Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT
SEPTEMBER 18, 2005
– Diary entry –
W
ell, well, well. Guess who’s back? Nick Dunne, Brooklyn
party boy, sugar-cloud kisser, disappearing act. Eight
months, two weeks, couple of days, no word, and then he
resurfaces, like it was all part of the plan. Turns out, he’d
lost my phone number. His cell was out of juice, so he’d
written it on a stickie. Then he’d tucked the stickie into his
jeans pocket and put the jeans in the washer, and it turned
the stickie into a piece of cyclone-shaped pulp. He tried to
unravel it but could only see a 3 and an 8. (He said.)
And then work clobbered him and suddenly it was
March and too embarrassingly late to try to find me. (He
said.)
Of course I 
was
angry. I had 
been
angry. But now I’m
not. Let me set the scene. (She said.) Today. Gusty
September winds. I’m walking along Seventh Avenue,
making a lunchtime contemplation of the sidewalk bodega
bins – endless plastic containers of cantaloupe and
honeydew and melon perched on ice like the day’s catch –
and I could feel a man barnacling himself to my side as I
sailed along, and I corner-eyed the intruder and realized
who it was. It was 
him
. The boy in ‘I met a boy!’

---

I didn’t break my stride, just turned to him and said:
a) ‘Do I know you?’ (manipulative, challenging)
b) ‘Oh, wow, I’m so happy to see you!’ (eager, doormatlike)
c) ‘Go fuck yourself.’ (aggressive, bitter)
d) ‘Well, you certainly take your time about it, don’t you,
Nick?’ (light, playful, laid-back)
Answer: D
And now we’re together. Together, together. It was that
easy.
It’s interesting, the timing. Propitious, if you will. (And I
will.) Just last night was my parents’ book party. 
Amazing
Amy and the Big Day
. Yup, Rand and Marybeth couldn’t
resist. They’ve given their daughter’s namesake what they
can’t give their daughter: a husband! Yes, for book twenty,
Amazing Amy is getting married! Wheeeeeee. No one
cares. No one wanted Amazing Amy to grow up, least of all
me. Leave her in kneesocks and hair ribbons and let 
me
grow up, unencumbered by my literary alter ego, my
paperbound better half, the me I was supposed to be.
B ut 
Amy
is the Elliott bread and butter, and she’s
served us well, so I suppose I can’t begrudge her a perfect
match. She’s marrying good old Able Andy, of course.
They’ll be just like my parents: happy-happy.
Still, it was unsettling, the incredibly small order the
publisher put in. A new 
Amazing Amy
used to get a first
print of a hundred thousand copies back in the ’80s. Now
ten thousand. The book-launch party was, accordingly,
unfabulous. Off-tone. How do you throw a party for a

---

fictional character who started life as a precocious moppet
of six and is now a thirty-year-old bride-to-be who still
speaks like a child? (‘
Sheesh,’ thought Amy, ‘my dear
fiance´ sure is a grouch-monster when he doesn’t get his
way
…’ That is an actual quote. The whole book made me
want to punch Amy right in her stupid, spotless vagina.) The
book is a nostalgia item, intended to be purchased by
women who grew up with 
Amazing Amy
, but I’m not sure
who will actually want to read it. I read it, of course. I gave
the book my blessing – multiple times. Rand and Marybeth
feared that I might take Amy’s marriage as some jab at my
perpetually single state. (‘I, for one, don’t think women
should marry before thirty-five,’ said my mom, who married
my dad at twenty-three.)
My parents have always worried that I’d take 
Amy
too
personally – they always tell me not to read too much into
her. And yet I can’t fail to notice that whenever I screw
something up, Amy does it right: When I finally quit violin at
age twelve, Amy was revealed as a prodigy in the next
book. (‘Sheesh, violin can be hard work, but hard work is
the only way to get better!’) When I blew off the junior tennis
championship at age sixteen to do a beach weekend with
friends, Amy recommitted to the game. (‘Sheesh, I know it’s
fun to spend time with friends, but I’d be letting myself and
everyone else down if I didn’t show up for the tournament.’)
This used to drive me mad, but after I went off to Harvard
( a nd 
Amy
correctly chose my parents’ alma mater), I
decided it was all too ridiculous to think about. That my
parents, two