Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Summary

Zero to Well-Read – Episode Summary: "Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn"

Date: August 4, 2026
Podcast: Zero to Well-Read by Book Riot
Hosts: Jeff O'Neill & Rebecca Schinsky

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on Gillian Flynn’s genre-defining thriller, Gone Girl—one of the most influential novels of the past quarter-century. Jeff and Rebecca break down what made the book such a sensation in 2012, why it stands up to rereads, its lasting impact on literary and pop culture, and how it reframed the conversation around gender, relationships, and the unreliable narrator in fiction. Packed with spoilers, in-depth thematic exploration, reader advice, and reflections on adaptation, the discussion is a master class on what makes Gone Girl a modern classic.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Reading Experience & Reread Value

• Both hosts revisit Gone Girl for the third or fourth time, noting how it only grows more impressive. Its longevity is rare for thrillers, which usually don't hold up once their twist is revealed.
• Jeff (01:19): "Honestly, it does get better every time I read this book once the twist is in the rear view mirror."
• Rebecca (01:52): "There’s always something new that I didn’t pick out on the previous reading...an incredible achievement."

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2. The Cultural Impact & "Gone Girl" as Genre-Creator

• Gone Girl didn't just become a bestseller; it redefined the domestic thriller genre. Every twisty, female-led thriller since is (sometimes unfairly) compared to it.
• Jeff (05:19): "It’s a little bit of both because the genre, subgenre...Gillian Flynn...there’s comps upon comps for a 'Gone Girl meets X.'"
• Rebecca (06:31): "If you have read a big domestic suspense thriller in the last 10 years, you owe Gillian Flynn a giant thanks."

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3. Plot Recap and Spoiler Warning ([12:10])

• Rebecca lays out the plot, noting it's impossible to discuss meaningfully without giving away the pivotal twist: Amy’s disappearance is an elaborate act of revenge, faking her own murder and framing her husband Nick.
• The structure alternates Nick’s present perspective with Amy’s (fake) diary entries, culminating in a mid-novel switch where Amy’s voice reveals the truth.
• Rebecca (12:10): "We know that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But that is extra true when the woman has a lot of smarts and a lot of time on her hands..."

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4. The Metafictional Magic Trick & Gender Politics ([17:35], [19:42])

• The hosts dig into how Flynn weaponizes genre expectations; readers’ assumptions about women, marriage, and crime fiction become the actual subject of the book.
• The notorious "Cool Girl" monologue and dissection of performative gender play are highlighted as central themes.

Notable Quotes

• Jeff (17:35): "Magic Trick feels like it cheapens it, but...it plays...on our ready made trafficking in narratives around a woman goes missing, who has a husband and how those things play out."
• Rebecca (19:42): "Unreliable narrators weren't new, but Flynn really broke the mold with this reveal...introducing an era...of domestic thrillers focused on toxic relationships, female revenge fantasies..."

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5. Characters and the Antiheroine ([24:21])

• Amy is painted as both a feminist antihero and a sociopath; the text demands readers hold complex, contradictory truths.
• Rebecca (24:52): "Amy gets to be angry, which is a win for feminism. And also she gets to be a sociopath, which is a real thing that some women are...Flynn holds both and expects us as readers to hold both."

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6. Reception and Legacy ([27:09], [29:00])

• Massive sales—over 20 million copies by 2019. Popularity dwarfed most literary thrillers; it became a perennial cultural touchstone but was largely ignored by major literary awards.
• Rebecca (27:09): "As of 2019, sales exceeded 20 million copies. No wonder it’s number nine on Amazon’s bestselling books of all time."
• Jeff (29:46): "It’s in the running for the most influential books of my lifetime in terms of the comps, the discourse initiated."

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7. Gillian Flynn: Biography and Career ([30:45])

• Flynn’s background in journalism, love of pop culture from highbrow to lowbrow, and how she wove this into the novel.
• The book’s genesis after her 2008 layoff, and its roots in the post-recession malaise.
• Jeff (31:35): "Flynn’s being conversant in everything, up and down, really comes into play here."
• Discussion of Flynn’s other works, subsequent lack of a fourth novel, and focus on adaptations and other projects.

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8. Themes and Structurally Deep Insights

Marriage and Relationship Horror

• The novel uses the thriller/horror frame to dissect modern marriage, mutual performativity, and the impossibility of true knowledge in relationships.
• Both Nick and Amy are shown performing gender, with neither party blameless.
• Jeff (44:31): "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."

The Media and Stereotypes

• The story indicts media narratives and the public’s hunger for them—how people slot real lives into pre-existing tropes, and how Amy manipulates this.
• Jeff (48:23): "In the absence of direct evidence, we'll use extant patterns to fill in the gaps...Amy is really trafficking in the limits of thinking in terms of trope."

The Unwinnable Gender Game

• Cool Girl as a concept; unattainable standards for women, performativity for both men and women. Amy is both using and critiquing these performances.
• Rebecca (76:12): "The only successful move is to reject the premise altogether...the game is unwinnable. No one wins it."

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9. The “Cool Girl” Speech ([72:02]–[72:58]) - 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...Cool girls never get angry. They only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want...I’m the cool girl.” —Amy, Gone Girl

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10. Adaptation Praises ([85:46])

• The Fincher-directed film adaptation is lauded as outstanding and near-perfect in casting (Ben Affleck as Nick).
• Rebecca (85:49): "You super can [get most of it from the movie]. Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay, David Fincher directs it...Ben Affleck as Nick is the best casting decision of all time."

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Rapid-Fire / Stray Thoughts ([57:53]–[71:45])

• Amy as a protagonist: Her sociopathy is carefully seeded through the narrative for sharp-eyed re-readers.
• No one is off the hook: Both gender and class performance are skewered; neither Nick nor Amy escapes culpability.
• Midwest setting: The characters' lives are rooted in post-recession malaise and rural malaise—just as much a character as any person.
• Hosts' favorite minor character: Nick’s sister, Go—“she of the rocket science brain and the rodeo spirit.” ([59:47])
• The media’s transformation from pre-Twitter days to now: How would Amy’s plan unfold in today's fractured, social-media-saturated environment?
• What would a Gillian Flynn–written Barbie look like? Is the "cool girl" speech the spiritual ancestor of the America Ferrera monologue in Barbie?
• Rebecca: “Are women crazy is the wrong question. What made them that way is more interesting.”

