Gone Girl Read Free

very much the new year. It’s winter: early dark, freezing cold.
    Carmen, a newish friend – semi-friend, barely friend, the kind of friend you can’t cancel on – has talked me into going out to Brooklyn, to one of her writers’ parties. Now, I like a writer party, I like writers, I am the child of writers, I am a writer. I still love scribbling that word – WRITER – any time a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don’t write about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it’s fair to say I am a writer. I’m using this journal to get better: to hone my skills, to collect details and observations. To show don’t tell and all that other writery crap. ( Adopted-orphan smile , I mean, that’s not bad, come on.) But really, I do think my quizzes alone qualify me on at least an honorary basis. Right?
    At a party you find yourself surrounded by genuine talented writers, employed at high-profile, respected newspapers and magazines .
    You merely write quizzes for women’s rags. When someone asks what you do for a living, you:
    a) Get embarrassed and say, ‘I’m just a quiz writer, it’s silly stuff!’
    b) Go on the offense: ‘I’m a writer now, but I’m considering something more challenging and worthwhile – why, what do you do?’
    c) Take pride in your accomplishments: ‘I write personality quizzes using the knowledge gleaned from my master’s degree in psychology – oh, and fun fact: I am the inspiration for a beloved children’s-book series, I’m sure you know it, Amazing Amy? Yeah, so suck it, snobdouche!
    Answer: C, totally C
    Anyway, the party is being thrown by one of Carmen’s good friends who writes about movies for a movie magazine, and is very funny, according to Carmen. I worry for a second that she wants to set us up: I am not interested in being set up. I need to be ambushed, caught unawares, like some sort of feral love-jackal. I’m too self-conscious otherwise. I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.
    But no, I realize, as Carmen gushes on about her friend: She likes him. Good.
    We climb three flights of warped stairs and walk into a whoosh of body heat and writerness: many black-framed glasses and mops of hair; faux western shirts and heathery turtlenecks; black wool pea-coats flopped all across the couch, puddling to the floor; a German poster for The Getaway ( Ihre Chance war gleich Null! ) covering one paint-cracked wall. Franz Ferdinand on the stereo: ‘Take Me Out.’
    A clump of guys hovers near a card table where all the alcohol is set up, tipping more booze into their cups after every few sips, all too aware of how little is left to go around. I nudge in, aiming my plastic cup in the center like a busker, get a clatter of ice cubes and a splash of vodka from a sweet-faced guy wearing a Space Invaders T-shirt.
    A lethal-looking bottle of green-apple liqueur, the host’s ironic purchase, will soon be our fate unless someone makes a booze run, and that seems unlikely, as everyone clearly believes they made the run last time. It is a January party, definitely, everyone still glutted and sugar-pissed from the holidays, lazy and irritated simultaneously. A party where people drink too much and pick cleverly worded fights, blowing cigarette smoke out an open window even after the host asks them to go outside. We’ve already talked to oneanother at a thousand holiday parties, we have nothing left to say, we are collectively bored, but we don’t want to go back into the January cold; our bones still ache from the subway steps.
    I have lost Carmen to her host-beau – they are having an intense discussion in a corner of the kitchen, the two of