Gone Girl

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.” 

Nick reports his true feelings, after recalling a lovely memory of his relationship with his wife. He does not like his wife now, on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary. Such comments indicate from the opening pages that all is not well with the Dunnes’ marriage.

“Go is truly the one person in the entire world I am totally myself with. I don’t feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don’t clarify, I don’t doubt, I don’t worry. I don’t tell everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than anyone else, by far. I tell her as much as I can.” 

Nick describes his relationship with his twin sister, Go, or Margo. He is closer to her than he is to his wife. This quotation reveals that Nick is not himself with others, including his wife, Amy, foreshadowing his dishonest behavior throughout the novel. In addition, Nick’s relationship with his sister is the central relationship in his life, which displays a side to Nick’s character—kind, funny, not misogynistic, somewhat considerate and loving—completely absent from his relationship with Amy.

“My wife loved games, mostly mind games, but also actual games of amusement, and for our anniversary she always set up an elaborate treasure hunt, with each clue leading to the hiding place of the next clue until I reached the end, and my present.”

Nick compares Amy’s treasure hunts to a mind game, in one of many hints that their marriage is not what it seems. The treasure hunts, conducted every year despite Nick’s consistent failure to solve the clues, indicate Amy’s love of extravagant ritual and attention. The treasure hunts allow her to ostentatiously display her superior intelligence and embarrass Nick, causing discord every year. Despite the fact that Nick dreads the treasure hunts, Amy still plans them, showing insensitivity on her part.

“My parents circulate the room hand in hand—their love story is always part of the Amazing Amy story: husband and wife in mutual creative labor for a quarter century. Soul mates. They really call themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are. I can vouch for it, having studied them, little lonely only child, for many year. They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish—expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other’s spaces liquidly.” 

Amy discusses her parents in her diary. This quotation undercuts the cheerful façade that Amy puts on everything. Watching from the outside and excluded from her parents’ perfect relationship, Amy feels lonely and isolated, distanced from them.

“So we married on the beach on a deep blue summer day, ate and drank under a white tent that billowed like a sail, and a few hours in, I sneaked Amy off into the dark, toward the waves, because I was feeling so unreal, I believed I had become merely a shimmer. The chilly mist on my skin pulled me back, Amy pulled me back, toward the golden glow of the tent, where the gods were feasting, everything ambrosia. Our whole courtship was just like that.” 

Here, Nick evokes the fairy-tale quality of his courtship and marriage to Amy. As a middle-class boy from Missouri, the wealth and privilege of Amy’s life, along with the dazzling and beautiful Amy herself, seems unreal. Nick appreciates and loves his wife at this point in the story, highlighting the contrast with the relationship he describes on the day of her disappearance. Both Amy and Nick describe their relationship in fairy-tale terms: the depth and extravagance of their love seems magical.

“My wife had a brilliant, popping brain, a greedy curiosity. But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women: Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it. She needed to be Amazing Amy all the time.” 

Nick exposes a truth about Amy; she needs to be the best, all the time. Losing, or even not being the best, is unacceptable to her. This quotation indicates that Amy would not take coming second place to Nick’s mistress easily or well, foreshadowing Nick’s later troubles. In addition, this quote demonstrates Nick’s admiration and respect for his wife’s intelligence. She challenges him, and he likes that.

“The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pole of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife…” 

Nick describes how Amy has changed since their marriage. He takes responsibility for some of her anger, which is due in part to his decision to move them to Carthage, but he also justifies his aloofness from her because of her off-putting anger and resentments.

“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.

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.” 

Nick laments the times he lives in and the lack of substance in his culture and society. As he did on the night of his wedding, Nick feels unreal and insubstantial. Now though, he is insubstantial with emptiness. At his wedding, his feeling of unreality was the result of his overwhelming happiness. Nick seems to lack a solid foundation. His personality seems insubstantial; therefore, his character is weak.

“‘People want to believe they know other people. Parents want to believe they know their kids. Wives want to believe they know their husbands.’” 

Detective Rhonda Boney describes a truth from her experience as a detective. People want to believe that they know the people closest to them, those they love, but they frequently do not, according to Detective Boney.

“He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore, I feel like I could disappear.” 

Amy writes this in her diary. Though the reader ultimately learns that she is manufacturing these diary entries, bits of the truth slip out occasionally. For example, she reports not feeling real, indicating her lack of a strong, independent identity. She identifies herself here as Nick’s wife; therefore, her identity is dependent on her marriage and the success of her marriage. With her marriage under threat, her whole identity is also threatened. She may disintegrate under the pressure. 

“On that single two-hour flight, I transitioned from being in love with Andie to not in love with Andie. Like walking through a door. Our relationship immediately attained a sepia tone: the past.” 

