Amy Dunne

It's-

Amy Dunne.

Yeah.

Like, so I watched it-

Before Gone Girl, I forgot Gone Girl

...

I was not perfect in my life, but I will say when I stick up for myself, I'm like, "Amy Dunne."

Amy Dunne.

We just default to trusting the person with the framed degree on the wall.

We do it without even thinking, and then there's Gone Girl, Nick and Amy Dunne.

The source text describes this book as the album to McFadden's cover band.

That is such a mic drop comparison.

Without a doubt.

Like long before Gillian Flynn wrote the calculating, deeply cynical Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, or Robert Eggers explore the rebellious, subversive coming of age in The Witch, Louisa May Alcott was quietly laying that groundwork in the 1860s.

She proved that the most dangerous villains aren't necessarily the ones lurking in the shadows of a ruined castle.

Sometimes they are the ones sitting demurely at the family dinner table.

True.

Amy Dunne was chilling.

But back then, I was like, "Okay, I want someone really villainous." So I wrote this character, Aria, in the book, Ari in this book.

And although I suppose I had kind of a somewhat two-dimensional mindset in thinking about her, like she needs to be bad, she was a character who in my mind did have some nuance and was an interesting and intelligent person, and she was someone who I kept on thinking about over all of these years and all of these other books.

I agree.

I thought about Gone Girl and Amy Dunne so much-

Yeah

...

I don't know that Steinbeck was interested or would have had, um, the ability to wield the idea of patriarchy, but Cathy's origin story, to use a modern parlance, is when she's young, she basically tells her parents, "I don't wanna do this."

Yeah.

Right? And they say, "You're going to do this." And they punish her for not doing it, and then she, you know, her origin story there is that she then pretends to play the good girl, like Amy Dunne does, and spoiler alert, spoiler alert, fast-forward, fast-forward, maybe beyond now you really should fast-forward this first 40 minutes here, she sets the house on fire and kills them so she can get out of that, right?

Mm-hmm.

The source rightfully notes that this book has cemented its reputation as one of the most impactful thrillers of the century.

Now, you know the basic premise, Nick and Amy Dunne, the fifth wedding anniversary

Right

Amy vanishes, Nick looks incredibly guilty, the media circus descends.

The sentences just pile on top of each other, building this intense claustrophobic pressure, revealing the absolute sociopathy required to maintain the facade of the perfect wife.

And here is where I see a really fascinating structural parallel between these two books.

Like I'm looking at Korede in Ayoola in My Sister, the Serial Killer, and I'm looking at Nick and Amy Dunne in Gone Girl.

Okay.

Right.

Amy Dunne disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary.

Her living room is smashed up.

Right.