and down really comes into play here. The book is Hitchcockian in a lot of ways. She has certainly watched a lot of Hitchcock movies and read some Mystic River.

33:13Jeff:She has this really important experience staying up one night reading Mystic River by Dennis Lehane and thinking, that's how you do it? That's how you do it. And she got laid off from her job in 2008. So she's in the same media person zone that Nick and Amy are in. And she starts writing, well, she starts writing her first book, not Gone Girl, but starts writing crime fiction after that layoff and reading Dennis Lehane. Just an incredible lineage for her to come out of. I think the malaise of 2008 and the housing bubble is an important character here. That at the time... The vibes are bad. The vibes are extremely bad.

33:51It's four years after the worst of it, but we're still crawling on hands and knees. I remember this at this point. Just had started Book Riot in 2012 and coming out of things that were going on in New York, especially, but that matters here. She wrote Dark Places and Star-Optics, both with spiky female characters. Sharp Objects, I think, is generally believed to be the next best one. I have not read it. I've been kind of saving it because it's for Gillian Flynn someday. It's good. I've heard it's good. And both have been made into other objects. I think the Amy Adams Sharp Objects is generally more well regarded than the Dark Places.

34:24Gone Girl was optioned extremely, not for TV. I'm sorry. I wrote TV for a movie very early in the process. And then she wrote the screenplay. David Fincher got on board, which is about as a highbrow of a commercial pull as you're going to get for a book like this. has not written a full book since Gone Girl. She's had some other gigs. She's been doing stuff. She has an imprint with Zando that focuses on crime fiction. She's been involved in her own adaptation. She's written for other things. As of March of 2025, that's the most recent citation where she said something about it. She's been working on her fourth novel, which is under contract with PRH.

34:59I assume she signed some sort of deal with Crown, which is a PRH imprint, right around Gone Girl or after. And they have not clawed back the advance. I don't know what's going on. I'm sure it's fraught. I doubt she was saying, you know what, 14 years later, this is exactly where I thought it would be. But she's been involved in movies and other projects at the same time. And she currently, Gillian Flynn popped up on the BR, our new show, Book Riot Podcast. We talk about publishing news. If you haven't checked it out over there, that's more of a current event show. That she was contracted and was working on a screenplay of a remake of The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman for Tim Burton.

35:33Oh, right.

35:33Jeff:I had forgotten about that. Which is a weird thing to do. But, you know, Gillian Flynn still has she still has a lot of credit from this book and the adaptation she worked on ever since. And I have here again, overtly identifies as a feminist just for those of you in the back. I remember having an argument with someone on Twitter in 2012 about whether or not Gone Girl was feminist and just being like, I don't know how to talk to you. Yeah, I can't help you if you can't read that. This is in the text of this book. but thank you for highlighting that I was talking to a friend who lives in Chicago this week, Flynn lives in Chicago and is a great and active member of the literary scene there apparently that she was at an event that the same friend was at in the last six-ish months and she referred to this book that she's working on so it is in process I also have a friend that went to a wedding that she officiated between two book people in the city so she's involved in the life Yeah, she'll hear her.

36:31She'll be on an interview or a panel or introduction. She'll do some stuff for sure. Yeah.

36:35Jeff:Yeah. Staying out there in the literary scene, even if we're not getting new books from her. I do think if you've read Gone Girl, to hold the expectation that sharp objects and dark places are more of the like traditional thrillers. They're very good, but Gone Girl is like it just announces itself as something new. You won't really get a Gone Girl fix from going back to a previous Gillian film. They're very well written. Yeah. I also don't need me to throw any shade of the long gap. I'm just noting it for people that may not know that. But there's also something about, and I've alluded to it here, it also kind of makes sense to me because what do you do next?

37:07There's sort of a checkmate element. Like these characters at the end of this book have checkmated themselves into basically hell, to this domestic hell. And it's such a beautiful, satisfyingly, discomforting ending. Like I don't know what the next, I could imagine, now what? I don't know what the next move is because that was sort of perfect.

37:27Jeff:Yeah, the expectations are almost impossible to me, right? Like you have written one of the best and bestselling books of all time. What are you supposed to do next? Maybe something completely different. Like I would think Gillian Flynn has a blank check to kind of write whatever she wants. But also like this is a masterwork. Maybe I'd be fine with it if she were done. If this is the last thing that we get from Gillian Flynn, I'm so happy that we have it. Well, think about it this way. Like if M. Night Shyamalan's last movie was The Sixth Sense, do we think about his career differently? Yeah. It's kind of interesting, right?

37:57Because it's a similar idea where The Sixth Sense doesn't have the emotional, intellectual, sort of cultural critique embedded in it, right? It's much more of a magic trick. And once you've seen the magic trick, that's kind of it. But at the same time, like now people are expecting you to do that thing again. And it's really hard to do again. And Unbreakable was pretty good. But everything else, I'm like, I'm not so sure about the rest. of the M. Night Shyamalan corpus ever since at the same time. We both read it early, Rebecca. What do you remember of your early reading experience?

38:25Jeff:It was, I believe, 2011, maybe early 2012. And at the time, I still hosted a podcast called Bookrageous from the pre-Book Riot days. Adam Ross, another author, came on the show and he had read Gone Girl in galleys. Our first segment of Bookrageous was always, what are you reading right now? And he was like, I have just read this galley for this incredible book. It's called Gone Girl, you're going to want to keep an eye out for it. So that was the first mention that I heard. I had not read Flynn's previous novels. And then a month or two later, I got a galley. And I want to have a memory of staying up really late reading it.

39:02Jeff:I honestly don't know if that's real. I just remember the feeling of, oh my God. And that the early Book Riot contributor core, our staff and contributors, it went through us like wildfire. It went through book media like wildfire. And we were all just waiting for the book to come out. So the reading public could have the same experience. It was like months in between having read The Galley. And I'm glad now knowing how allergic it turns out I am to hype. I'm so glad I read this book months before it landed. So I didn't otherwise end up like waiting six years to get to it. Yeah. What's it like to read this?

39:38What's it about? I think we've sort of hit on some of these so far. But you mentioned here that the writing is especially good. You can pull out individual sentences, phrases, be like, look at that, look at that thing. Look what she did there. Yeah.

39:49Jeff:And like, A, I could never. Some of these sentences and word choices and the construction that she uses just feel original and sharp and so true to these characters, but creative and human. And this is a thing I'm watching for now when I read of like, what are the really human creative signs of a work? But kind of my ideal combination of excellent writing and a page turning story. It is remarkable that a thriller still feels fresh and exciting on the third reading when I know what the beats of the story are going to be. Like, I really don't want to understate that. And it's about, I mean, the things that we've been talking about, this toxic marriage, about gender politics, and also that Flynn, through Amy and Nick, is willing to say the ugly things that few people are willing to say out loud.

