"Gone Girl"

[fiefoe]

The ending is fitting. In fact, I abandoned the audiobook and raced through the end on my kindle, so props to Gillian Flynn.

• that hot, mean satisfaction right in the belly, like a nib of mercury.
• It occurred to me that I had brought Amy to the end of everything. We were literally experiencing the end of a way of life,
• “That’s right we do,” Rand said, the big smile again, and he and Stucks began an improbable discussion of liberal-arts rugby over the noise of the car, the air, the night, all the way to the mall.
• In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn’t have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation.
• I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.
• I realized as I rang his doorbell that a four-hundred-dollar suit in this neighborhood was more poignant than if I’d shown up in jeans.
• Rhonda could not only keep quiet, she could infuse the room with a mood of her choosing, like an octopus and its ink.
• I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened.
• I hated him for not knowing it had to end, for truly believing he had married this creature, this figment of the imagination of a million masturbatory men, semen-fingered and self-satisfied.
• He took away chunks of me with blasé swipes: my independence, my pride, my esteem. I gave, and he took and took. He Giving Treed me out of existence.
• She’s overdone it all just to make sure there are a million damning little clues in circulation. Again, you’ve got to know my wife: She’s a belt-and-suspenders type.”
• 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.
• “We should have Botoxed him,” she said. Apparently, Botox fights sweat as well as wrinkles
• Questions could be asked several times, to make the interview seem as smooth as possible, and to allow for Sharon’s reaction shots.
• I look quite pretty after a cry of about two minutes—longer than that and the nose goes runny, the puffiness sets in, but up to that, my lips gets fuller, my eyes bigger, my cheeks flushed. I count as I cry into Desi’s crisp shoulder
• I was the ultimate hollow man: the husband that Amy always claimed couldn’t apologize finally did, using words and emotions borrowed from an actor. But it worked.
• she said, and then she was kissing Go on the cheek and swishing away from us, the back of her dress a battlefield of stickpins to keep the material in front from slouching.
• It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.
• I caught her looking at me now and then with the same steeled chill with which she looked at our father: just another shitty male taking up space. I’m sure I looked at her through our father’s miserable eyes sometimes: just another petty woman resenting me.I took a slug, tightened my fingers around the curves of the tumbler, then hurled it at the wall, watched the glass burst into fireworks, heard the tremendous shatter, smelled the cloud of bourbon. Rage in all five senses.
• So he brings me lovely green star fruit and spiky artichokes and spiny crab, anything that takes elaborate preparation and yields little in return.
• crackling cold, with her hand in mine, the kiss in the cloud of sugar. It was one of the few stories we told the same way. I said it all in the cadence of a bedtime tale: soothing and familiar and repetitive. Always ending with Come home to me, Amy.
• I don’t know, I thought maybe it was flowers from you.” I flinched. Of course she’d find a way to work in a gripe: that I hardly ever sent her flowers
• All this time I’d thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood. It was kind of romantic. Catastrophically romantic.
• “Always have a backup plan to the backup plan.” “You actually poisoned yourself.” “Nick, please, you’re shocked? I killed myself.”
• Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer. You don’t buy it? Then how about this?
• 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.
• where she couldn’t inflict herself on me but where I could visit her from time to time. Or at least imagine her. A pulse, my pulse, left out there somewhere.
• 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.
• My life has begun to feel like an epilogue.
• I’d left that will-destroy notice on the table, a limp guilt trip, and then the notice disappeared, because my wife had taken action, as always, and that action wasn’t to get rid of the stuff but to save it. Just in case. I felt a giant bubble of joy—I couldn’t help it—and then the joy was encased in a metallic terror.
• I had been thoroughly, finally outplayed. I created a manuscript, and she created a life.
• 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.