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Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• [01:19] – Gone Girl’s unique reread value
• [06:31] – Genre-spawning power & spoiler warning
• [12:10] – Detailed (spoiler-filled) plot recap
• [17:35] – The metafictional twist and use of reader expectations
• [24:21] – Amy as a feminist antihero; the complexity of ‘unlikable women’
• [27:09], [29:00] – Sales data and snubbing by major awards
• [30:45] – Gillian Flynn biography and career context
• [44:31] – Marital politics, gender role performance
• [48:23] – Tropes, stereotypes, and the power of media
• [72:02] – "Cool girl" monologue notable quote
• [85:49] – Praise for the Fincher adaptation

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Notable Quotes (with Attribution and Timestamp)

• "Unreliable narrators weren’t new, but Flynn really broke the mold with this reveal...introducing an era...of domestic thrillers focused on toxic relationships, female revenge fantasies..." —Rebecca (19:42)

• "Magic Trick feels like it cheapens it, but...it plays...on our ready made trafficking in narratives around a woman goes missing, who has a husband and how those things play out." —Jeff (17:35)

• "Amy gets to be angry, which is a win for feminism. And also she gets to be a sociopath, which is a real thing that some women are...Flynn holds both and expects us as readers to hold both." —Rebecca (24:52)

• "Cool girls never get angry. They only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want...I’m the cool girl." —Amy via Rebecca (72:02)

• "Patriarchy is not good for men either. Less bad than for people who don’t know if his men. But it still blows. Pay attention." —Jeff (96:24)

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For Whom Is This Book?

• For fans of psychological suspense and genre-defining work
• Anyone interested in contemporary gender politics (though you don’t need to agree with its takes)
• Not for those who require likable or admirable protagonists

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Readalikes and Further Recommendations

• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (for a similar “revolutionary twist”)
• Japanese thrillers like Out by Natsuo Kirino and Penance by Kanae Minato
• Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross
• Classic stories of marriage gone bad: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Scenes from a Marriage
• For literary/cultural resonance: The Great Gatsby (on idealization and performativity), The Secret History

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Final Takeaways (Cocktail Party Creep Sheet)

• Gone Girl redefined what thrillers could do by merging razor-sharp writing with a game-changing twist and deep, critical engagement with gender roles.
• Amy is both a feminist hero and an unrepentant sociopath; the book dares you to hold both truths at once.
• No one wins in the performative gender game; the only escape is to reject its premise—even if the system punishes you for trying.

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0–10 Scores from the Hosts

• Historical Importance: 8 (still fairly young, but highly consequential)
• Readability: 10 (flies along, even at 500+ pages)
• Current Relevance: 10 (themes and questions as present as ever)
• Book Nerd Cred: 5 (extremely widely read, perhaps no longer a ‘deep cut’)
• “Oh damn!” Factor: 9 (twists, craft, and social commentary)

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Closing Thoughts

The hosts agree: Not only did Gone Girl change the game, but nothing since has managed to surpass or even replicate its alchemy of twist, craft, cultural resonance, and fun. The episode leaves listeners with rich food for thought on gender, media, narrative, and the place of villainy (and antiheroism) in art.

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Next on Zero to Well-Read: For more deep book dives and sharp literary banter, join Jeff and Rebecca each week—or get even more on Patreon with extended “office hours.”

Transcript

[Jeff O'Neill]

This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by Thriftbooks.com today. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. One of the most influential books of the last 25 years. You'll hear Rebecca and I talk all about it. One of the great things about a book that was so popular is there's a lot of used copies available in the market. You of course can get a new paperback any old place. You can also buy that at Thriftbooks and get a nice little discount on top of it. But you can also find kind of the whole range from a like new hardcover to a pretty beat up paperback still in good condition, totally readable for five bucks. With Gone Girl, I was seeing like new hardcover editions. Now these are not going to be first editions or even second printings, but you know, part of that first run it was in hardcover for a long time. It's going to be a nice one to have on your shelf. Also, you can get the Blu Ray I saw of Gone girl for just 10 bucks on thriftbooks.com and as we say on the show as well, this is also a wonderful adaptation. All right, onto the show. Welcome to Zero to well read a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I am Jeff o' Neill and I'm Rebecca Schinsky.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This week we're discussing the jaw dropping thriller that launched a thousand and then some wannabes, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. Big day here, Jeff. I'm so excited.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We've talked about this before on an old show we used to do called Adaptation Nation that was kind of a limited series where we compared the book and the movie and this is one of the great adaptations of my lifetime. We'll get back to that in a second. But for me, and I think you have this note below, honestly, it does get better every time that I read this book once. The this, the twist thing is in a rear view mirror because that can only really happen once. Like you only get that first time experience once with that. But everything else that Gillian Flynn is doing with this, I find myself more and more interested. And this is I think my fourth time reading this book at this point.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes, this is my third at least possibly fourth. And for knowing what's going to happen in a thriller. Most thrillers don't stand up to multiple readings. This one does just it continues to become more impressive. There's always something new that I didn't pick out the previous reading of it. It just an incredible achievement here and one of the most fun reading experiences I've Ever had a collective fun reading experience. This was a great time on the literary Internet in 2012 when the book came out and it was such a delight to revisit it through the lens of this show in particular and really get to take apart what Flynn is doing and how it works. I really could not be more stoked to be talking about Gone Girl today

[Jeff O'Neill]

for the kind of books that we like to read. If you've listened to the show, you have a sense sense of us as readers and thinkers and this is probably as happy as we've ever been with a book that went giant, right? Were we ever happier when a book was like the book of the year? I mean, I don't know.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I was thinking about that this morning. I love it when the big popular book is also a really smart book and it doesn't happen that often. Gillian Flynn is so sharp. Janet Maslin's original review for the New York Times talked about the book as ice pick sharp and it's right on. It just really stands up not just to the test of time, but to multiple rereadings. And having finished it this time around, I thought, yeah, I can coming back to this again in five or ten more years.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It ages beautifully. I agree with you. You could do it every now and again. A wonderful cast of characters and we're going to dive more and specifically into the characters in our office hours for this episode. You can join that, you can listen to that by becoming a [e-mail] z2 well read multiple, multiple levels there for you to pick from as well. If you have a moment and I know you do, a reminder to rate and or review the show wherever you're listening. Apple, Spotify, Android, wherever you can rate it. That would be terrific for us. And you can always email us@02 well read bookriot.com so if you got some takes, you've got some Amy takes in your chamber and you're listening to this 12 weeks from now, that is fine. We're here. The books are here for you and so are we. At least for now at this point. And Rebecca with that, I think it's time. I guess I'd be curious if you're younger than us, you know, if you're in your 20s or something like that, you're out of school or even if you're in school but younger than us, you, let's say you weren't reading new books when this book came out in 2012. I'd be curious to hear what your sense of gone Girl is. If you haven't read this book, was this something you still think was a phenomenon? Does this feel like the ancient past? We were just talking the other show about Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, right. Like there's this big book, you know, not dissimilar subjects in a lot of different ways. And that book has really faded. Where for me, Gone Girl still feels very present. But maybe I'm the weirdo. Rebecca maybe we're the weirdo for thinking of how current this feels and how fresh this book still feels to us.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