40:39Jeff:Amy articulates the tension, just as one example, between being attracted to a traditionally masculine kind of energy. She sees Nick and she describes him as the kind of guy who carries himself like he gets laid a lot, a guy who likes women, a guy who would actually fuck me properly. And there's a tension between being attracted to that and then being disappointed by and repulsed by his also stereotypically masculine relationship failures. And that she lets her characters be complicated and then lets us stand in that complexity is like there's no handholding here. It's just look how messed up all of this is.

41:20Jeff:Like, let's be in it together. With the sauce on top of Amy as this almost classical tragic figure, like, she is so convinced that she's smarter than everybody else, because most of the time she is. And most of the time she has everything planned out and she has all her ducks in a row, that there's this hubris element where she thinks that she can use people's weaknesses against them. She's aware of all the dynamics, but she's overconfident in her ability to pull it off. She underestimates her opponents. And that is fun and satisfying to see as well. Amy getting her comeuppance in ways is really interesting.

41:58And then doing another reverse. You think she's getting her comeuppance, but then she sort of weasels her way in and out of it at the end. So we can save a little bit of that to put off. I think the thing that really strikes me is how much the early sections of the book are establishing kind of the state of play, not just between Nick and Amy, but between men and women of a certain demographic place. place, like where we are in the world of love and letters amongst the white college, college educated knowledge worker sort of person at this time, and the expectations that are brought to both of them.

42:34Because in a way, both of them are understand, they both understand gender expectations that's different than, say, Mad Men's world of the 1950s. But they haven't also pushed all the way through, nor have we as a culture, to the other side of we need to talk. My expectations may not be met here. What do you want? How can we figure this out together? There's multiple. I don't think on the internet we were doing the men would rather go to therapy than X sort of me. We were not doing that yet.

42:59Jeff:Yeah. And I don't think therapy speak had been out there and like therapy is not a cure-all. Like there's all the things that go into it. But I think in this day and age, there would be some sort of sense of like, did you try, even a mention, did you guys try therapy built into the book? And all the reasons people say that now is in here where the slow accrual of disappointments, of things less unsaid, the quiet quotidian lies of omission or, yeah, that's fine, or I really don't mind when you really do. And those things manifest and boil. And then you become the worst part. You drift towards being the worst bit of yourself away from each other in a communicative, open, healthy relationship to a individual locked in their own understanding, feeling aggrieved, feeling like you can't change anything, and then you make some pretty bad choices, and then what the outgrowth of that really is.

43:49And then a female revenge fantasy of a guy who has cheated on his wife, which is bad. You should not do that. That is a bad thing. Who has been sort of emotionally distant, and the idea that they're sort of—those two transgressions combined means that they are deserving of a punishment of some kind. and what is the appropriate response to that? What's a fantasy response to that? What's a demons responsibly to that? Because there's something satisfying to see Amy torture Nick. But I think for most of us at some point during the book, we're like, that's too far. And where you too far is, is an interesting thought for most people.

44:29Jeff:And I think you're also getting to one of the things that made this book work so well is that it doesn't just appeal to women and validate the things that straight women are angry about in their relationships with straight men. But the dudes get a perspective, too. Amy's expectations are too high. They're impossible. She's rigid. Her parents spoiled her. She comes from this incredibly privileged background because her parents got rich writing children's books about a character named Amazing Amy, who in real life, Amy screws something up. Book Amy does it right. Like, she's all messed up in the head from that experience with her childhood, and there's no way that anybody is going to be good enough for her.

45:09Jeff:And, like, Nick knows it, but the punishment that he experiences is certainly unfair. And I think this is really one of the genius things of this book is that it's not just the cool girl monologue. It's also the bit about the dancing monkeys, which is what Amy and Nick refer to other husbands, other boyfriends as dancing monkeys when their domineering, high expectation, rigid wives are mad that they want to go out with the boys instead of coming to group date dinner. they all say, I really need you to come, or they do the thing you were just saying of like, oh, no, it's fine if you don't come.

45:46Jeff:But actually, they're secretly mad, where Amy was the cool girl. And so it was fine if Nick wanted to go play basketball instead of coming to dinner. She didn't expect him to be one of those dancing monkeys. And that Flynn is addressing what the gender performance looks like on both sides of this relationship is smart for readers, but also really smart for selling books because a lot of men read and loved Gone Girl, too. Like, this is not marketed in the way that a lot of the books that have come after it have been pitched squarely to women readers. Flynn writes from both sides. Yeah. And the Cool Girl slash Dancing Monkey dichomony, they're both bumping up against this central problem of not being able to express expectation and boundaries in a way that's healthy, right?

46:33To say, you know, sometimes it is okay for you to stay out with the guys. and also sometimes it's okay for you to say, I really want you here or that I'm really not going. And what is that negotiation, Rebecca? There is no right answer. That's a constantly negotiated. There is no spreadsheet that you can pull up where you can say, actually, it needs to be a 60-30 or whatever, and then 10%, you flip the coin. That's an, every individual couple has to negotiate for themselves. And the difficulty of seeing into someone else's heart and soul what they want and what they don't want and their relationship to you and their feelings about you, that is, that's a black box.

47:05And the work of trying to negotiate that and feel comfortable with it is the work of a lifetime. And what we're seeing here is what happens if you try to take a shortcut, right? What happens if you want to extract revenge or you want to opt out or you are so unhappy and cowardly that you have an affair with a 23-year-old because it makes you feel good about yourself and she's young and doesn't know anything about you and you take an escape hatch at the same time. So I think those pieces are real. And I don't see them being solved anytime soon as they go.

47:34Jeff:Yeah, they're very real. Like, I have observed this dynamic. I'm sure you have observed this dynamic in our social groups where, like, there is tension between a couple because she doesn't want to seem too rigid. So she says, like, yeah, it's fine if you don't show up, but she is secretly mad. And then he's angry when it turns out that she's secretly mad. And that was another thing that upset a lot of readers about this book. Like Gillian Flynn holds both parties responsible for participating in these performed dynamics. And nobody gets off the hook lightly here. So there's not an excuse. She's holding up a mirror to patriarchy and to the ways that men and women perform gender in our social systems.

48:14Jeff:And nobody looks good in that mirror. And that's part of the point. Like this is a bad system. Mm-hmm. One note I hear is like one thing she's playing with in the absence of direct evidence, we'll use extant patterns to fill in the gaps, right? So the cool girl or the missing girl or the cheating husband, like those are readily available stories. And they are not without – there's a reason those things are out there, but they are also ham-fisted when you're trying to apply them, especially to a novel situation. and Amy is really trafficking in the limits of thinking in terms of trope or thinking in terms of stereotype or ready-made figure.

48:50It's kind of like in Jurassic Park where I can make the dinosaur, but there's some gaps in it, so I need to flop in some frog DNA, but that frog DNA is the very thing that makes the thing go haywire at the end. It's like, okay, we'll just sort of patch it together at the same time. So it really is about media stories and the use of media and stories to manipulate people, but also to see each other unclearly And not have to do the work of like, what is really going on here, especially when you have to apply something to the legal system, which has its own sort of requirements of proof, so to speak.

