Six Degrees of Separation: Gone Girl

This month’s six degrees of separation (which I missed due to vacation) is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I feel like the lone person who wasn’t shocked and awed by it. Honestly, I think this says more about the dark and twisted nature of my mind than anything about the book. My favorite part of the novel was Amy’s break down of the “cool girl” stereotype:

“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 hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

01. Fortune’s Pawn by Rachel Bach. And that’s where my first connection starts, with Deviana Morris… She can out drink you, out fight you, and is highly intelligent. If cool girl was the highest of compliments instead of an annoying stereotype, then Devi would define it.

02. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? by Philip K. Dick. Space. The final frontier. Wrong book, right sentiment. Just as in Fortune’s Pawn, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? people are encouraged to colonize space. I have to admit, I find something about the vastness of space to be disturbing. I don’t know that I would be jumping at the first opportunity to live off Earth.

03. Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. Sheep. Wolves. Animals in the title. I won’t pretend the connection is deeper than that. I’d highly recommend both books though. And Wolves is quintessential ’80s though. Which brings me to…

(Bonus: Both American Psycho and Tell the Wolves I’m Home have literary mixtapes. The first one is mine; the second one was created by Kate. Books, music…get amongst it.)

04. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Admittedly, when I think about American Psycho, I think about two things: the ’80s (and how I can’t stand Whitney Houston’s music) and blood. Lots of blood (and, it goes without say (yet I am), violence).

05. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian not only has blood in the title, the book is violent – soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly violent. Naturally, it is one of the best things I have ever read.

06. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. And finally, making my student loans worth it (putting my undergrad degree to use and all), I’m connecting Blood Meridian to Tropic of Cancer. Because geography*.

*The hard part about writing a blog is sometimes seeming too flippant and the worrying notion that my attempts to be facetious will be taken too literally. When I say “because something”, I am not being serious (as I am actually old enough that when I went to college, because geography would not have been acceptable). It’s acceptable now, at least colloquially, which I will always find bizarre. So here’s to feeling old and being far too pedantic for the internet.

Thanks to Annabel and Emma for hosting this meme. See official rules below to participate.