As we get into the themes, I think we will be able to explain why it still feels so present that this is about the things that happen in life still today. It deals with big questions about relationships, gender dynamics, all sorts of dark and twisty fun. Gillian Flynn like if you have read a big domestic suspense thriller in the last 10 years, you owe Gillian Flynn a giant thanks. So it just, it feels perf. Perennially relevant. Even if the particulars of the characters lives aren't the same as what's happening out in the culture today. It really, really stands up.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We've been lucky enough to get to talk about a few books that have changed and. Or changed the game or made a game. And in this regard it's a little bit of both because the genre, sub genre. Gillian Flynn I'm sure there's prior examples but. But note you have before that there's comps upon comps for a Gone Girl meets X. Like Gone Girl just gets thrown around still much to the detriment of subsequent books as I think you'll talk about a little bit more later. You know, Robert Langdon, Twilight, Harry. Like we've seen some of these that have come and this one is interesting because we don't really have a word for it. Like you have to do a couple of modifiers at the same time. It's like a psychological thriller that's about gender with a female protagonist and or victim, but it's also about that like sort of a metafictional thriller about the nature of thrillers, especially as it regards to gender. And so the, the one that came closest upon that I think enjoyed the most success was Paul Hawkins, the Girl on the Train. We got a bunch of the Girl X books to the point where we were mocking some stuff up for book riot. We would make a Fake the Girl in the Field creative to see how things look.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We did have the Girl in the Field.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it was pretty fascinating. Rebecca.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It is, it's really fascinating. Let me tell you what it's about. And before we get into synopsis, I want to tell you listeners, if you have read Gone Girl, we can't talk about Gone Girl without spoiling it. Like, it is impossible to talk about this book without talking about what the big twist is. So there will be spoilers. I think you should not listen to this episode until you have read Gone Girl and experienced that for yourself. It's fine to know that there's a twist. You need to experience it for yourself. If somehow on the Internet in the year of our Lord 2026, this has not been spoiled for please go have the reading experience.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like, I agree with you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, right. Like, unless you just know that you're deeply not interested in reading it. So you're here because you want to hear all of the things. If you think you want to read this book at all, I really encourage you have that experience in as pure a fashion as you can. Because having it in a pure moment that we both had early in the book's life is one of the great reading memories of my life. Like one of the most memorable reading experiences. And I just don't want you to miss out on that. Like, we'll take your download and your listening time whenever you want to come back.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's right. Yeah, I agree with you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay, I hear you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay. So we know that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But that is extra true when the woman has a lot of smarts and a lot of time on her hands. And in this case, we are talking about beautiful, brilliant, and almost perfect Amy Dunne. Who vanishes without a trace on her fifth wedding anniversary to her husband, Nick. There have been signs of struggle in their home. She left clues for their traditional anniversary treasure hunt. Nick knows that he didn't kill Amy. But there are holes in his alibi. There are some skeletons in his closet. And as the investigation begins, we are entering the story from Nick's point of view. The book is supplemented alternates chapters between Nick's present day point of view. As he's trying to solve this treasure hunt. And figure out who took his wife. And is the treasure hunt, like, connected to her disappearance in some way or what's going on? Then it alternates over to excerpts from Amy's journal entries over the last seven years. That fill in the blanks for us about her perspective on how they met. The early days of their relationship. And how things have started to go sour between them. Their versions of events, Nick and Amy's really bear significant differences. And that's putting it mildly. Amy's journal shows like the swoony days of early love. And then things turning bitter. As first Nick and then she are both laid off from their journalism jobs in New York City. The book is taking place in 2012. But you know, the housing crisis hit in 2008. And then there was. There were financial ramifications all over the place. So they have moved from New York City to Nick's hometown of Carthage, Missouri. Partially because it's more affordable. But mostly to take care of his dying mother and his ailing father. And Nick is telling us how Amy, who has always been type A and really controlling, transformed over their five years of marriage from being a cool, fun partner in crime to this, like, cold, cruel, and really resentful woman after they moved. As he starts solving the clues to the treasure hunt, he starts to believe that actually Amy wasn't abducted, but that she planned her disappearance. She is framing him as a way to punish him for how their lives have turned out. And then at right about the halfway mark, this is like the biggest and then probably in the history of the show, the book flips to Amy's present day voice because Girl is alive and she is well and she has spent the last year planning her disappearance because she knows that Nick has been cheating on her, which conveniently Nick doesn't tell us for quite a while in the book and has been failing to live up to her expectations. And from there we move with all of them. What is Amy up to? What is Nick up to? How's the investigation going? Is she gonna get away with it? It's a ride to, like, put it very mildly.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I do not remember my feeling of the big switch. There's. There's been a few books that do something like this again in the middle it turns or there's a cliffhanger. We talked about Kylie Reid's book. Such a fun age that has a. It's not a. A twist where the whole thing shifts, but like, enters into a room where like, oh no, they don't know what's waiting for them on the other side of that room. Fates and Furies by Lauren Grofta. Something not that similar. That's probably the closest to me. But I don't remember sniffing out what happens here at all. No, I don't. And we both read it early. We were early, early days of book riot. And we heard some things about this. We'll get into Gillian Flynn and her career. But she'd been around, but she was not the Gillian Flynn we know because Good Gone Girl made her the household name for us in our households and the households of our hearts here. So I really don't have a memory, except that I feel like I got a little hit of it. Like a smell memory. Reading it this time I was like, oh, yeah. You just kind of float over it for a second, like, what's going on? And it starts snapping into place. And then you see Amy from her point of view and it's pretty remarkable. It's a long book, Rebecca. We were texting about that earlier, but it Reads like a house on fire. It really, really flies. Like it's 500 pages in print. I think there's a lot of back matter now in a print where you get book club questions and selections of dark objects and excuse me, sharp objects and dark. Oh no, I forget the name of the places. Thank you. But it is quite a long book. At the same time, a wonderful reading experience. One of the great plain reads where you're just going to lock in. You're going to lock in and you will not know where you are for four hours.