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697fb4f
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Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood. Tony Kushner, THE ILLUSION
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Gillian Flynn |
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695c15f
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I have learned about bulk shopping in my four weeks as a Mississippi River resident. Republicans go to Sam's Club, Democrats go to Costco. But everyone buys bulk because--unlike Manhattanites--they all have space to store twenty-four jars of sweet pickles.
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Gillian Flynn |
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4dd7084
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He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room.
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Gillian Flynn |
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99fcd5e
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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 ho..
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Gillian Flynn |
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cbf466f
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You think you can ever be a normal man again? You'll find a nice girl, and you'll still think of me, and you'll be so completely dissatisfied, trapped in your boring, normal life with your regular wife and your two average kids. You'll think of me and then you'll look at your wife, and you'll think: Dumb bitch.
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Gillian Flynn |
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0108b9f
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And she'd feel sorry for the kids, but not in a way that made her want to help, just in a way that made her not want to look at them anymore.
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Gillian Flynn |
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bff1aaf
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Nick's cell phone rings at ten A.M., and I can tell by his voice that it is Go. He sounds springy, boyish, the way he always does when he talks to her. The way he used to sound with me. He heads into the bedroom and shuts
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Gillian Flynn |
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d960753
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never entirely erased the stink, though--she must have one rank pussy),
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Gillian Flynn |
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743ed37
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Once you've crossed state lines, you don't phone to ask if you can drop in.
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Gillian Flynn |
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237f112
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If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we'd all have a very Merry Christmas, I heard my aunt Diane boom in my head. Those words had been the bane of my childhood, a constant reminder that nothing turned out right, not just for me but for anyone, and that's why someone had invented a saying like that. So we'd all know that we'd never have what we needed.
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Gillian Flynn |
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64859cb
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This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.
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Gillian Flynn |
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ef7d944
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This is Nick's wife, Amy, who was born and raised in New York City." And her friends, plump and welcoming, immediately suffer some strange Tourettesian episode: They repeat the words--New York City!--with clasped hands and say something that defies response: That must have been neat. Or, in reedy voices, they sing "New York, New York," rocking side to side with tiny jazz hands. Maureen's friend from the shoe store, Barb, drawls "Nue York Ce..
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Gillian Flynn |
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943891e
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It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are playing-acting there can be no such thing as a soulmate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because i'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to fe..
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Gillian Flynn |
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beabd7b
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She was humming something melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out--a folk song? a lullabye?--and then realized it was the theme to M*A*S*H. Suicide is painless. I went downstairs.
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Gillian Flynn |
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3da9012
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So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn't make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I'm the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-lookin..
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Gillian Flynn |
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bd3dd9f
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My wife loved games, mostly mind games, but also actual games of amusement,
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Gillian Flynn |
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3eca8e4
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It was him. The boy in 'I met a boy!
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Gillian Flynn |
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a424bc7
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They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish - expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other's spaces liquidly. Making it look easy, the soul-mate thing. People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.
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Gillian Flynn |
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10276a1
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The woman got shit done, and she was not one to abandon a project (say, her fixer-upper husband, for instance), even if she decided she didn't like it.
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Gillian Flynn |
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5270c50
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I was not raised by big-dreamer parents who pictured their child as a future president. I was raised by pragmatic parents who pictured their child as a future office worker of some sort, making a living of some sort.
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Gillian Flynn |
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403e022
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My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I'd developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all.
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Gillian Flynn |
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7b6b548
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It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.
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Gillian Flynn |
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f83026b
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Instead there were paintings of sailboats, proper pastel pastorals, a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt. The latter was particularly strange, since I'd known little about Mrs. Roosevelt, except that she was good, which at the time I suppose was enough. Given my druthers now, I'd prefer a snapshot of Warren Harding's wife, "the Duchess," who recorded the smallest offenses in a little red notebook and avenged herself accordingly. Today I like my ..
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Gillian Flynn |
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0f69451
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It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm. I doubt my sister will ever marry: If she's sad or upset or angry, she needs to be alone - she fears a man dismissing her womanly tears.
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Gillian Flynn |
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a25550f
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It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoe..
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Gillian Flynn |
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e0499b0
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If she were alive, someone would need to return her. If she were dead, nature would have to give her up.
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Gillian Flynn |
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7106fa2
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Mama Mo does not insist. She simply makes things a reality by assuming they are such:
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Gillian Flynn |
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111f6d2
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I was sometimes as guilty of playing the figure-me-out game as Amy was.
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Gillian Flynn |
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680ee94
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He'd have to work to make me comfortable here, and he doesn't want to do that. He wants to enjoy himself.
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Gillian Flynn |
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404cad1
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No relationship is perfect, they say--they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation--yes, honey, okay, honey--is the same as concord.
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Gillian Flynn |
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4adf1ad
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They would not be good for marital advice: They are soul mates, remember? They are all peaks, no valleys - a single, infinite burst of marital ecstasy. I can't tell them I am screwing up the one thing I have left: my marriage. They'd somehow write another book, a fictional rebuke in which Amazing Amy celebrated the most fantastic, fulfilling, bump-free little marriage ever . . . because she put her mind to it.
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Gillian Flynn |
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a0caa63
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I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.
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Gillian Flynn |
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eedf531
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I hated Nick for being surprised when I became me. I hated him for not knowing it had to end, for truly believing he had married this creature, this figment of the imagination of a million masturbatory men, semen-fingered and self-satisfied. He truly seemed astonished when I asked him to listen to me.
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Gillian Flynn |
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607de53
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He's calling you a Cool Girl to fool you! That's what men do: They try to make it sound like you are the cool girl so you will bow to their wishes. Like a car salesman saying, How much do you want to pay for this beauty? when you didn't agree to buy it yet. That awful phrase men use: 'I mean, I know you wouldn't mind if I . . .' Yes, I do mind. Just say it. Don't lose, you dumb little twat.
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Gillian Flynn |
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20e1b35
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You're here covering the murders, bad girl," Jackie continued. "Adora must hate that. Sleeping in her house with your dirty little brain. (...) Course before Adora took it over, we all slept over at Joya's house with our dirty little brains. Same house, different crazy lady running it."
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Gillian Flynn |
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b2741f0
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Yet most of the time that I'm awake, I want to cut. Not small words either. Equivocate. Inarticulate. Duplicitous. At my hospital back in Illinois they would not approve of this craving.
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Gillian Flynn |
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ce8bb1f
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The nurses gave us meds to alleviate our tingling skins. And more meds to soothe our burning brains.
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Gillian Flynn |
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0836e54
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I wasn't entirely sure about Meredith's assessment. Some people would love to have the killer be a guy born and raised in Wind Gap. Someone they went fishing with once, someone they were in Cub Scouts with. Makes a better story.
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Gillian Flynn |
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44c5873
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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.
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Gillian Flynn |
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c0560f3
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I had a new persona, not of my choosing. I was Average Dumb Woman Married to Average Shitty Man. He had single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy.
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Gillian Flynn |
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1d8385f
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I think this experience will make him a better person. Or at least a sorrier one.
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Gillian Flynn |
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8147670
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I've never understood why that's considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.
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Gillian Flynn |
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414deb2
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So all these extras, they're just bonus fuck-yous. Amusing booby traps. I love that I am a woman with booby traps.
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Gillian Flynn |
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d3ac930
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Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxipad commercial, Windex commercial. You'd think all women do is clean and bleed.
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Gillian Flynn |