Literature and Writing Quotes in Gone Girl

One thing Gone Girl basically hammers us with from the beginning is how deeply writing is ingrained in Nick and Amy's identities. In the first chapter, we learn that Nick grieves the loss of his magazine writing job, while in this, the first of Amy's diary entries, we see her literally define "writer" as her identity. The fact that both characters find their sense of self in their jobs rather than their marriage is probably a major cause of their relationship's downfall.

Writing isn't only part of Nick's identity in terms of his former career in New York—it's also woven into the fabric of his heritage. He grew up surrounded by the legendary presence of Mark Twain, played Tom Sawyer at the Hannibal tourist sites, and frequently references the writer's role in his past.

Not only is Amy a writer who is the daughter of writers, but she is actually a living, breathing fictional character. Her parents' Amazing Amy books, while the source of her privileged upbringing, also did serious damage to her sense of self. Amazing Amy is the embodiment of her every failure to be the daughter her parents wanted her to be, and is the beginning of Gone Girl's theme of how damaging the fictional personalities we create for ourselves can be.

While she's not aware of it, this statement by Marybeth Elliot is actually super ironic: Amy is a piece of fiction and she's constantly rewriting herself. She's Amazing Amy, Cool Amy, Avenging Amy. And while she claims that Real Amy is pretty awesome, we think there's a possibility that she may not even totally know who Real Amy is. There are so many different versions of Amy that she might as well not even be real. Which, of course, she isn't, but you know what we mean.

While rewriting reality is a way of life for Amy, it's also a defense mechanism Nick commonly resorts to as a way of ignoring things that are too painful for him to fully process. In this case, his childhood fantasy of his father being an important government man who loved him but couldn't be there for him is less painful than the truth: that his real father is mentally and verbally abuse and drove his mother away from him.

Andie's fascination with the wife of the man she's sleeping with is kind of creepy, but it provides yet another example of Amy's unreality. On top of her multiple personalities, she's a character in Andie's childlike imaginings of her.

The writing theme is so tightly woven into this story that it even becomes a part of Amy's plot to get revenge on Nick. Her dedication to crafting seven years' worth of diary entries not only gives her the chance to draft evidence that will condemn him, but allows her to "rewrite" events to make herself the heroine.

Burn—Greta's totally unimpressed with Amazing Amy, and Amy's offended by her lack of worship of her fictional counterpart. The biggest sting of that comment is that Greta can unknowingly see through the veneer of perfection Amy's parents tried to project through the books: Amazing Amy really is too good to be true.

Close to the end of the book, words again become weapons when Amy and Nick start writing dueling memoirs, each accusing the other of being the bad guy as they battle it out to see whose version will stand as historic record. Amy's later demand that Nick delete his manuscript is the ultimate deathblow to Nick's attempt to outdo her—it truly leaves her "in control" of the twisted story they've written.

Nick really brings the theme of writing's power to shape relationships and events in his final lines of the book. Drawing on his knowledge of story structure from hours of studying movies, Nick assigns literary roles to himself and his wife, calling himself the hero, or protagonist, and her the antagonist.

Interestingly enough, these are the roles that they actually play in Gone Girl. While Nick isn't necessarily likeable, we don't want him to be guilty, and we ultimately feel sympathetic toward him when Amy traps him at the end. Amy, by contrast, is difficult to feel sympathy for, mostly because of her classic antagonist behavior of keeping Nick from freedom and happiness.