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I remember hitting the turn on it and it was like months before the book came out and no one had told me anything other than, you're gonna wanna read this book. Like publishing did a great job of keeping this secret. I have to say I agree. Most of us have this story and I remember being like, oh shit, like she's a what? And then as she starts to tell you what she's been doing and why and how it's all planned out. It is an impressive feat. And I can't imagine now like the red stringboard that Flynn must have had to keep all the plans and the clues and to keep everything straight. Everything about the way that this book is conceived and constructed and executed is stunning. It's just work. A writer working at the top of the game and as you said, not just changing the game, but in some ways inventing it. Often imitated, never duplicated. I don't really think you could.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, Magic Trick feels like it cheapens it, but it's a metafictional movie. Can kind of only do once. Because what it does is it plays. It is interested on the thing. It is interested. The subject of the thing that it uses to not trick us but to confuse us, to mislead us is the thing. It's interesting, which is our ready made assumptions, our ready made trafficking and narratives around a woman goes missing, who has a husband and how those things play out and what an Amy's manipulation of the media and law enforcement is the same thing Gillian Flynn is doing to manipulate us at the same time. So that's the metafictional thing that's happening. And you could really only do that once. You have to find some other magic trick, right? Like you have to move on to pulling rabbits out of the hats or making the Statue of Liberty. Because the close up magic she does with this you can really only do one time. So, and this has been done before and I have this down on the read alike, but Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie doesn't do the same thing, but it operates in the same way where it's using assumptions. At the time, at the moment of its publication, people got mad about it because Otto was cheating. I don't want to spoil it here. You can go read about it. Murder of Roger Ackroyd is like the most underrated Agatha Christie, I think because it's a boring title. Murder on the Order of Prince is a much better title. But even Murder on the Order of Sprint, spoiler alert here. Pew, pew, pew for two minutes. That's also like they all did it right. This is what's happening at the same time. But the cultural ideas and the cultural representations and roles that we in culture, play, perform, Reify have complicated feelings about are still around. Yes, they're still around in different form. She gave us. We're now into why it's important. But the big idea or the big monologue here is about the cool girl, but really it's about performative gender play and the limitations thereof, the consequences thereof, and the hollowness of it and misaligned expectations, especially between these are heterosexual relationships, men and women, and how the patriarchy sucks for everyone. It especially sucks for women, but it's not too great for dudes either. And here's how some of the stage plays out in multiple ways.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, and this is in thrillers. There is before Gone Girl and then there's after Gone Girl. And Unreliable Narrators weren't new, but Flynn really broke the mold with this reveal halfway through that not only is Amy alive, but her entire narrative in the first half of the books, those journal entries is fabricated. She constructed all of them to mislead the cops, to, you know, mostly to mislead the cops, but also the public and Nick. And it introduces also this era that we are still in of domestic thrillers that are focused on toxic relationships, female revenge fantasies, and not just mysteries about sort of external things. The Girl on the Train and Where the Crawdads Sing are both direct descendants of Gone Girl. Gone Girl is number nine on Amazon's best selling book of all book books of all time. Girl on the Train and Crawdads are numbers and 14. So like three books in the top 20 come from this lineage that Flynn basically invents. And once you say it's like Gone Girl, like, I think this is a huge, this is an impossible to live up to thing. Because it's like Gone Girl doesn't just mean there's a big twist. It means there's a twist. The Narrator is lying to you about something. And so you have to be suspicious the whole time about what it is. And the beauty of this reading experience the first time around is you don't know that you should be suspicious of the narrator. You don't know what the twist is going to be. Or even if there's going to be one. And that is what makes it have so much impact. Like, now, if someone hands me something and says, this is great. For readers of Gone Girl, I think that has come to mean really just, there's a woman, she's mad, and she's an unreliable narrator. But if she's unreliable, don't ruin that for me. Part of the fun is in the discovery of it. And after Gillian Flynn gave me the ultimate surprise here. No thriller that's been compared to Gone Girl has delivered. I really don't think that it can. Because she did something so different. And it ruins it to know if that's what's coming.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. But the thing that, for me, makes it interesting to read and reread again. Is the relationship politics stuff. And the trafficking in cultural ideas about gender. That is the subject of the book more than it's about gender. Amy Dunne disappearing herself. Right. That's the action. But there are ideas in this. And the cool girl one is just one of them. And, like, it's the most memorable. And we'll talk about that some more. But there's a lot of stuff, and we're going to get into it. That is really about. Like, how is the case that we. We were ready as readers. And then the public of this book to. We were so manipulated by both Amy's intentional breadcrumb trail. Right. But then also the manipulation on the part of a lawyer on these sort of talk shows. On ways you appear in front of people. And it gets moved back and forth in pretty predictable ways. But Gillian Flynn showing other people being reactive to us. Distracts us from how much we are also participating in the same thing. And that's what makes it so exciting. And how the thing is like a Swiss watch of metafictional play and readerly indictment. Like, we are part of the thing being critiqued here. Like, we're. If you're surprised, if you enjoy. If you have the experience I think Gillian Flynn intends you to have. It means you are implicated in the cultural currency that this book is dealing with. Critiquing and showing the dark, dark side of. And I think it's also interesting to think about. I'm sure that people have written histories of this. But the quote unquote unlikable woman character who's also not just a villain, right? Like, is Amy a good guy or bad guy? It's sort of beyond good and evil in that way. But coming out of sort of the 90s erotic thriller mode of like Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction, this is doing something much more complicated with the figure of the sort of wronged, scorned, otherwise woman, which, you know, in the form of Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction is, becomes a real hysterical sort of thing. And if Amy is anything, it's the opposite of that. She's not just a. She's the cool girl and that she is cool. Like she is cold. She is calculating. At the very beginning, her husband Nick is talking about just trying to think about seeing inside of her head and imagining like spiders and coils within it. Like there's a mechanical coldness to her that's real. And it's not suggested that she's broken, she's got problems, but it's not like she's written off as just crazy. There's something else in addition to this. What she's doing is not forgiven by the text by any stretch of the imagination. Though I think some of our sympathies lie with her and I think Gillian Flynn is interested in us interrogating that as well.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes, it's like layers on layers on layers. Like she did kick off a new age of unlikable female narrator, but it's really female anti hero. And 2012, when this book comes out, we are at peak male anti hero 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 anti hero. And it launched a ton, a ton of discourse about whether or not the story was actually. Femin identifies as a feminist. Like, I think any intelligent reading of this book can see that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I don't accept even as a possibility of non feminist reading, honestly, Amy