49:21Jeff:Yeah, yeah. And like, just everyone's afraid of angry women for justifiable and unfair reasons. Like, that's all over this book. And it's interesting to read Gone Girl right now. Like, this has been on the schedule since we conceived of the show. I agree with this. That's completely what you're about to say. It's incredible to read it right now when Yesteryear is in the water. What is Gillian Flynn's Yesteryear, Rebecca? What is Gillian Flynn's Yesteryear? Right. We just read Yesteryear. If you want to hear us dish about that, it's in the Book Riot podcast Patreon. First of all, I don't think we get to Yesteryear if we had not had Gone Girl.

49:56Jeff:Yesteryear is a descendant of Gone Girl. That's interesting. I think I buy that. Yeah. In unreliable narrator ways and other trying to explore gender performance ways, we both found Yesteryear to be much less successful than Gone Girl. Spoiler alert for that. Yeah. One of the things they have in common is that Flynn knows how much fun it is as a reader to spot the holes in a character who thinks that they are perfectly self-aware and on top of everything. And that's one of the fun parts about reading Amy. It comes up in Yesteryear as well. But like, wow, does Yesteryear suffer by close comparison to Gone Girl?

50:31Jeff:And like, I'm not going to do close comparison for all the books that came after Gone Girl and claimed to be. But when I'm looking at the big book of this year, which is Yesteryear and is about a woman who is angry and who refers to the women of the Internet as the capital A, capital W, angry women in Yesteryear, it was impossible not to think about it while I was reading this and to see like the through line and publishing from Gillian Friends sort of kicking the door. down on characters like this to a deeply unlikable main character in a much more cynical story in yesteryear. Yeah. It's also about the going through the motions in your life and the repercussions of that, like, especially on Nick's part.

51:18I think one thing we learned about Amy is that she has been play acting from the very beginning. There is no real Amy, as we understand it, even when she's giving us the quote unquote, true story. Like, I'm not sure what that document is supposed to be that she's, is she writing something down? Like, we really don't know. The only thing we know is actually a text is the fake diary that we're reading from her point of view in the first half of the book. But in those moments, she's even referring to would, quote unquote, I like to sleep with this guy. She has lost some sense of self, and it's only building herself in response to or mimicking of.

51:49She takes on the persona of this young woman she meets at this campground day, that's not the day's end. There's this campground motel situation and she starts to play act as her. Oh, that's what it looks like to be an abused woman on the run. I can take on some of her things. But in the dark night of the soul, she has nothing that she's actually authentically trying to express. It's only reaction to her parents. It's only reaction to Nick. It's only reaction to her, all of her friends who don't have to work and have cupcake shops or something like this. There is no, or she hasn't found or hasn't lost, but her central sort of thing is going through these, taking on these various roles and then going through the motions and then being unhappy with it.

52:27Jeff:Yeah. And that like that points back to and I really saw it on the third reading. Like there are breadcrumbs through the book that Amy is unwell. Like that she is she is a sociopath. There is not an identity there at the center. And there's not real affection for anyone. She likes Nick because she likes how Nick makes her feel about herself. But she's play acting at that moment. Right. She knows it. Right. So she likes the way Nick makes her feel. But she also knows she's performing. So she doesn't she never says this. But I think the reader does is like we know that she feels that the person Nick likes is not actually her, but someone she's performing.

53:05Jeff:But that she likes the control that she exerts over Nick and the behavior she can elicit from him. Like she likes that she can make him a dancing monkey while pretending that that's not what she's doing. Yeah. And she likes being able to manipulate other people to her own ends. But her own ends are liking to manipulate people. Like it kind of is an Ouroboros like eating its own tail. Yeah, it's just narcissism. She has no goal. And one of Nick's frustrations with her is they're in this town in Missouri, and they've been there for a while, and she's not doing anything. And you know why she's not?

53:36Because she doesn't have anything she wants to do. Yeah, exactly. She doesn't have friends. She doesn't really have hobbies or interests. She doesn't want a family. And all those things are fine. But once you start adding them together, she has no direction. And this is where you start like, it's not cool that Nick had an affair, but you can understand it given that she's sort of unmoored. And then once he has an affair and has proven that he's bad, that gives her a role to play. And then she's happy again or she has a purpose again.

54:04Jeff:That the height of her career is writing meaningless quizzes for a website. That in itself tells us something about this person. Like a lot of people did that kind of work in the early Internet boom days because that was the only work available for writers. Today's episode is brought to you by a father-son thriller writing team, Arshia and Ari Masha. Former Dr. Cyrus Darian has spent years hiding from his past, living alone in the Oregon wilderness with little more than a backpack in his survival skills. When he saves a stranger's life in the remote back country, he's drawn to an off-grid commune where a series of unexplained illnesses raises troubling questions.

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57:24FX's The Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu.

57:28Jeff:But that's like, she still thinks in that way? Like, there's not a real depth of humanity to her at all. And so it doesn't excuse the behavior that Nick does in response to her, but I do think it explains it. And that's one of the things that makes the book work so well, is that you understand why Nick was miserable with this person. You understand why their marriage wasn't working. Like, one of my snarky margin notes was like, they've only been married five years, these rookies. Come on, y 'all. Yeah. Get it together. That's at least a 12-year situation to find yourself in at this point. You're supposed to be in the honeymoon phase still.

58:09Jeff:That's right. But there's so much that you can unpack about this, and it really does. If you're listening and you read this when it was first out and you haven't revisited, I really do encourage you to go back and read it again and see what you find this time around. We have a billion straight thoughts, Rebecca. We have to fly through these, but they're so good, we just have to do them. So let's go. Okay, yeah, let's run through a bunch of them. I wonder if Gillian Flynn is bummed that so many bad books have been pitched as the next Gone Girl. Or is it like you? I think you like to see, listen, maybe I'm a horrible person, but someone's saying like the next Gone Girl and it isn't.

58:45You're like, well, that's just reified. That's like the Miami Dolphins pop champagne every time an NFL team loses because of the last undefeated team. Yeah, I think that's right.

58:53Jeff:I'm super glad that I've never been the kind of person who secretly thinks they could pull off the perfect murder. This seems like a lot of work. Listen, I gagged when she described cutting her arm. So the human cost alone, I'm a bad liar and I have a terrible memory and I'm squeamish. So it's like me being a fighter pilot. It's never going to happen because I'm tall, I have bad hand-eye coordination, bad vision, and I get motion sickness. So it's kind of the worst of all possible arrangements for me. We get to ring the bell for one of your favorite rules. Do not assume a character's diary is the truth.

59:26Jeff:In fact, assume they're lying. The best example of it may be. Let's see. What Days Inn has a minibar? This is a real small note, but at one point, Amy's dad goes over to the minibar in their room in the Days Inn and makes himself a gin and tonic. And I have not been in a Days Inn that has a minibar, especially a Days Inn in a small town in the middle of Missouri. I can say it's been a good 30 years since I've been in a Days Inn. So I'll defer to your knowledge of inexpensive roadside motels in this particular. Okay. Admittedly, not a lot of experience there. Your girl is bougie. But what days in has a mini bar?

