Content warning: This post contains mention of sexual assault.
Gone Girl is one of the last books I remember seeing everyone reading. I was still living in New York City when Gillian Flynn’s book came out and, in my memory, at least one person a day had it with them on the subway. It’s easy in this day of e-readers and phones to forget what a commitment that was, to hold a physical book in two hands while standing up on a swaying train car. Hardcovers can weigh a few pounds.
The book, which set me up for an obsession with the author’s other fascinating, dark, female characters, was a phenomenon in itself. By the end of its first year in print, over two million copies of the book had sold. Today, it’s twenty million. The movie, written by Flynn and directed by David Fincher, was a rare page-to-screen adaptation that held everything I loved about the original and added more to it. (It’s worth noting that 2010s phenomenon, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also got a Fincher directed adaptation that was also excellent. Let the man direct thrillers!)
It's hard to believe that Gone Girl the movie is almost decade old now, released October 3, 2014. The Cool Girl monologue, which appeared in the book and was adapted for the film, is perhaps the part of the book people remember best. It outlined what so many women felt—whether they were in their twenties like me or older—but had never put their finger on.
It still grabs me. It’s embarrassing to admit how often I think about it and how much I’d love (just once!) to write a paragraph with that much staying power.
“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.”
It's a brilliant monologue. Who amongst us hasn’t tried to be the Cool Girl at least once in our lives? Who amongst us hasn’t been mad at men for wishing we were still pretending to be the Cool Girl instead of who we really are? The women I know aren’t as angry as Gone Girl’s main character, Amy, is all the time but I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t felt her rage on occasion.
Recently on Threads, I saw a post from a woman who’d found what she thought was a relatively easy job at a coffee shop. The owner had no problem with her work ethic or her interaction with customers but warned the woman that she might not be a good fit. She didn’t chat enough with her coworkers, wasn’t friendly enough. You’re great at your job but please smile more. In the comments, other women offered sympathy. One shared that she was told she should look happier while filing out excel spreadsheets in her cubicle. No wonder people still remember Gone Girl and Amy, who feels overlooked and undervalued and then does something about it. The book is shelved as a thriller but really it’s a fantasy. Instead of story about sexual desire, we get a fantasy of female rage.
I read Gone Girl when I was just a few years out of college and my takeaways were different then. I spent most of my time in high school not really getting the point of feminism. Growing up, people told me I could do anything I wanted with my life and I believed them. Sure, my mom had gotten a settlement as part of a gender discrimination lawsuit for unequal pay but that was an outlier. Sure, a middle school friend was called a slut because she fell asleep at a party and a boy fingered her. Sure, most of my friends have at least one story about a boy pushing their heads down into his lap. Sure, men harassed us on the internet for being too pretty or not pretty enough or writing about the wrong things or the right things but in the wrong way. Sure, men got the jobs, the promotions, the girlfriends and wives who made their lives easier. That was just bad luck. We just needed to girl boss, to lean in. It didn’t mean things weren’t equal.
Then I started learning that there were things that were riskier for me to do as a woman. Traveling in a foreign country, a man on the bus pushed his hard penis into my leg. I was embarrassed for him at first—surely this was an oversight—and stepped away. He moved toward me again. His nose, I remember, was bulbous with some kind of disease. I was seventeen.
As a food writer, I read books by people who went undercover in the industry—meatpacking plants, restaurants, farms, and so on. The men did their research and came back mostly unchanged. Then I read a book by a female author, the work was smart and well-written and intensively researched, who was drugged and raped by a coworker while reporting.
I started saying no to things that felt uncomfortable. When a hard-to-pin-down source for a story texted me last minute to say he could meet me in a remote location at night, I said no. It might have been fine—he was a private detective with strange hours—but I still said no. I didn’t get the interview. Would the story have been better if I’d gone? I’ll never know.
I stopped listening to everyone who told me things were equal and looked at the evidence that had been piling up my whole life. Some people had to try a lot harder to succeed. Some people were safe and others weren’t. Some people were heard just because they were speaking; others had to shout and shout only to be told they were too shrill, too angry. If you said it differently, I’d listen.
In the years since the book came out, we elected an orange-haired scammer and business failure to be our president instead of a woman. We appointed (another) sexual predator to the supreme court. We overturned Roe v. Wade. Now a nominee for vice president is going around telling the world that women only matter if they have children. Major social media accounts advertise the benefits of moving to remote locations to submit to our husbands and become trad wives.
I’m almost thirty-five which means my female friends are either having babies or hurriedly trying to decide whether or not they’ll be happy—really happy—if they either do or don’t have children. Time moves fast and soon it will be too late. Meanwhile, I hear from single friends who keep seeing men in their 50s on dating apps who are interested in finally having children. Now they want to settle down.
They weren’t spending their one wild and precious life talking about it in their thirties over wine with their friends. They’ve had a chance to live and travel and focus on their careers and try new things and build up enough of a nest egg to have children without it being a financial burden. Now they feel ready. These men are looking, of course, for a woman a decade or two younger than them.
It’s biology but it’s also fucking unfair. Where’s our extra decade? Why do we have to agonize over these decisions while so many men are off blowing around like leaves, seeing where the wind takes them? Maybe women wouldn’t be so stressed out if we weren’t constantly being reminded that our clocks are ticking.
A few years ago, a close friend died when she was only thirty-two. I used to think that was so old; now I can’t help but add “only.” I think about how young she was, how thirty is just the beginning of adulthood. Her birthday is next month. But every year, I’m the only one who gets older. Sometimes I imagine what she might be doing now or in five years or ten. I think about the poems she wrote, the poems I’ll never get to read because she’s not there to create them.
Revisiting Gone Girl now, just a few weeks before my own birthday, I found myself relating to Amy in a way I couldn’t before. Amy’s age isn’t specified but she’s likely in her early thirties. Gillian Flynn was 41 when the book was published and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the book was written by a woman who was roughly the age I am now.
This time, I noticed that Amy hadn’t just become a different person for Nick—the Cool Girl he wanted—she was a chameleon around everyone in her life.
Men aren’t the only ones women change themselves for. We are constantly becoming someone else. We are good mothers, good daughters, good employees, good wives. We are aware of other people’s needs. We make time for others and don’t leave enough for ourselves. We are juggling everything—even our futures. We are trying to smile even when no one is there to see us. We are selfless because to do otherwise is selfish, unlikable.
I want us to be able to be leaves, changing and falling into the air without knowing where we will land, only that something will be there to catch us. We can keep being good or we can be ourselves. There’s only one path to choose. I want to snap off the tree. Let the wind blow.
This one really rocks and thank you! You reminded me of a few years (now over three decades ago) when I was single. It was between my two marriages and I was, yes, in my thirties, and yes, that question of who I really was vs. who do I need to be (or pretend to be) was omnipresent. Yes, we need to claim the hope and build the world that allows us to learn the answer to that with more ease, and without the man-ipulation. Thank you.
Such a thoughtful post!