[Rebecca Schinsky]

gets to be angry, which is a win for feminism. 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. And at the same time she is crazy like, and that those 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, like 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. 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, 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. 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

[Jeff O'Neill]

film adaptation years of a hardcover run. Amazing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. And this would have been the big publishing story of 2012 were it not for 50 Shades of Gray, 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 story.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Are we sure we've recovered from 2012? I feel like we might still be living in the long wake of 2012

[Rebecca Schinsky]

in so many ways.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Gender discourse. In so many ways.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is. And it just, it 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 readers 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. Like, 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. 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. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. I 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. It really would be 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The only thing I have to add here is 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 came out, if this book hadn't been written and it came out today, I think it goes bananas again.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

100% agree.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I think it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

There's something kind of timeless about it or. Or it has a very extended relevancy and it. 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 go, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Gillian Flynn Rebecca, we have a Jayhawk on our hands. Far above the Golden Valley, glorious to view. Gillian Flynn was born in Kansas City in 1971. Her parents were educators. If you don't know, 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. She was a voracious reader from a Jaeger. She was quite quiet, shy and reading was a respite from that. Who among us, at least this, this particular podcaster, can relate to that? She wrote her first story at the age of eight called the Outhouse.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Great title, Gillian.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, she went to LA 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 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. I'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 cosmotell, 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

[Rebecca Schinsky]

stew here 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. That, like, this is. The book is Hitchcockian in a lot of ways. She has certainly watched a lot of Hitchcock movies and read some Mystic River. You know that she has this, like, really important experience staying up one night reading mystic river by Dennis Lehane and thinking, that's how you do.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's how you do it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think the malaise of 2008 and the housing bubble is an important character here. That at the time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The vibes are bad.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The vibes are extremely bad. It'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, like, coming out of things that were going on in New York especially, but that matters here. She, you know, she wrote Dark Places and Sharp Objects, both with spiky female characters. Sharp Objects, I think, is generally believed to be the. The next best one. I have not read it. I've been kind of saving it because it's Gillian Flynn someday. It's good. Good. I've heard it's good. And both have been made into other objects. I think the Amy Adams Sharp Objects is generally well regarded. More well regarded than the Dark Places. Gone 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 commercial pull as you're gonna get for a book like this. Has not written a full book book since Gone Girl. She's had some other gigs. She's been doing stuff. She has an imprint with Xando that focuses on crime fiction. She's written. She's been involved in her own adaptations. 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. I assume she signed some sort of deal with Crown, which is a PRH imprint, right around Gone Girl or After. And. 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I had forgotten about that, which is

[Jeff O'Neill]

a weird thing to do. But, you know, Gillian Flynn still has. She still has a lot of credit from this book and the adaptations she worked on ever since. And I have here, again, overtly identifies as a feminist. Just for those of you in the

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 yeah, 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 like 6ish 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 like, involved in the life.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, you'll hear her. She'll be on an interview or a panel or introduction. She'll do some stuff for sure. Yeah, yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. The expectations are almost impossible to me. Right. Like you have written one of the best and best selling 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 master work. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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? Like, it's kind of interesting, right, because 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 show corpus ever since. At the same time, we both read it early. Rebecca, what do you remember of your early readings?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 gonna wanna keep an eye out for it. So that was the first mention that I heard. I had not read Florida Flynn's previous novels. And then a month or two later I got a galley and I want to have a memory of like staying up really late reading it. 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, like, 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 Gall. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. What's it like to read this? What's 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, phrase, be like, look at that, look at that thing. Look what you did there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. And like, AI 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 gonna be like. Just, I really don't wanna 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. 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 hand holding here. It's just, look how messed up all of this is. 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 could 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And then doing another reverse. You think she's getting her comembus 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 and 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 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 because 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 we have we as a culture to the other side of the. 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. The men would rather go to therapy than X Men.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We were not doing that yet.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And I don't think therapy speak had been out there. And like therapy is not a cure all. Like you've got. There's all these 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. 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. What the outgrowth of that really is. And then the. 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. Of those two transgressions combined means that they are deserving of a punishment of some kind. And what is that? What is the appropriate response to that? What's a fantasy response to that? What's a demon's responsibility to that? Like, 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 valid 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. Like, 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 enough for her. And, like, Nick knows it, but the punishment that he experiences is certainly unfair. And I think that. 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 why Amy and Nick refer to other husbands, other boyfriends as dancing monkeys when they're domineering. High expectation, rigid wives are mad that they want to go out with the boys instead of coming to, you know, 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. But actually they're secretly mad where Amy was the cool girl. And so it was fine if Nick wanted to, like, 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 sell books. Because a lot of men read and loved Gone Girl too. Like, this is not marketed in. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, and the cool girl slash dancing monkey Dichomedy are both, 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. To say, you know, sometimes it is okay for you to stay out with the guy 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 the relationship to you and their feelings about you, that is, that's a black box. And 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, what happens if you try to take a shortcut? Right? What if, 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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, 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. And nobody looks good in that mirror. And that's part of the point. Like, this is a bad system.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. 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. It's kind of like in Jurassic park where like 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 to see 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I agree with this completely what you're about to say.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's incredible to read it right now when yesteryear is in the water.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yesteryear, Rebecca, what is Gilean flinds?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, right. And like we just read yesteryear if you want to hear us dish about that, it's in the book Riot podcast. Patreon and I, first of all, I don't think we get to yesteryear if we had not had Gone Girl. Like, yesteryear is a descendant of Gone Girl. That's interesting.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think I buy that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Spoiler alert.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. One of the things they have in common is that Flynn knows how much fun it is as a reader to spot the whole 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? And like, I'm not gonna do close comparison for all the Books that came after Gone Girl and Claim to Be. But when. 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 Ang in yesteryear. It was impossible not to think about it while I was reading this and to see the through line in publishing from Gillian Friend sort of kicking the door down on characters like this to a deeply unlikable main character in a much more cynical story in yesteryear.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it's also about the going through the motions in your life and the repercussions of that, like, especially on Nick's part. I 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. And she has lost some sense of self. And it's only building herself in response to or mimicking of. She takes on the Persona of this young woman she meets at this campground day that's not the days in so 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 a reaction to Nick. It's only a reaction to her. All of her friends, who you 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 a sociopath. There is not an identity there at the center and there's not real affection. She likes Nick because she likes how Nick makes her feel about herself.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But she's play acting at that moment. Right. And 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

[Rebecca Schinsky]