1:00:03Jeff:Please report back. I think one of my favorite, well, my favorite side character in the book is Nick's sister Margo, who he calls Go. And I would read a whole spinoff about her. He describes her as she of the rocket science brain and the rodeo spirit. It's pretty good. And that's also high compliments. If someone describes you that way once, you tell that story for the rest of your life and put it on your tombstone. the rocket science brain and the rodeo spirit come on it's good tattoo tattoo alert rocket science brain she of the rocket science brain and rodeo spirit tattoo alert anybody let's see also jeff what is the most midwestern thing about all right let's do this is missouri the midwest yes If it's not the Midwest, what is it?

1:00:49I have a Kansans antipathy for Missouri, so take this with all the grains of corn. I'd draw the line of, I think you have to be a free state to be in the Midwest. You have to have been a free state. Missouri is the South. No! It's more the South than the Midwest.

1:01:05Jeff:Missouri is not the South. Having lived in the Midwest and the South, Missouri is not the South. I said what I said. I'm not taking it back. Okay, either anyway. What is the most Midwestern thing about this story? Pickles wrapped in cream cheese and salami or parents who tell long and overly detailed stories about mundane experiences? I think the pickles wrapped in cream cheese is amazing. I also think there's another straight thought. She did not dwell enough about this is summertime. It's miserable in southern Missouri in along the river. Mug is a mug in there. Oh my God. The Skeeters alone, they'll eat you alive.

1:01:44That's one thing. In books, they never go to the bathroom and they never put on bug spray. And that's what you're doing in the summertime in the Midwest. You're just putting on bug spray all the time.

1:01:51Jeff:Yeah. You smell like DEET for three and a half months. Yeah. What else you got? Is this the contemporary read-alike for Wuthering Heights? Marriage horror story, terrible people doing terrible things. I don't hate it. I think at its core, it's meaningfully different in that the main characters in Withering Heights are sort of drawn together like forces of nature, where no such deep abiding sexual attraction is pulling these two people together. Though things aren't great between two people and how that goes, certainly, but I think at its core, they're actually about different things. My last one is I just really spent a lot of stray thought time thinking and wondering about what an updated version of this story in today's media environment is with the Internet and social media being the way that they are, like as present and as siloed.

1:02:44Jeff:like how do you try to play the media in the way that amy and then eventually nick play the media when the media is so fractured and is everywhere and it's on all the time uh like people are watching the news for their updates about nick and amy in 2012 and he's going on he's getting a big interview and the nancy grace avatar on the fox news stand-in and is doing shows about him doing big episodes and that's how everyone's keeping up. And like, that's not what we'd be doing in 2026. I think it's just a fascinating thought experiment of what this would look like now. Yeah, to relate a straight thought, like the metafictional element brought to bear here, I think, I don't know if it precipitated or anticipated or just was going to happen anyway.

1:03:30The long string of metafictional murder mysteries we get now in the form of true crime, but also in the form of like knives out, early murders in the building where I know that you know, that I know, that you know, that we all know the tropes and all the expectations and the gymnastics people have to do to try to surprise you or befuddle you or, in sorcery, you don't know what's happening. It's more you don't know what's happening, so you're surprised, rather than you're surprised by sort of using an innate critique of something and the tropes of something to comment on it and also further the story at the same time.

1:04:05Flynn enters the pantheon of people I do not want to be perceived by.

1:04:08Jeff:One million percent. No one gets off well here, and I assume if I were somehow perceived here, I would not get off well either. Maybe we'll talk in Office Hours about who the— If you had to pick which character to be in this, who would you be? We could do this. I said, what if Gillian Flynn had written the Barbie movie? Because I was thinking of that speech that America Frere gives in Barbie, and it seems like— It's impossible to be a woman. Yeah. Don't you think it's related to the— Do we get that speech without the cool girl monologue? Like, they're related. Oh, no. I think they are related.

1:04:38I think the cool girl one is more sophisticated. It's certainly appropriate. I'm not there to quibble with the truth of it. But like the cool girl thing is doing something a little more sophisticated. But like Gillian Flynn playing with Barbie itself is trying to play with tropes about gender and like Gillian Flynn make it a Barbie murder mystery written by Gillian Flynn who says no. That's my straight thought.

1:04:57Jeff:I love this connection because I remember seeing America Ferrera give that speech in Barbie and being like, I totally get this. And it's kind of on the nose. Right. And Greta Gerwig has definitely read Gone Girl a bunch of times. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The cool girl's speech is totally the parent of that. It's impossible to be a woman's speech. Yeah. Usually Jeff can come. I'm referring to myself in the third person here. That's how shamed of myself I am at this. Oh, no. Usually Jeff can come up with some reason to explain why a book is mentioned. But Greta, this sort of runaway, is reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

1:05:32And we're told she's only reading it because the only choice is black beauty. I get that. But Gillian Flynn could have chosen any book to put there. And I was looking at it. And I remember reading The Martian Chronicles. It's this fix-up book where Bradbury put together a couple of short stories with some connected vignettes. It's about Mars and people. And I just don't have a lot there. Weird pick. What's unweird is that we just did – it'll be out by now. But like we just recorded Ray Bradbury for an I-451. They're all connected, Rebecca, all these books.

1:06:00Jeff:Yeah. Interesting to see Bradbury show up in Flynn's references. The idea of the cool girl is AAA and rightly so. Note, I'm not trying to pull cool girl down at all. But I'm also saying do not sleep on her formulation of the cool guy. And I'm just picking some of these bits. I met a boy, a great, gorgeous dude, funny, cool ass dude. Give me a man with a little fight in him. A man who calls me on my bullshit. and in parentheses, but also who kind of likes my bullshit. It's Nick, laid back and calm, smart and fun and uncomplicated, untorture, happy, nice, big penis. And then description of Nick, you literally cheat, steal and lie, hell kill to convince people you're the good guy.

1:06:41It ain't easy for anybody, but I'm just throwing those out there.

1:06:45Jeff:Performances of gender cost everybody. Hello, Gillian Flynn. Is Nick's part of the story, the manuscript he wrote that Amy made him delete at the end? Oh, I don't think so. I don't think so. I think not, but I think it's interesting. Yeah, I think we're just with him in real time. I'm going to redeem. Jeff's going to redeem himself here with Hannibal, Missouri. Why is it set in Hannibal, Missouri? We are told explicitly, she doesn't make this a mystery that, oh yeah, this is where Mark Twain was from. And I was thinking about Huck Finn. There's a fake murder in Huck Finn as well. Oh yeah. That Hulk uses to get out of a situation, but then gets somebody else in trouble and is pinned on Jim, right?

1:07:21We did James, so connective tissue there. So it's like, is she thinking about parallels between systems of oppression and, like, faking your death as a way out of systems? And it just doesn't work. Like, it doesn't help anybody. It just makes it worse. The empty mall and the blue books, boys. So we're given this scene of, like, this empty mall and then the shutdown factory. And the people that used to work there still hang out and are, like, living their own private dystopian. Well, Station 11 is already dystopia. But like the bad guys in Station Eleven are hanging out at this mall in 2012, Rebecca.

