She's not like other girls

We’re popping bottles at Zero to Well-Read this week as the show hits the one-million-download milestone in advance of its first anniversary on September 9. It’s a huge deal, and we don’t take it—or your time and attention—for granted. Sincere thanks to everyone who has listened, rated, reviewed, and shared the show with bookish friends.

While we’re on the topic of milestones, Book Riot will be turning 15 in October, no small feat for an independent media company in this landscape. And when we say independent, we mean it: everything you read, watch, and listen to is made by hand by a team of just 16 people with no corporate investment or publisher subsidies, ever.

If our work expands your reading life, you can now support the show by becoming a paid member here on Substack, or join us on Patreon for early access, ad-free listening, and exclusive bonus content.

In a moment of unexpected ~synergy~ this week, our conversation about Gone Girl landed just before the New York Times revealed that Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster sits atop their list of the best thrillers of the century so far.

Gone Girl is known for its Big Twist and for having the ultimate unreliable narrator in Amy Dunne, but those aren’t what makes it the GOAT. Flynn’s execution is A+, of course—this is top-shelf crime fiction—but the real magic of Gone Girl lies in its focus on the institutions of marriage and gender. She put the domestic in domestic thrillers and put the genre on the map.

Through Amy Dunne, Gillian Flynn ushered in an era of female antiheroes that we’re still living in. With the now-legendary Cool Girl speech, she created a permission structure for women to express rage at a system in which men reward us for playing by their rules…until they decide to punish us for it.

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.

Women knew what the performance of Cool Girl looked like long before Gone Girl, but Flynn named it. She allowed Amy to be smart, funny, and beautiful, and angry, manipulative, and certifiably batshit. By containing those multitudes, she rejected the timeworn question of whether women are crazy and replaced it with an infinitely more interesting one: what might make them that way? (Spoiler: it’s patriarchy.)

And it worked. Oh! How it worked. Gone Girl resonated HARD. With estimated total sales exceeding 20 million copies, it sits at #9 on Amazon’s list of the bestselling books of all time. It’s #22 on Goodreads’ most popular books of all time. And while it didn’t make the New York Times critics’ list of the best books of the century so far, readers voted it #49.

Since Gone Girl, the unlikable, unreliable female narrator has become a mainstay of bestseller lists. Domestic thrillers in which the bad guy isn’t just a guy but the whole system that created the guy(s) line bookstore shelves and publishers’ pockets. The Girl on the Train, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Yesteryear are just a few of the subsequent blockbusters that rode Flynn’s feminist revenge thriller coattails all the way to the bank.

I’ve been chasing the Gone Girl high since 2012, and I suspect it will remain a singular and formative experience in my reading life, the rare book that is both timeless and undeniably a product of its time.