she's performing, 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 moment while pretending that that's not what she's doing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. She has no goal. And one of the things, 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? Because she doesn't have anything she wants to do. 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 kind of understand it given that she's sort of unmoored. And then once he has an affair and has 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That the height of her career is writing meaningless quizzes for a website.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Website.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That in itself tells us something about this person. Like a lot of people did that kind of work in the early like Internet boom days because that was the only work available for for writers.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Today's episode is brought to you by USG Audio, Same Boat Productions and Peacock. Now, if you're into a bookish kind of boozy, kind of delicious good time, it's perfect for book clubs. I got something for you. Join best selling author Ellen Hildebrand as she unpacks every moment of the five star weekend with the show's cast and crew. They discuss all the joy, the drama, the tea and of course the food. Now guests include Jennifer Garner, Chloe Sevignier, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan, Darcy Carden Harlow, Jane West Dubney, all the people friend and the series showrunner and directors. You can stream all eight episodes of the five star weekend on People Peacock, where you can also watch this podcast. Now, I did say boozy, right? So on that on the rock, Spark Tender Created Cocktails has partnered with the podcast to bring fans deeper into the story through sponsored, quote unquote book talk segments where Ellen enjoys an on the rocks ready to drink cocktail and answers questions from book clubs and fans across the country. Like I said, a boozy good bookish book club time. Check it out on Peacock. And thanks again to USG Audio, Same Boat Productions and Peacock for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by the audiobook edition of the Case study by Nicole Lundrigan, a new thriller from Penguin Viking. Now, if you love the voyeurism and creeping dread of the silent patient, and you like a messy capital M, messy psychological thriller, the Case Study is your next read. To further explain why, I will start you off with a question. Now, why do you think a wife would secretly use mirroring software to spy on her husband's virtual therapy sessions with a patient? To answer the question, because she's obsessed with the patient. Yes, the patient, who is a former teen killer with a rare psychiatric disorder. Now, while the wife feeds her true crime addiction by spying on her, she's unaware that an eerie game is playing out in reverse and the patient has a devious plan of her own. Now see, that's why you can't just be out here doing everything. Okay, now to find out what happens next though, make sure to push play on the audiobook edition of the case study by Nicole Lundrigan. Narrated by Athena Karkanis and Michelle Dudoreski. Thanks again to Penguin Viking for sponsoring this episode.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But that's like she still thinks in that way. Like she, there's not a real depth of humanity to her at all. And so it does, it doesn't excuse the behavior that Nick does in response to her. But I do think it explains it. Like it's. 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. Like, come on, y', all, get it together.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's at least a 12 year situation to find yourself in at this point.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You're supposed to be in the honeymoon phase still.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But there's, I'm just, there's so much that you can unpack about this, and it really does, like, 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This time around, we have a billion straight thoughts. Rebecca, we have to move. We have to fly through these. But they're so good. We just have to do them. So let's go.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Or is it like, 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. You're like, well, that's just re. That's like the Miami Dolphins pop champagne every time an NFL team loses because of the last undefeated team. Yeah, I think.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I think that's right. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Listen, I gagged when she described cutting her arm. So I. The. The human cost alone. I'm a bad liar and I have a terrible memory and I'm squeamish. So, like, there's. 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We get to ring the bell for one of your favorite rules. Do not assume a character's diary is the truth.

[Jeff O'Neill]

In fact, assume they're lying.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The best example of it, maybe. Let's see what Days in has a mini bar. This is a real small note, but at one point, Amy's dad goes over to the mini bar 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 mini bar, especially a Days Inn in a small town in the middle of Missouri.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I can say it's been a good 30 years since I've been in a daze inn. So I'll defer to your knowledge of inexpensive roadside motels in this particular.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay, admittedly, not a lot of experience there. Your girl is bougie. But what? Dazin has a mini bar? Please report back. I think one of my favorite. Well, my favorite side character in the book is Nick's sister, Margot, who he calls Go. And I would. I'd read a whole spin off about her. He describes her as she of the rocket science brain and the rodeo spirit.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's pretty good.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. Your tombstone. The rocket science brain and the rodeo spirit compliments.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Rodeo spirit's good tattoo. Tattoo alert. Rocket science brain. She of the rocket science brain and rodeo spirit. Tattoo alert. Anybody?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Let's see also, Jeff, what is the most Midwestern thing about this?

[Jeff O'Neill]

All right, let's do this. Is Missouri the Midwest?

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

If it's not the Midwest, what is it?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I have a. I have a Kansans antipathy for Missouri. So take this. With all the. The grains of corn, I 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. The Missouri. Missouri's the South. No, the south and the Midwest.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Missouri is not the South. Having lived in the Midwest and the South, Missouri is not the South.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I said what I said.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm not taking it back 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?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think the pickles wrapped in cream cheese is amazing. I also think this is another straight thought she did not dwell enough about. This is summer time. It's miserable in southern Missouri. In the along the river mug is a mug in there. Oh, my God. The skeeters alone, they'll eat you alive. That'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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. You smell like DEET for three and a half months.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. What else you got?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Is this the contemporary read alike for Wuthering Heights Marriage horror story. Terrible people doing terrible things.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't hate it. I think at its courts it's meaningfully different in that the main characters in Wuthering Heights are sort of drawn together like forces of nature where no such deep abiding, like sexual attraction is. 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 a bit different things in the same arena.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. 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. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. To related straight to thought. Like the metafictional element brought to bear here. I think. I don't know if it. It precipitated or anticipated or just was it was going to happen anyway. The long string of metafictional murder mysteries we get now in the form of true crime, but also in the form of like Knives out or only 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 sourceful you. So you're like, you don't know what's happened. 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. Flynn enters the pantheon of people. I do not want to be perceived

[Rebecca Schinsky]

by 1 million percent.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 this. If you had to pick which character to be in this, who would you be? We could do this. I also said what if Gillian Flynn had written the Barbie movie? Because I was thinking of that speech that America Ferreira gives in Barbie and

[Rebecca Schinsky]

it seems like, possible to be a woman.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it's a. Don't you think it's related to the ghoul? Do we get that speech without the cool girl monologue? Like they're related. I think the cool girl one is more sophisticated. It's certainly appropriate. I'm not there to quibble with the true 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 Barbara Barbie murder mystery written by Gillian Flynn. Who says no, that's my straight thought.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I love this connection because I remember seeing America Ferreira give that speech in Barbie and being like, I totally get this. And it's kind of on the nose.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And Greta Gerwig has definitely read Gone Girl a bunch of times. The cool girl speech is totally the parent of that. It's impossible to be a woman's speech.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Usually Jeff can come and I'm referring to myself in the third person here. That's how ashamed 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. And we're told she's only reading it because the only choice is black beautiful beauty. I get that. But Gillian Flynn could have chosen any book, anything 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 connective vignettes. It's about Mars and people and I. 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, Fahrenheit 451. They're all connected. Rebecca. All these books. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Interesting to see Bradbury show up in Flynn's reference.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The idea of the cool girl is triple A 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. 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. Untortured, happy, nice big piece of penis. And then description of Nick. You literally cheat, steal and lie. Hell, kill to convince people you're the good guy. It ain't easy for anybody, but I'm just, just throwing those out there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Performances of gender cost everybody.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Hello.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Gillian Flynn is Nick's part of the story. The manuscript he wrote that Amy made him delete at the end Is that your underwriting? Is that your reading? I don't think so. I think not, but I think it's interesting.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. I think we're just with him in real time. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm going to redeem. Jeff's going to redeem him. Hannibal, Missouri. Why is it set in Hannibal, Missouri? We are told, like, explicitly. She doesn't, like, make this a mystery that. Oh, yeah, this is where Mark Twain was from. And I was thinking about Huck Finn. There's a f. There's a fake murder in Huck Finn as well that Huck uses to get out of a situation but then gets somebody else in trouble and is pinned on Jim. Right. We did James. So connective tissue there. So is she thinking about parallels between systems of oppression and, like, faking your death is 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 who are given the 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 11 are hanging out at this mall in 2012. Rebecca. It was a weird scene, and I. I don't know. It was. It was a very strange thing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think it comes out of, like, my. The place that I've seen those kinds of scenes is zombie movie 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. But it does feel like we're into a different genre book for female. Very unusual. I was just watching Black Panther with the fam and was thinking of Killmonger, the. 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 Kilman Monger, they're identifying something real and bad. It needs addressing, but I do. They don't really. They don't really know what to do except revenge. That's all they got. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Setting your husband up to look like he murdered you is not the answer.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I said already that gagged. 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. This is. I was very Possible I could have run Nick and a Amy at a party at a Brooklyn walk up roof sometime in 2006. I know this. 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 and she will. She will default to. She will include a quiz for no reason other than to help her think. 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 she never. That's never the same. 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 there's so this idea of the scavenger hunt, treasure hunt that's beautifully done for the enjoyment of the person it's done for, but is really a test of that person's devotion. This book came out in June 2012. The episode of Parks and Rec where Leslie Knob gives Ben this absurd thing is February 20th. Is this peak scavenger hunt as a representation between the difference of understanding and care in male female 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is a thing. Yeah, this is a thing. Like, and maybe it's come 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 it as romantic, like set up a treasure hunt or like 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 be 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. I don't know if people are still doing this today, but yeah, I feel