1:07:48It was a weird scene. And I don't know. It was a very strange thing.

1:07:52Jeff:I think it comes out of like my the place that I've seen those kinds of scenes is zombie movies. Like there's always the bad guys hanging out in the malls. And I think Gillian Flynn is well versed in just the horror universe. Right. But it does feel like we're into a different genre books. Yeah, that's true. Very unusual. I was just watching Black Panther with the fam and was thinking of Killmonger, the villain of Black Panther played by Michael B. Jordan. The villain who is right and struggles to figure out what to do with that rightness is the way I'm formulating it here. So I think Amy and Killmonger, they're identifying something real and bad and needs addressing.

1:08:28But they don't really know what to do except revenge. That's all they've got.

1:08:32Jeff:Yeah, setting your husband up to look like he murdered you is not the answer. I said already to get a gag to the description of Amy cutting herself. Franz Ferdinand on the stereo, Take Me Out. This is still played on the radio here in Portland where the dream of the late 90s and 2012s is still alive. I was very possible I could have run Nick and Amy at a party at a Brooklyn walk-up roof sometime in 2006. I remember this world very well. I wasn't in the main, but I was occasionally invited to the kind of scene I understood here. The quizzes. I thought the idea that Amy wrote these quizzes, which requires her to be conversant in ready-made memes of understanding of how people are, think, and behave.

1:09:10So smart. She will include a quiz for no reason other than to help her think, right? And it's always the other choice that she doesn't know to put on the quiz that's the right answer. There's always like answer E, which is talk to somebody, tell them how you feel. and that's never on there because it doesn't ever seem to be something she's ever considered. I think Gillian Flynn is now on the Mount Rushmore of man, it has been a while, living authors joining Edward P. Jones, Donna Tartt, George R. R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, and Gillian Flynn. My brain went to a weird place too. I was thinking, so this idea of the scavenger hunt slash treasure hunt that's putatively done for the enjoyment of the person it's done for, but is really a test of that person's devotion.

1:09:56It's a nightmare. This book came out in June 2012. The episode of Parks and Rec where Leslie Knope gives Ben this absurd thing is February 2012. Is this peak scavenger hunt as a representation between the difference of understanding and care and male feel in our relationships? Is it 20? Is this it? What is in the water about this depiction of this? Has anyone actually ever done this? Is this something people do?

1:10:20Jeff:Yeah, this is a thing. And maybe it's because of Amy's character coming out of women's magazines, but having read my fair share of Cosmos as a young woman, this is a thing, or at least it was a thing, that was presented as romantic. Like, set up a treasure hunt or do a scavenger hunt where all of the clues are to places where you had great kisses or important memories or whatever. And of course it feels like a test to the other person who doesn't live in your head and have the exact same important memories. but this was very much in the conversation about like women and romance at least in the earlier 2000s.

1:10:58Jeff:I don't know if people are still doing this today but it was advice. Yeah, I feel like it's up there with giving someone a dog is like that's not a gift, man. You're not doing that. I want to list the best metafictional works in each genre. I'm not a reader of genre but I'd like to read some. The Gone Girl for horror. What does that look like? I don't know enough about horror. Someone can shoot me an email. Jeff's overthinking at corner continues. It's now more of a dodecahedron than a corner. But sometimes mystery alerts, they sprinkle in little clues about what the answer is. And the nickname for a mystery is a whodunit, and Amy's last name is Dunn.

1:11:34So I don't know. Maybe there's a clue there at the beginning. Whodunit? Amy. But so is Nick's last name. I know, but I'm just saying. Whodunit? Well, they both Dunnit. That's what we learned. They're both guilty.

1:11:43Jeff:That's true. Okay. You remain right in your dodecahedron over there. Okay. Thanks. And lastly, another tough look for Jeff's. Come on, Jeff. character Jeff and Greta basically blackmail her into giving them all of her money. He went from catfish theft to robbing women who are on the lam. Very tough for Jeff. And gives rise to one of my favorite phrases in the book that Amy describes Jeff's catfish theft as the illicit piscine economy. That's another A I could never. No. All right. I had a lot. Sorry. Right. Or you're welcome, depending on how everyone's experience of that particular run was for everyone.

1:12:22Jeff:We got a little manic about Gone Girl. It's okay. It's okay. All right. Notable quotes, Rebecca. Of course. It's time. It's time. I've looked through my fingers at this, but I'm so glad. Praise be to Goodreads. They picked the cool girl speech as the number one notable quote. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the cool girl means I'm a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gangbang while somehow maintaining a size two.

1:13:02Jeff:Because cool girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool girls never get angry. They only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead. Shit on me. I don't mind. I'm the cool girl. I'm not sure. Do I have anything else to say? I mean, it kind of speaks for itself. I don't know, Rebecca. And reading that again, too, where does your eye track? It's the whole combination. The hot, funny, brilliant woman who adores football and poker and dirty jokes that like you, the cool girl is to perform everything and therefore nothing. Like the only way to successfully do this is to sacrifice some component of yourself.

1:13:46Jeff:And it's that hot and understanding and they never get angry. Like I didn't it actually goes back to Fahrenheit 451. I didn't need anything from you. You liked me. You were drawn to me because I didn't need anything from you. And like don't be high maintenance is a message that women receive from the culture and from men that don't be like don't be high maintenance. be easy to get along with and easy to get along with means like the things that I like and let me do what I want. Yeah. I think that one of the pieces I struggle to make a sense out of is Nick and Margo's twin relationship. And we come right up to the line of inappropriateness.

1:14:25I think one thing Gillian Flynn might be interested in here is because there's a version of this description that sounds like it sounds like you want to have sex with your college roommate, Nick. Like, isn't this the nature of your college roommate who has the anatomy that you find sexually attractive? Like, that's kind of what you're looking for. And people like this may exist out there, but it's kind of a griffin, you know, kind of a mythical creature, a centaur of two different kinds of things put together at one time. And not just that you want that, but that you expect that. And anything that's not that is somehow too needy or demanding or emasculating or something.

1:15:04Jeff:Yeah, it's the difference between wanting to have sex with women and liking women. Right. Or be in a relationship with them. But you know, at the same time, another way of putting it that where else do you want to go? Who is Amy? Sorry, why is Amy amazing? And Andy's just able this is the other character in the amazing Amy picture books. Well, don't you know, a lot of powerful, fabulous women who settle for regular guys. And Amy certainly thinks that that's what she has done. I've watched House Hunters. I know this is a thing that happens in the world. Flynn just really is willing to name it. Amy also says, most beautiful good things are done by women people scorn.

1:15:44Jeff:And then Nick has a moment of observing Amy. I already knew what she was going to say, the mantra of all attractive women. Women One of the sharpest and most difficult things to reckon with and untangle about gender and especially about how women are expected to perform gender is that part of it is supposed to be agreeing with men that women are difficult. And that if you're a pretty woman, other women don't like you. You're supposed to not get along with other women because they're threatened by you. And women, like the narratives are that women are competitive with each other. So it's like this feeds back into cool girl.

