Nat’s Reviews > Gone Girl > Status Update

“My father finally died. At night, in his sleep. A woman spooned his last meal into his mouth, a woman settled him into bed for his last rest, a woman cleaned him up after he died, and a woman phoned to give me the news.
‘He was a good man,’ she said…
‘No, he wasn’t,’ I said, and she laughed like she clearly hadn’t in a month.”

“You don’t buy it? Then how about this? He did lie. He didn’t mean a fucking thing he said. Well then, screw him, he did too good a job, because I want him, exactly like that. The man he was pretending to be… That’s the man I want for my husband. That’s the man I signed up for… the man I deserve.
So he can choose to truly love me the way he once did, or I will bring him to heel and make him…”

“It would come to me at strange moments… I’d detect a nib of admiration, and more than that, fondness for my wife, right in the middle of me, right in the gut…to woo me back to her, even to predict all my wrong moves…the woman knew me cold. Better than anyone in the world, she knew me. All this time I thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood.”

“I caught her looking at me now, with the same steeled chill with which she looked at our father: just another shitty male taking up space. I’m sure I looked at her through our father’s miserable eyes sometimes: just another petty woman resenting me.”

“it really is true… Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”

“My home was disheveled, but not yet wrecked when she first started kissing my husband… slipping into bed with him… I wonder what it feels like to be a woman whose Christmas present must be bought in cash. Liberating. Being an undocumented girl means being the girl who doesn’t have to call the plumber or listen to grips about work or remind and remind him to pick up some goddamn cat food.”

“…I’m a romantic.
In real life, if Nick had killed me, I think he would’ve just rolled my body into a trash bag and driven me to one of the landfills in the sixty-mile radius. Just dispose of me. He’d have even taken a few items with him — the broken toaster that that’s not worth fixing, a pile of old VHS tapes he’s been meaning to to toss — to make the trip efficient.”

“He took away chunks of me with blasé swipes: my independence, my pride, my esteem. I gave, and he took and took. He Giving Treed me out of existence.

That whore, he picked that little whore over me. He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.”

“I am married to an imbecile. I’m married to a man who will always choose that, and when he gets bored with this dumb twat, he’ll just find another girl who is pretending to be that girl, and he’ll never have to do anything hard in his life.

Resolve stiffened.”

“But it’s so very necessary. Nick must be taught a lesson. He’s never been taught a lesson! He glides through life with that charming-Nicky grin, his beloved-child entitlement, his fibs and shirkings, his shortcomings and selfishness, and no one calls him on ANYTHING. I think this experience will make him a better person. Or at least a sorrier one. Fucker.”