The book is Gone Girl…

Shortly after passing my PhD for viva, I pledged to resume reading one novel or nonfiction work that was not related to my own research… per week. Two years later (almost exactly to be precise; that horrid day was 29 September 2013), I decided to act upon my pledge and read Gone Girl: the book everyone was ranting/raving about when I last gave any thoughts to pleasure.

I finally read it last week. I was hooked but I hated it. That’s a rare feeling for me. I’m not one to shy away from abandoning a book if I think it’s rubbish.  It wasn’t even fulfilling to me in the trashy way Days of Our Lives was in the early 1990s but I needed to know what happened and I didn’t want to find out any other way but by finishing it myself. And then of course, I remembered the feminist backlash and I found myself engrossed in that narrative as well because people were struggling to cope with a bestseller having an anti-heroine. Somewhere in that backlash lies my anger.

First, I did not have  a problem with the anti-heroine narrative. I think having female villains is an important feminist form of representation. Especially since, Amy Dunne was intelligent and reactionary against her own husband’s infidelity. I felt that it is honest, though over-represented narrative. What really bothered me was the myth of the cool girl narrative. The bud light drinking, football watching, can quote a few lines from Star Wars, snowboarding chick who is not really valued for much else than that. That part annoyed me as it still is cool in relative to how a woman is able to be compatible with men and not other women or within the scope of self-comfort.

I’m moving on… my next book is the Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999). I read it in college I think but have no memory of it. I hope it doesn’t annoy me as much as Gone Girl.