Nick falls out of love with Andie very quickly, revealing a callous, self-serving, fickle side to his nature. As Go has pointed out to Nick previously, when a relationship gets hard, Nick wants out. Nick admits this to himself. Just as he fell out of love with Amy, he now has fallen out of love with Andie. Though this quotation reveals a shallow aspect of Nick’s character, it also results in the insight, for Nick, that he was a better man with Amy than with anyone else, because he wanted to impress her, which echoes Go’s comments that Nick just wants to be the good guy and have everyone love him. He cannot bear the strain or conflict, so he falls out of love with Andie.

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am 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 gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, 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.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time the Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men — friends, coworkers, strangers — giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.” 

This is Amy’s description of the Cool Girl, the girl she was pretending to be in her relationship with Nick when they met. She took on the persona that she believed would be the most attractive, and it worked. Nick fell for Amy as the Cool Girl. However, this quotation is also a critique of the social phenomenon of the Cool Girl; the pressure that women feel to be perfect, to appease men and acquiesce to their desires without having any of their own. In this way, Flynn connects the dramatic power play between Amy and Nick to broader social trends.

“Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that's how the hating first began. I've thought about this a lot, and that's where it started, I think.” 

Amy reveals the pain of knowing that the person who is supposed to love her best doesn’t even like her. However, rather than try to work on herself, she turns against Nick. That action exposes Amy’s narcissism

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxipad commercial, Windex commercial. You’d think all women do is clean and bleed.” 

Amy’s witty, acerbic commentary is intelligent, funny, apt, and cutting. Those characteristics are her primary personality traits, apart from her severe narcissism or sociopathy. In addition, her insights into women’s roles and the relationship between men and women indicate her keen ability to understand social situations and to use that understanding to manipulate people in her personal life.

“There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child—you grow up knowing you aren’t allowed to disappoint, you’re not even allowed to die. There isn’t a replacement toddling around; you’re it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.” 

Amy acknowledges that she is both a despot and an insecure overachiever. At no point does she take responsibility for her actions, and this quotation demonstrates her deft ability to blame others for her failings.

“‘Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit. If she punished a friend of a few months by throwing herself down a flight of stairs, what would she do to a man who was dumb enough to marry her?’” 

As Nick starts to figure out what Amy has done, he turns to the people she has accused of hurting or threatening her in the past. Hilary Handy tells Nick how Amy injured herself and then blamed Hilary for it. Her frightening experience with a 15-year-old Amy shows how far Amy will go to punish those she finds unworthy of her.

“Because you can't be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it's always waiting to return. Like the world's sweetest cancer.” 

Amy describes the love she and Nick share to the reader. She doesn’t care if he was only lying to get her to come home; she will force him to be the husband that he said he would be. The metaphor of their love as cancer is apt: painful and all-consuming, this relationship could end up killing them both.

“‘We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves—surprise!—we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.’” 

Nick explains his take on his relationship with Amy; he is speaking directly to Amy in this quotation. He acknowledges that their way of being with each other is sick and twisted; he thinks they should part. Amy, on the other hand, believes that they should stay together because no one else understands or gets them like they do each other. She sees nothing wrong with her behavior.

“‘You are a man…You are an average, lazy, boring, cowardly, woman-fearing man. Without me, that's what you would have kept on being, ad nauseam. But I made you into something. You were the best man you've ever been with me. And you know it. The only time in your life you've ever liked yourself was pretending to be someone I might like. Without me? You’re just your dad.’” 

Amy calls Nick out. She isn’t going to let Nick leave their marriage. She intends to force him to see himself the way that she does. She is right in what she says here about Nick’s character and identity. Nick’s identity is fragile, as is Amy’s. It’s part of what drew them together. They both require another person to make them be, and feel, real. 

“‘I’m the bitch who makes you a man.” 

While arguing with Nick on the night of her return, Amy lays it all out for him. She believes that after being with her Nick will never be able to settle for some average, boring woman. She believes that Nick needs her to make him into the man she knows he can be. Such statements reveal Amy’s extremely manipulative nature, and her narcissism. She believes that she has the power to control and form Nick’s personality and behavior to her liking.

“Me, Nick Dunne, the man who used to forget so many details, is now the guy who replays conversations to make sure I didn’t offend, to make sure I never hurt her feelings. I write down everything about her day, her likes and dislikes, in case she quizzes me. I am a great husband because I am very afraid she may kill me.”

Nick has indeed been brought into line by Amy. He is finally the perfect husband. 

“Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn't feel like I was staring into the sun. I'm rising to my wife's level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It's a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can't imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist.” 

Ironically, Amy has the husband that she has always desired. Her manipulations have been successful in making Nick grow up and take responsibility for his life.

“I was told love should be unconditional. That's the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times.” 

Amy makes her ultimate statement about love. She believes that unconditional love is nonsense for the weak-minded. The love she gives and the love she expects in return is completely conditional on her own happiness. Nick must always strive to be who she wants him to be. She doesn’t admit it here, but the conditions of her love are completely a one-way street: only Nick must strive to please her, while she can behave in any way she wishes.