Please let him look. I didn't need to hide from someone courting oblivion as ardently as I am.
We will have a happy marriage if it kills him.
I was very lucky to grow up in a household that really valued storytelling and didn't find it frivolous.
I'm not someone who can be depended on five days a week. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday? I don't even get out of bed five days in a row—I often don't remember to eat five days in a row.
There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.
He was verbally poking a bruise.
I'm so much happier now that I'm dead. Technically missing. Soon to be presumed dead. Gone. And my lazy lying shitting oblivious husband will go to prison for my murder. Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That's murder. Let the punishment fit the crime.
Save Gas, Fart in a Jar.
It sounded artificial, like a beauty contestant pledging world peace.
Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet.
It's humbling to become the very thing you once mocked.
I realized I'd be stuck doing all the hard stuff, she reasoned. All the diapers and doctors' appointments and discipline, and you'd just breeze in and be Fun Daddy. I'd do all the work to make them good people, and you'd undo it anyway, and they'd love you and hate me.
Nothing to it but to do it.
Stay away from boys. They'll either throw rocks or look up your skirt.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness.
The problem started long before that, of course. Problems always start long before you really, really see them.
Everyone has a moment where life goes off the rails. Mine was the day Marian died. The day I picked up that knife is a tight second.
I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.
To know exactly what I wanted to hear in those notes, 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'd thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood.
Do not antagonize the cops, I told myself. Repeat if necessary: Do not antagonize the cops.
The little brown house was my father's house, which was actually blue, but Amy was making another inside joke. I'd always liked our inside jokes the best – they made me feel more connected to Amy than any amount of confessional truth-telling or passionate lovemaking or talk-till-sunrising.
I spoke in a soft, soothing voice, a voice wearing a cardigan.
When a child knows that young that her mother doesn't care for her, bad things happen.
I sat at the bottom of the bathtub, humiliated, trying not to cry. So.
Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber.
I know, I know, I'm being a girl.
I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.
But she did invite me to her house, and women like that don't invite over women like me unless they want something.
I woke up on my sister's couch with a raging hangover and an urge to kill my wife.
Nick's the kind of guy you can drink a beer with, the kind of guy who doesn't mind if you puke in his car. Nick!
I'm not just pretty anymore, I am pretty for my age. It is the truth: My value has decreased.
This man might kill me.
I went into Andie's bathroom, took a piss, looked at myself in the mirror, and made myself say it: You are a cheater. You have failed one of the most basic male tests. You are not a good man. And when that didn't bother me, I thought: You're really not a good man.
It is now two million square feet of echo.
I stared back—cows are the few animals that really seem to see you.
Mom, Dad, Baby, they were three advanced people with three advanced degrees in psychology—they thought more before nine A.M. than most people thought all month.
Sometimes the answer is at the bottom of a bottle.
The whole book made me want to punch Amy right in her stupid, spotless vagina.
I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.
Third choice is a single woman who has that open look. You know it : The same woman you stop to ask for directions or the time of day, that's the woman we ask for money.
See, Curry, Detective Willis felt I was holding back some information and so he sulked off, like all men do when they don't get their way with women they've fooled around with.
Amma and I were sick just like Marian. It had to be made that obvious to me before I finally understood—nearly twenty years too late.
An old guy with a Hemingway beard and the build of a girl.
If you cannot take care of me when I'm alive I'm dead anyway.
And every single person in this case lies, is lying, did lie.
Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.
I wanted to slice barren into my skin. That's how I'd stay, my insides unused. Empty and pristine. I pictured my pelvis split open, to reveal a tidy hollow, like the nest of a vanished animal.
To show don't tell and all that other writery crap. (Adopted-orphan.
Worse, I convinced myself our tragedy was entirely her making. I spent years working myself into the very thing I swore she was: a righteous ball of hate.
