Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

If I were Gillian Flynn’s husband, I’d sleep with one eye open. Flynn, a former TV critic for Entertainment Weekly, and bestselling author of the exceptional and exceptionally sinister psychological thrillers, Sharp Objects (2007), Dark Places (2010), and this year’s Gone Girl, just seems to be a little too in touch with her creepy characters.

You’ve heard of that teen-parenting prevention program where high school kids are given a fake, perpetually crying baby to care for? The teen-marriage prevention equivalent of the crying baby would be required reading of Gone Girl.

If you've tied the knot you know that the mettle of the marital bond is not measured by how good the sex is, but rather how well each partner deals with the skid-marked underdrawers, bounced checks, and screeching in-laws. In Gone Girl main characters Nick and Amy Dunn’s case, it’s the depths of deceit and venomous vengeance that define their bond.

When she was a kid, Amy Dunn was the inspiration for Amazing Amy, the precociously perfect little star of her parents’ long-running, bestselling series of children’s books.  All grown up now, she is a beautiful, brainy, “trustifarian” who composes personality quizzes for the women’s market. Nick is the handsome, hayseed who escapes to New York and becomes a pop culture writer for men’s magazines. They are the beautiful people, the perfect couple.

That is until they both lose their jobs, and Amy’s parents take back her trust fund, and Nick and Amy have to move to Nick’s backwater hometown to care for his violently mentally ill dad and Nick’s mom who is slowly succumbing to cancer. Could it get more dismal?

Yes.

Amy disappears under suspicious circumstances, and as Nick says when the investigation revs up, “Everyone knows it’s always the husband. Just watch ‘Dateline.”

Then the real fun begins!

One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times - Chapter 91

#91 -  “Stay out of hospitals. That’s where all the sick people are.”

Mom had a subtle, dry sense of humor and, although I don’t know if she used it to sooth stressful situations, I know that I do. When Jackson, my 11-year-old grandnephew in Pennsylvania, was recently diagnosed with leukemia and went into the hospital to begin chemotherapy, it tore a hole in my heart. I’ve never met Jackson, and haven’t even seen his dad since he was a small child, but they are family. And when family suffers, I suffer. After the initial horrified reaction, and the overwhelming feeling that I must in some way help, mom’s #91 (which I’d not even thought about in years) bubbled to the surface, and I said to Jackson’s grandmother, my niece Jane, “Well, you know Mommy Wade would say, ‘Why are you in the hospital? Don’t you know that’s where all the sick people are?’”

Mom’s #91 also reflects her aversion to, or perhaps denial of, illness. Mom firmly believed in not believing you are sick. And although that attitude is meaningless in the face of the undeniable, I find myself clinging to it like a nursing baby.

Marathon Monsoon

I love going to the Big Bend area during the late July-August monsoon. There’s nothing more majestic than a giant rainstorm crossing the high-meadows of the southern-most extension of The Rockies. Actually I’ll travel to Marfa, Marathon or Fort Davis at the drop of a sombrero, but a recent trip was especially sublime for a number of reasons. It was the first time I’d taken off work in a long while and I really needed a rest. It rained most of every day, which made for lovely sleeping and reading with the doors and windows flung wide open onto Los Portales of The Gage Hotel where we stayed (below right). 

BFF Deborah Fondren (left) traveled from New Mexico to meet me for the 3-day sleep-read-eat and drink-a-thon. Each morning we had Anderson’s coffee with half & half and brown sugar, and each evening we had happy hours at the White Buffalo Bar and dinner at the 12-Gage Restaurant. Of course we had to make the trek to the fabulous Marfa Book store and a dependably delicious lunch at the Food Shark Truck. We were disappointed that we couldn’t get into the recently re-opened Cochineal Restaurant, but that’s OK, we’ll be back.  

Marci Roberts (above far right), who owns the 112-year-old The French Grocer in Marathon, joined us for drinks one afternoon, and it was great to see her again. 

We also went next door to the studio of James Evans, Marci’s partner, so I could buy James' wonderful photography books, Crazy From The Heat, and Big Bend. James is my favorite photographer and I love giving his books as gifts.