1:16:22Jeff:Like, well, I just don't get along with women that well because I'm so hot. So I'm going to be one of the guys instead. Right. And what's the most what's the highest compliment you can pay an attractive, famous woman is that they're so down to earth. Right. Like something like that at the same time. Like, yeah, you have to you have to like come down, come down, come down. You are all the things that Amy is. If you are brilliant and sharp and high maintenance and you have high expectations and you're perceived as difficult, you cannot win this game. Your hotness won't win it for you. And I think the real point and what Flynn is going for is the game is unwinnable.

1:16:59Jeff:No one wins it. The only acceptable, the only successful move is to reject the premise altogether as a very proudly difficult woman. like also stoked i should have put this in stray thoughts stoked to see hot dogs get so many mentions on the page lots of hot dogs that's how you know she's from chicago not one mention of hot dogs in tana french's books by the way i should mention i've got a few anything else you want to hit and there's a bunch so i don't want to short change it but there's a moment where amy like almost gets it when she's in disguise like after she's left nick She's chopped her hair off.

1:17:37Jeff:She's dyed it this dark, mousy color. She's been systematically gaining a little weight. And I do mean a little because she started as a size two and she's gained like 12 pounds. But she says, I'm not just pretty anymore. I'm pretty for my age. It is the truth. My value has decreased. And so we see her recognizing the system, but she continues to accept its terms. She says, I don't miss men looking at me, but she does want Nick to want her. She does still find it to be an expression of her value if other people want her. And the successful conquering of the system that we're in is to just decide that you don't care if men are looking at you when you're a woman.

1:18:21I had this quote you had as well. This is Gillian Flynn joins the zero to well-read philosophical core. It's good. She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book. It's good or it's bad. I like it or I didn't. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.

1:18:40Jeff:Like a hot dog. But yes, come sit by us, Gillian Flynn. There's more to say than it's good or it's bad. we haven't talked about this but a really striking opening line slash paragraph this is from nick's point of view when i think of my wife i always think of her head so i'm just going to stop there for a second i'm not going to do this for the whole thing but like if we know pretty quickly you pick up this book that this is a mystery thriller you've read the blurb there's a woman who's missing and then to see a man think of a woman like this all right because we've consumed all the stories we've seen seven what's in the box like we've done all these things before to see a woman to see a man excuse me look at a woman like this like an object we're already the mode of this guy did it from from the eighth word essentially to continue here the shape of it to begin with the very first time i saw her it was the back of her head i saw and there was something lovely about it the angles of it like a shiny hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil so he doesn't see her face not identifying her as a real person with interiority completely objectifying and like maybe the most basic version of it.

1:19:50Now we learned that what Nick is doing is a little more nuanced than that is like, he really, he knows that he doesn't know her. Right. But we don't know that yet, but it's hard to shake that. We can't shake that from the beginning of like, this is a woman looking at a person's head and sort of being obsessed with the physicality object of it. And you're like, he going to hit that head. He going to hit that head. That's what we're thinking.

1:20:10Jeff:I probably already did. Yeah. Yeah. Just good writing here. My wife was no longer my wife, but a razor wire not daring me to unloop her. And I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. This is Amy almost getting it again, but she doesn't get that she doesn't get it where she's a nihilist, essentially. If all of us are play acting, there can be no such thing as a soulmate because we don't have genuine souls. Like there's nothing into us to connect to other people. So it's pointless. also her the list of roles she's playing and how we also i think the thing i would encourage reader to get is that we get these characters amy has played in her life we know who these people are amazing amy preppy 80s girl ultimate frisbee granola and blushing ingenue and woody hep bernie and sophisticate brainy ironic girl boho babe cool girl the loved wife the unloved wife the vengeful scorned wife and now diary amy wasn't that delicious so good your bill ladies i got it no i got it seriously i insist i insisted first oh don't be silly you don't be silly people with the wells fargo active cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited two percent cash rewards on purchases okay rock paper scissors for it rock paper scissors shoot no The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card.

1:21:30Visit wellsfargo.com slash active cash. Terms apply. This episode is supported by FX's The Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties, and access. At its center is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's The Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu. Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store? It's actually a club with cool finds and like a whole community.

1:22:11Jeff:It's a club. Of course, Jason. It's in the name. Sam's Club. Oh, yeah. Come join us. Sam's Club. Gillian Flynn does know the Midwest, even if she sets it in Missouri. Why this isn't across the river in Kansas, I will never know. Midwest is full of these types of people. The nice enoughs. Nice enough, but the soul made of plastic. Easy to mold, easy to wipe down. The woman's entire music collection is formed from Pottery Barn compilations. Great line. Her bookshelves are stocked with coffee table crap. The Irish in America. Mizzou football, a history in pictures. We remember 9-11, something dumb with kittens.

1:22:47Pretty good.

1:22:49Jeff:Such a great writer. All right. Is it for you? Is it not for you? If you don't know by now, Rebecca, I'm not sure what else we can say. Oh, man. Warning you off or pointing you toward. Just domestic suspense of the highest order. And also, like, if you're here, you have not read Gone Girl and you liked Yesteryear, but you want to see how, like, it's really done, Gone Girl. Yep. We have managed to avoid talking about an issue we do not care about but comes up. If you need to have a character that you like and that you root for, you are going to have a very tough time with this. Yeah. The immortal questions that Art asked, which of these are primary here?

1:23:28I'm entering a new one into the docket. I've just put it at the end, but we'll get to that in a second. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? And also, who is my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? Who am I and who are my people? And lastly, I'm entering in, this is one I should have brought in earlier, what is justice?

1:23:50Jeff:Ooh, I like this. Actually, I think the original one I used to say was what is the nature of justice, but I don't know the difference of it, but I'm putting it what is the nature of justice there. All right, Rebecca, this is not one of those ones like, yeah, it's all of them. Just pick your poison here. What do you think you want to talk about? What is the good life is really on this. They've made each other miserable. What is the good life? Do we get a representation of the good life here? Nobody in this book is happy. So I think the closest any of these characters could get to is like, not this.

1:24:20Jeff:Whatever this is, I don't want it. The happiest moments are Nick and Go at the bar being brother and sister. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's actual openness. It's talking about your needs, letting yourself be weak. Like everyone in this book is so consumed with performing strength. like never letting anybody see a moment of weakness. So there's that element too then of, is this all there is? But it really is about how do I know what I know? How do I know what I know? Where does it come from? Yeah, that's the real one. What is like, what is the truth? Is there a truth? Especially in interpersonal relationships where two people experience the same moments but have different interpretations of them.

1:24:59Jeff:And then this, of course, what is the nature of justice? I don't think that anyone here is asking what the nature of justice is. Flynn is interested in it, but Amy had decided a long time ago what she thinks Nick deserves. Yes. Well, I think that's the idea in the reader because it plays upon, it traffics in the idea of a revenge fantasy, especially for the wrong, the scorned woman who you're like, yeah, get him, get him, girl. Like that's a natural response that happens in art. but you wouldn't get you wouldn't excuse amy's behavior in like the court of rightness to say you know what he cheated on you he's been distanced you get to frame him for murder and psychologically like because her original plan is going to kill herself right and we have i don't have a good read on she decides not to i don't know she's a coward or she sees something else that she wants but she doesn't go through her ultimate plan to like i guess have him live his life in prison is that was going to be her goal i read i i've always read that flip where she decides not to kill herself, but to go back to him as evidence of her weakness.

