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Gone Girl Audiobook Excerpt Transcript

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head and the shape of it, to begin with, the very first time I saw her, it was the back of her head. I saw it, and there was something lovely about it – the angles of it like a shiny, hard, corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily. I know her head anywhere and what’s inside it, I think of that too her mind, her brain all those coils and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast frantic centipedes like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling, her brain and sifting through it trying to catch and pin down her thoughts.

What are you thinking Amy of the question I’ve asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer, I suppose these questions storm cloud over every marriage. What are you thinking? How are you feeling who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do my eyes, flipped open at exactly 6 a?

. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist dummy click of the lids, the world is black, and then showtime six zero, zero. The clock said in my face first thing: I saw six zero.

It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings. 8: 43. 11.

51. 9. 26. My life was alarmless at that exact moment: six: zero, zero, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks revealing its full summer; angry god-self, its reflection flared across the river toward our house. A long blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains, accusing you have been seen.

You will be seen I wallowed in bed, which was our new york bed in our new house, which we still called the new house. Even though we’d been back here for two years, it’s a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams suburban nouveau riche the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split levels: shag, carpet, side of town, the kind of house that Is immediately familiar a generically grand unchallenging new new new house that my wife would and did the test? Should I remove my soul before I come inside her first line upon arrival, it had been a compromise. Amy demanded we rent, not by in my little Missouri hometown in her firm hope that we wouldn’t be stuck here long, but the only houses for rent were clustered in this failed development. A miniature ghost town of bank-owned recession, busted price-reduced mansions a neighborhood that closed before it ever opened.

It was a compromise, but Amy didn’t see it that way, not in the least to Amy. It was a punishing whim. On my part, with a nasty selfish twist of the knife, I would drag her caveman style to a town. She had aggressively avoided and made her live in the kind of house she used to mock. I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like.

One of us was always angry. Amy usually does not blame me for this particular grievance Amy, the Missouri grievance blames the economy. Blame bad luck. Blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the internet, blame people who use the internet. I used to be a writer.

I was a writer who wrote about tv and movies and books back when people read things on paper back when anyone cared about what I thought I’d arrived in new york in the late 90s, the last gasp of the glory days, although no one knew it, then New York was packed with writers, real writers because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. 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 think about it. At a time when newly graduated college kids could come to new york and get paid to write, we had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade.

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