[Jeff O'Neill]

like it was up there with giving someone a dog is like that. That's not a gift, man. That's. You're not doing that. I want a list of 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 a Corner continues. It's now more of a dodecahedron than a corner. But, like, you know, sometimes mystery lures like the sprinkle in little clues about what the answer is, and the. You know, the nickname for a mystery is a hoodie. Done it. And Amy's last name is Done. So I don't know, maybe there's a clue there at the beginning. Who done it?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Amy's last name.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I know, but I'm just saying who? Well, they both done it. That's what we learned. They're both guilty.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's true. Okay. You remain right in your dodecahedron over there.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay, thanks. And lastly, another tough look for Jeff. Come on, Jeff. Character Jeff and Greta basically blackmail her into giving them all of her money. Yeah, he. He went from fish catfish theft to robbing women who are on the lam.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Very tough introduction and gives rise to one of my favorite phrases in the book that Amy describes Jeff's catfish theft as the illicit pissing economy. That's another. AI could never.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No. All right. I had a lot. Sorry. Or you're welcome, depending on how everyone's experience of that particular run was for everyone. A little.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We got a little manic about Gone Girl. It's okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's okay. All right. Notable quotes. Rebecca. Of course, it's time I look through my fingers at this point. This. But I'm so glad.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 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 on me. I don't mind. I'm the cool girl.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm not sure. Do I have anything else to say? I mean, it kind of speaks for itself. I don't know. Rebecca. Bars and reading that, it's again too. Where does your eye track?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's the whole combination. The hot, funny, brilliant woman who adores football and poker and dirty jokes that, like 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 and that it's that hot and understanding and they never get angry. Like. Like, I didn't.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

It.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. I think one thing Gillian Flynn might be interested in here, 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, is that. Isn't this the nature of your college roommate who is. Has the anatomy that you find sexually attractive? Like, that's kind of what you're looking at for. And people like this may exist out there, but it's kind of a. 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 like that? Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's the difference between wanting to have sex with women and liking women.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Who is Amy or, sorry, why is Amy amazing and Andy's just Abel? 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 like, 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. Like Flynn just really is willing to name it. Amy also says Most beautiful, good things are done by women. People scorn. 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 don't like me all that much. Like, 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 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. 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?

[Jeff O'Neill]

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, like, come down, come down, come down.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

If you are all the things that Amy is, if you are brilliant and sharp and, like, high maintenance and you have high expectations and you're perceived as difficult, like, you cannot win this game. Like, your hotness won't win it for you. And I think the, like, the real point and what Flynn is going for is the game is unwinnable. No one wins it. The only acceptable, the only successful move is to reject the premise altogether. Like, 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 piece.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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

[Rebecca Schinsky]

want to shortchange it, but there's a moment where Amy, me, like, almost gets it when she's in disguise. Like, after she's left Nick, she's chopped her hair off. She's dyed it this dark mousey color. She's been systematically gaining a little weight, and I do mean a little because she started as a size 2 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 term. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We haven't talked about this, but a really striking opening line, slash paracord. 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 read the blurb, there's a woman who's missing. And then to see a man. Think of a woman like this already. 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. Now 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right, Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 is what's going to happen.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

He probably already did.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 soul mate 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, Aedes girl, ultimate Frisbee granola and blushing ingenue and woody Hepburnian sophisticate, brainy, ironic girl, Boho babe, cool girl. The loved wife, the unloved wife, the vengeful, scorned wife. And now diary Amy. 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 with a soul made of plastic, easy to mold, easy to wipe down. The woman's entire music collection is formed from Pottery Barn compilations. The 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. It's pretty good.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Such a great writer.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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, warning you off or pointing to it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. We have managed to avoid talking about an issue we do not care about. But come 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The immortal questions that are asked, which of these are primary here? I'm entering a new one into the docket. I'll just put at the end, but we'll get to it 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? I. And who are my people? And lastly, I'm entering in. This is one I should have brought in earlier. What is justice?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Ooh, I like this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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. This is not one of those ones. Like, yeah, it's all of them. Just pick your poison here. Which do you think you want to talk about?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

What is the good life is really on this? They've made each other miserable.

[Jeff O'Neill]

What is the good life Life? What is the. Do we get a representation of the good life here?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Nobody in this book is happy. So I think the closest any of these characters could get to is, like, not this. Whatever this is, I don't want it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The happiest moments are Nick and Go at the bar being brother and sister, right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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?