1:26:01Jeff:That like, she sees him saying the things that she's always wanted him to say, and she thinks that she's won. And she can go back and just extract more of that for the rest of her life. Yeah. But the idea of like, when it comes to injuries of the heart, especially, what is just? And I think the answer for most of us who have become adults and learned is there is no recompense, right? There's not a lot you can do. Nor is it necessarily a penal system to have an affair. I mean, again, you have an affair or you drift apart or you want to live a different life. That's damage to somebody else. But do you owe someone else your life?

1:26:37Do you have to stay in something that's unhappy if you're unhappy? If the other person, like, I think these are very open questions in my own social circle. We don't have good answers to these. Because, you know, someone leaves a relationship after a long time that was loving and healthy or seemingly, and one other person feels it that way. where we get mad at those people, but we also, I don't think, say, you should have to stay. We don't believe that. And there's a conflict there that I think is very difficult to reconcile. So when it comes to matters of interpersonal dynamics, like what does justice look like for someone who's agreed to sign up with your life with someone, but they damage that or they leave or there's no good answer.

1:27:12Jeff:Or they're not who they were pretending to be. Well, that's right. They were not who they were pretending to be. So then you weren't who you're pretending to be and we just stuck ourselves. It all falls apart. Rebecca, are we sure this isn't about art and writing? It is more about art and writing than you would think at first glance. Is it ever? Yeah, yeah. Love that when it's sneaky. Could you get most of the gist of this from watching the Signal adaptation? I'm so pleased to tell you that you super can. This is a great adaptation. I just got to write about it for the site. Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay.

1:27:44Jeff:As you said, David Fincher directs it. He's a perfect choice to direct a movie like this, especially when you think about his other projects fight club seven zodiac the social network murders gender all kinds of interesting stuff going on really contextualizes what kind of story gone girl is the soundtrack by atticus ross and trent reznor is like just come on and then i think this is your note but i totally agree ben affleck as nick is the best casting decision of all time like if the oscar for casting had existed in 2012 this casting director should have gotten it for that one alone. Like Rosamund Pike is great as Amy, but Ben Affleck as Nick, who knows he has a punchable face.

1:28:26And a cleft chin, which is a big deal here.

1:28:29Jeff:It's perfect. But also, I think it also is trafficking in the reason it's perfect casting is not just Affleck as a physical body and actor, but all the baggage Ben Affleck brings as Ben Affleck, right? So we are conversant in the meta stories about Ben Affleck, much in the same way we have to be conversant in the meta stories for Gillian Flynn to pull the rug out for under us. So like that we get that it's perfect casting is a great sign for Gillian Flynn that it's going to do what we want it to do, which I think is wonderful. It is one of the great adaptations and just a wonderful movie on its own.

1:29:04Yeah, it's very, very good. It's very good. Again, if we had to do another one, movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets.

1:29:09Jeff:Miss Piggy giving the cool girl speech would give me my entire life. I think that it would be great. I don't think I can hear some of the words that come out of Miss Piggy's mouth. Also, the hot dog line at the end is very fraught. If Miss Piggy has to say. I hadn't thought about that great point. Fraught stuff. We can sit with complexity here. Talk about meta. Great. I would also be open to a musical, but only if Neil Patrick Harris comes back to play Desi. Boy, that's really specific. for the seventh most important character. You have a casting wish. But he's great in it too. Like also great casting of him as Amy's ex-boyfriend that she has told lies about and he thinks he's helping her at the end of the story.

1:29:54Jeff:And Neil Patrick Harris, one of the great stage musical performers. So I think that would be fun. Rosamund Pike is very good as Amy, but she has to act. Whereas Ben Affleck just gets to be and it's not fair, but she's very good. It's great. Also, Tyler Perry as the lawyer, Tanner Bolt is like, he's just also really stellar good performances all around unpopular opinion i kind of like tanner bolt he's good at his job he is good at his job we like competence usually the figure of like the divorce attorney or the you know the richard gear in um chicago like that kind of like i'll take any gig for the cash is a punching bag but i don't know there's something about the way he's presented like tanner knows what he's doing and maybe we know that nick is innocent and so he's working on the side of like trying to figure out the puzzle if he was guilty and doing the same things we like Tanner Bolt can go jump into something hot and boiling.

1:30:45Miscellaneous, trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes and more. Rebecca, what do you have?

1:30:49Jeff:So in the early drafts, the story was just told from Nick's point of view, and he would describe Amy and Flynn just sort of hit on like, wait, let's let Amy speak for herself, and then hit on this mechanism of the twist and the fake diary. So like, she's a writer who does a lot of drafts. Another thing that came out of her writing process is the cool girl speech was an exercise that she was just giving herself to do when she was suffering a bout of writer's block. In a previous version of the book, Amy wasn't writing online quizzes, but she had a column for a women's magazine. And so Flynn was like, okay, let's just bust the writer's block.

1:31:25Jeff:Let me just come up with what kind of column Amy would write. And the cool girl speech comes out. And And Flynn even says in an interview that she typically has a commitment to not put any of her writing exercises actually into the books because it just feels indulgent. But she saw the cool girl speech and she knew that it was something. So we came close to not having it. That's so weird. So weird. It was also partially inspired by Cameron Diaz's performance in There's Something About Mary because that character is a doctor. like she's beautiful and she's a doctor and she's self-possessed but she also is one of the guys and Flynn had this moment of like of course the men all love her she's a character who was created by a bunch of men what's your sense of the is is cool girl is the manic pixie dream girl a subset of the cool girl oh um because this was coined I looked this up the I looked this up earlier but I forgot to put in, but you're talking about Cameron Diaz reminded me that the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl came out of Kirsten Dunst's performance in Elizabethtown.

1:32:33So it predates Cool Girl, a one-dimensional character existing only to provide emotional support to the protagonist or to teach him important life lessons while receiving nothing in return. I guess the Cool Girl is more of a, I mean, often the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a point of romantic interest, but maybe not the end point, like maybe not the girl you marry or something like that. I'm not sure, but that's an interesting dichotomy here to think about at the same time.

1:32:59Jeff:Yeah, I'm going to have to puzzle over that one. Okay, yeah. Sorry, I just sprung that on you. Listener, if you've got a good take, podcast.bookwrite.com. They feel meaningfully different to me, but they live in the same universe. Yeah, I think that's about it. I just need some time to untangle why. This is what Gillian Flynn said she learned from Mystic River. Start with a character, go deep and dark, and then craft a mystery. I think you can feel it, especially if you look at the structure of this. The opening 20, 30 pages are, there's a lot before Amy's gone. It's like, from Nick's point of view and how unhappy he is and how he recognizes that things aren't great.

