On Throwaway Girls and the Psychopaths We’d Rather Be
“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.”
—Libby Day, Dark Places
Every time a book sells into the stratosphere, there’s an army of marketing experts who try to reverse-engineer its success. They advise publishers to mimic the cover, the blurb, the tropes… anything really, often charging insane consulting prices just to hold up a bestseller and say, “Do this… but different.”
Gillian Flynn wrote three novels and the third is the one that hit. Gone Girl sold over twenty million copies and spawned an entire subgenre of domestic thrillers with “Girl” in the title. Her second book, Dark Places, got solid reviews, a film adaptation that disappeared into VOD oblivion, and a readership that could generously be called “cult.”
Including me.
Those of us who consider ourselves honorary members of the Kill Club are often baffled as to why it was Gone Girl that took off when Dark Places was so obviously, so clearly better.
The easy answer is that Gone Girl had a better hook, a tidier premise, a more marketable mystery. But the easy answer is wrong.
The real answer is uglier and I won’t keep you waiting: readers wanted to be Amy Dunne. Nobody wants to be Libby Day.
The Cool Girl and Her Aspirational Psychopaths
The “Cool Girl” monologue from Gone Girl became a cultural phenomenon because it gave women language for something they’d felt but couldn’t articulate. Amy’s evisceration of the performance expected of women—the “hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping”—landed with the force of revelation. Women shared it on social media. They quoted it in arguments. They recognized themselves in it, either as former Cool Girls or as women who’d lost men to them.