[Jeff O'Neill]

How do I know what I know? Where does it come from?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, that's the real one. 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? 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 decided a long time ago what she thinks Nick deserves.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes, well, and I think that's the. The idea in the reader because it plays upon it. It traffics in the idea of a revenge fanty, 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 distance. 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 if 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 what's going to be her goal?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. That like, yeah. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, but that, 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've become adults and learned is there is no recompense.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

There's. There's not. There's not a lot you can do, nor is it necessarily a penal system to have an. I mean, again, you have an affair or you, 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? Do 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 of the person feels it that. 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, 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, they damage that or they leave or there's no good answer, or they're

[Rebecca Schinsky]

not who they were pretending to be.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It all falls apart.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Rebecca, are we sure this isn't about art and writing?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It is more about art and writing than you would think at first glance. Yeah. Yeah. Love that. When it's sneaky.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Could you get most of the gist of this from watching the signal adaptation.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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, 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. Fighting, Fight Club 7, Zodiac, the social Network, murders, Gender.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All kinds of interesting stuff going on.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it 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 from that one alone. Like, Rosamund pike is great as Amy, but Ben Affleck as Nick, who knows? He has a punchable face is just like.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And a cleft chin, which is a big deal here.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's perfect.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But also, I think it also is trafficking in the. The reason it's perfect casting is not just Affleck as a, you know, 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 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

One of the great adaptations and just a wonderful movie on its own.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Miss Piggy giving the cool girl speech would give me my entire life. I think that it would be great.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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

[Rebecca Schinsky]

has to say, hadn't thought about that. Great point. We can sit with complex talk about meta. Great. I would also be open to a musical, but only if Neil Patrick Harris comes back to play Desi Boy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's really specific for the seventh most important character. You have a great in it too.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like also great casting of him as Amy's ex boyfriend that she has told lies about. And. And he thinks he's helping her at the end of the story. And Neil Patrick Harris, one of the great stage musical performers. So I think that would be fun.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Roseman 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Also, Tyler Perry as the lawyer. Tanner Bolt is like, he. He's just also really stellar. Good performances all around, unpopular opinion.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I kind of like Tanner Bolt. He's good at his job.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

He is at his job. We like competence.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Usually the figure of, like the divorce attorney or the, you know, the Richard Gere in 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 were. Like, Tanner Bolt can go jump into something hot and boiling. Miscellaneous trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes and more. Rebecca, what do you have?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 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. Let me just come up with what kind of column Amy would write. And the cool girl speech comes out. 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. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's so weird. So weird.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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, moment of like, of course the men all love her. She's a character who was created by a bunch of men.

[Jeff O'Neill]

What's your sense of the is. Is Cool Girl? Is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl a subset of the Cool Girl? Oh, because this was coined. I looked this up the. Or 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 Green girl came out of Kirsten Dunst's performance in Elizabeth Elizabethtown. So 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 time. Same. Same time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to puzzle over that one. Okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, sorry, I just sprung that on you, listener. If you've got a good take, podcast

[Rebecca Schinsky]

bookri.com they feel meaningfully different to me, but they live in the same universe.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I. I think I just need

[Rebecca Schinsky]

some time to untangle why this is

[Jeff O'Neill]

what Gillian Flynn Cinch learned from Mystic River. Start with a character, go deep and dark, and then craft a mystery. I think you can feel it. Especially look at the structure of this. The opening 20, 30 pages are. There's a lot before Amy's gone. It's like get from Nick's point of view and how like unhappy he is and how he recognizes that things aren't great. We don't. He 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. It's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't know. She's framing him for murder.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, he doesn't know that yet. He doesn't know that. That yet. Yeah, but it's toxic hot takes Rebecca.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like, yeah, threads would not do well with Gone Girl.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That would not go well. 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. It spoils what are supposed to be surprises in books. Like, let's just let it go.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yep. 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 is as metafictional things for me. You know, I'm. No one's gonna appoint me jury to crown the best crime novel all time, but for me, I think it's the best crime crime to all. I read one of my other hot takes if. If you need a character to like in a work of art, I am not sure how to talk to you. I'm not. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're dumb. I'm just. That's not a wavelength that I know how to cross the chasm to get across to you. And this is a great example of it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I agree.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Anything else you want to get out?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No. Got all the takes off.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 Art Roger Aykroyd controversy. That's fun to go see. What else you have a bunch here?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Let's see other good female revenge thrillers out by Natsuo Carino and Penance by Kanae Minato. A couple 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 it into a tv TV miniseries with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac. That is really solid. 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. What other? Zero to well wrote titles to connect to. The Great Gatsby is overtly mentioned at least twice, I. 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. Rebecca, how about the Secret History? I think I saw Some vibes. 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. From writing a mystery, whereas Tarte gets to a mystery from a place of wanting to talk about art and beauty and other things. So like they're coming to a similar place but from different directions.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. They feel spiritually related to me. That like 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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I wrote James my personal effort because of the Huck Finn. But also then 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 representations of gender there. I also was thinking about Guy Montag and millie from Fahrenheit 451. This disconnection. Right. Like looking. I thought of Nick is looking at Amy's head. Not unlike Guy encountering Millie just sitting there and having her shell cells in and just feeling like an object that's impenetrable. There'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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's a fun comparison.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean we just read it. So that's there. Cocktail Cocktail party creep sheet where we try to offer three to five takeaways. We have three here. Two of them are each yours and one is mine. Rebecca, what do you have?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yep. Is to pull up the meta fictional ladder behind you there. I the only in mind patriarchy is not good for men either. Less bad than for people who don't know if his men. But it still blows. Pay attention.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Final beat is 0 to 1 out score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. I think much like 451, 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Seven or eight? Yeah, eight.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Eight.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The next 20 years will be very important for the legacy of this book. I think you're right. We're out of the. We're. 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. Books matters at this point. Right. Like this was not, you know, the underground Railroad. Whitehead. There's things that happened after it. Nickel boys. And like the con, the profile is raised. But right now this is peak Flynn and it hasn't really built on it. We'll see how that goes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Got it. How do you even build on it?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't know. I. I could never write something like this. So it sounds hypocrite, not hypocritical. It sounds arrogant and hubristic to say. But I don't really know what you do.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, this is the mountaintop.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it's very tough. Readability is a 10.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

10.

[Jeff O'Neill]

10.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. It's readable.

[Jeff O'Neill]

10. Current relevance of central questions.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

10. 10. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

10. I don't know that the book nerd read credit is especially high on this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'd go just a little bit higher because it's a little bit older.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. And also that you could have seen the movie and got gone. And if you've read the book now.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay. Where do you want to go?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think five is fine.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, damn. Factor is a nine.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it's high.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Really good.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Great. So glad we got to go back to it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

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 [e-mail] 02 well read also includes guided read alongs. The odyssey's in the bank, the movies coming out. We're sort of noodling around for our next pick there. Caveat. You can always send suggestions to our email at 02. Well [e-mail] but trust me, we've thought about it. We just. We just have. Whatever you're putting in, you can follow us on the Socials at 02 well Read podcast. If you want to see me do a 60 second version of on the Casting of Helen and Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, you can find the that over on a couple of the socials by this point. Thanks to Thriftbooks 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 what's it? 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 like, what else can we do?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It'll be 15 next year and then the movie will be 15 in 2029.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We're not going to do it next

[Rebecca Schinsky]

year and then the book will turn 20 in 2013. 2. So maybe every 10 years we pick up Gone Girl.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I could do that.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Me too.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Thanks everybody. This is a good one.