1:33:31He turns the corner, Amy's making him crepes for their anniversary, and he says bile rises in his throat. We don't know why yet. We're just giving a state of play that they're in this toxic, maybe is a little too strong, but maybe not. I don't know. I don't know.

1:33:45Jeff:She's framing him for murder. Well, he doesn't know that yet. He doesn't know that yet. Yeah, it's toxic. Hot takes, Rebecca. I think this is a good, it's a good thing that Gone Girl came out before the internet was really peak internet because Gone Girl calls for a lot of nuance and the internet is not good at it. Yeah, threads would not do well with Gone Girl. That would not go well. Yeah, I'm so glad I don't have to live through 2026 internet discourse about what Gone Girl is. I also think it should be retired as a comp title. It sets writers up for failure. It sets readers up for disappointment.

1:34:21Jeff:It spoils what are supposed to be surprises in books. Like, let's just let it go. Yeah. I think this is the best crime novel I've ever read. I read all the Christie. I read a bunch. But because it's about ideas that seem more current, it does about fictional things. For me, no one's going to appoint me jury to crown the best crime novel all the time. But for me, I think this is the best crime novel I've ever read. One of my other hot takes, if you need a character to like in a work of art, I am not sure how to talk to you. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're dumb. I just, that's not a wavelength that I know how to cross the chasm to get across to you.

1:34:55And this is a great example of it.

1:34:57Jeff:Yeah, I agree. Anything else you want to get out? No, got all the takes off. All right, Rita likes. I have a couple. I said The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. The less you know about it, the better. And then once you read it, Google the murder of Roger Ackroyd controversy. It's fun to go see. What else? You have a bunch here. Let's see. Other good female revenge thrillers out by Natsuo Carino and Penance by Kenei Minato. A couple of things that inspired Gillian Flynn are Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee and Scenes from a Marriage, the film by Ingmar Bergman. There's also an HBO remake turned into a TV miniseries with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac that is really solid.

1:35:39Jeff:And then I would recommend also Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross, who is the author who recommended Gone Girl first to me. But Mr. Peanut is itself a dark Hitchcockian twisty thriller about a marriage gone bad. And they're interesting companion reads to each other. Yeah. What are those year to well-read titles to connect to? The Great Gatsby is overtly mentioned at least twice, I think. But it's very much about desire and falling in love with the idea of someone versus the actual thing. And once you're presented with the reality of it, not handling it very well, to say the least. A lot of connectivity there.

1:36:15Rebecca, how about the secret history? I think I saw some comps when it came out, or like I was reading some reviews in early coverage. I think what's interesting is that Gillian Flynn comes to traffic in and get some ideas from writing a mystery, whereas Tartt gets to a mystery from a place of wanting to talk about art and beauty and other things like they're coming to a similar place but from different

1:36:39Jeff:directions yeah they feel spiritually related to me that like that the vibes of like this dark and tangly web of people it's messy they're treating each other badly everyone's kind of just high on their own supply right i wrote james by personal effort because of the huck finn but also than thinking about James as being so conversant in the dominant culture that he can then manipulate it to his own ends, kind of like Amy is doing with representations of gender there. I also was thinking about Guy Montag and Millie from Fahrenheit 451. This disconnection, right? I thought of Nick as looking at Amy's head, not unlike Guy encountering Millie just sitting there and having her shells in and just feeling like an object that's impenetrable.

1:37:25There's no way of going what's in. It is so far. I have no ability to get inside there. And also maybe there's nothing in there. This person has been brainwashed and Amy is her own issues, but maybe there's a reason that he can't get in there. Maybe it's unreasonable to ask him to make that. That's a fun one. It's a good comparison. I mean, we just read it. So that's there. Cocktail Party Creepsheet, where we try to offer three to five takeaways. We have three here. Two of them are yours and one is mine. Rebecca, what do you have?

1:37:52Jeff:Are women crazy is the wrong question. Like, of course, some women are crazy, but the question is what made them that way. And Flynn spends a lot of time answering that. Also, Gone Girl did something that no thriller had done before, and it made it impossible for another to do it again. Like, that's the way to own the corner. Yep. Is to pull up the meta-fictional ladder behind you there. The only one is patriarchy is not good for men either. Less bad than for people who don't know if it's men, but it still blows. Pay attention. Yes. Final beat is zero to a watered score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest.

1:38:27I think much like Fortnite 51, we kind of have to ping this out for something that's only 14 years old. What's as high as we can give to something that's 14 years old?

1:38:38Jeff:Seven or eight. Yeah. Eight. Eight. Like for the, you know, Girl on the Train, Where the Crawdads Sing of It. And then also that like thousands of books with girl in the title have come after this one. the next 20 years will be very important for the legacy of this book because I think you're right we're out of the we're coming out of the initial 15 to 20 years where you know we were reading it at the same time as feeling very current it's a bunch of comp titles I'd think that Gillian Flynn not having a bunch of other books matters at this point right like this was not you know the Underground Railroad with Whitehead there's things that happened after it Nickel Boys and like the profile is raised but right now this is peak Flynn and it hasn't really built on it.

1:39:20We'll see how that goes. God, and how do you even build on it? I don't know. I could never write something like this. So it sounds not hypocritical. It sounds arrogant and hubristic to say, but I don't really know what you do.

1:39:33Jeff:Yeah, this is the mountaintop. Yeah, it's very tough. Readability is a 10. 10. 10? Yeah, it's readable. 10. Current relevance of central questions, 10? 10, yeah. 10? I don't know that the book nerd read cred is especially high on this. I think it's pretty low. The book was so popular and it led to so many other things, like almost an inverse of the historical importance, maybe like a four. I'd go just a little bit higher because it's a little bit older. Okay. Right. And also that you could have seen the movie and got gong-gong-gong if you've read the book now. Okay. Where do you want to go? I think five is fine.

1:40:12Okay. Five is fine. Oh, damn factor is a nine.

1:40:14Jeff:Yeah, it's high. Yeah. Really good. great one so glad we got to go back to it oof all right we did it in office hours we're going to talk about characters if you want to join that or some of our other tiers you can browse and pick from a few choices at patreon.com also includes guided read-alongs the odysseys in the bank the movie's coming out we're sort of noodling around for our next pick there caveat you can always send suggestions to our email at zero to well read at bookride.com but trust me we've thought about it we just have whatever you're putting in You can follow us on the socials at Zero to Well Read podcast.

1:40:49If you want to see me do a 60-second version of On the Casting of Helen in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, you can find that over on a couple of the socials. By this point, thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. And Zero to Well Read is a proud member of Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, we're going to have to find some reason to talk about Gone Girl again. I don't know. We've done the movie. We've done the book. When Gillian Flynn has another book out, we could come. Maybe she'll talk to it. What else can we do?

1:41:15Jeff:It'll be 15 next year, and then the movie will be 15 in 2029. I think that's to wait for 20. We're not going to do it next year. And then the book will turn 20 in 2032. So maybe every 10 years we pick up Gone Girl. I could do that. Me too. I can do that. Thanks, everybody. This was a good one.