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

derivative
as a criticism
is itself derivative.’ I’ve got to get him out of my head – he
still steps on my lines from a hundred miles away.) I wash
my hair in the sink, the warm water making me sweat, and
then back in the car with my bag of hair and trash. I put on a
pair of outdated wire-rim glasses and look in the rearview

---

mirror and smile again. Nick and I would never have
married if I had looked like this when we met. All this could
have been avoided if I were less pretty.
Item 34: Change look. Check.
I’m not sure, exactly, how to be Dead Amy. I’m trying to
figure out what that means for me, what I become for the
next few months. Anyone, I suppose, except people I’ve
already been: Amazing Amy. Preppy ’80s Girl. Ultimate-
Frisbee Granola and Blushing Ingenue and Witty
Hepburnian Sophisticate. Brainy Ironic Girl and Boho Babe
(the latest version of Frisbee Granola). Cool Girl and Loved
Wife and Unloved Wife and Vengeful Scorned Wife. Diary
Amy.
I hope you liked Diary Amy. She was meant to be
likable. Meant for someone like you to like her. She’s 
easy
to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a
compliment – that just anyone could like you. No matter. I
thought the entries turned out nicely, and it wasn’t simple. I
had to maintain an affable if somewhat naive persona, a
woman who loved her husband and could see some of his
flaws (otherwise she’d be too much of a sap) but was
sincerely devoted to him – all the while leading the reader
(in this case, the cops, I am so eager for them to find it)
toward the conclusion that Nick was indeed planning to kill
me. So many clues to unpack, so many surprises ahead!
Nick always mocked my endless lists. (‘It’s like you
make sure you’re never satisfied, that there’s always
something else to be perfected, instead of just enjoying the
moment.’) But who wins here? I win, because my list, the
master list entitled 
Fuck Nick Dunne
, was exacting – it was

---

the most complete, fastidious list that has ever been
created. On my list was 
Write Diary Entries for 2005 to
2012
. Seven years of diary entries, not every day, but twice
monthly, at least. Do you know how much discipline that
takes? Would Cool Girl Amy be able to do that? To
research each week’s current events, to cross-consult with
my old daily planners to make sure I forgot nothing
important, then to reconstruct how Diary Amy would react to
each event? It was fun, mostly. I’d wait for Nick to leave for
The Bar, or to go meet his mistress, the ever-texting, gum-
chewing, vapid mistress with her acrylic nails and the
sweatpants with logos across the butt (she isn’t like this,
exactly, but she might as well be), and I’d pour some coffee
or open a bottle of wine, pick one of my thirty-two different
pens, and rewrite my life a little.
It is true that I sometimes hated Nick less while I was
doing this. A giddy Cool Girl perspective will do that.
Sometimes Nick would come home, stinking of beer or of
the hand sanitizer he wiped on his body post-mistress-
coitus (never entirely erased the stink, though – she must
have one rank pussy), and smile guiltily at me, be all sweet
and hangdog with me, and I’d almost think: 
I won’t go
through with this
. And then I’d picture him with her, in her
stripper thong, letting him degrade her because she was
pretending to be Cool Girl, she was pretending to love blow
jobs and football and getting 
wasted
. And I’d think, 
I am
married to an imbecile. I’m married to a man who will
always choose that, and when he gets bored with this
dumb twat, he’ll just find another girl who is pretending to
be that girl, and he’ll never have to do anything hard in his
life
.

---

Resolve stiffened.
One hundred and fifty-two entries total, and I don’t think
I ever lose her voice. I wrote her very carefully, Diary Amy.
She is designed to appeal to the cops, to appeal to the
public should portions be released. They have to read this
diary like it’s some sort of Gothic tragedy. A wonderful,
good-hearted woman – 
whole life ahead of her, everything
going for her
, whatever else they say about women who die
– chooses the wrong mate and 
pays the ultimate price
.
They have to like me. Her.
My parents are worried, of course, but how can I feel
sorry for them, since they made me this way and then
deserted me? They never, ever fully appreciated the fact
that they were earning money from my existence, that I
should have been getting royalties. Then, after they
siphoned off 
my
money, my ‘feminist’ parents let Nick
bundle me off to Missouri like I was some piece of chattel,
some mail-order bride, some property exchange. Gave me
a fucking cuckoo clock to remember them by. 
Thanks for
thirty-six years of service!
They deserve to think I’m dead,
because that’s practically the state they consigned me to:
no money, no home, no friends. They deserve to suffer too.
If you can’t take care of me while I’m alive, you have made
me dead anyway. Just like Nick, who destroyed and
rejected the real me a piece at a time – 
you’re too serious,
Amy, you’re too uptight, Amy, you overthink things, you
analyze too much, you’re no fun anymore, you make me
feel useless, Amy, you make me feel bad, Amy
. He took
away chunks of me with blase´ swipes: my independence,
my pride, my esteem. I gave, and he took and took. He
Giving Treed me out of existence.

---

That whore, he picked that little whore over me. He
killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a
crime. According to me, at least.

---