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Summary
Part Two: Boy Meets Girl.
Amy Elliott Dunne, The Day Of
In a shocking twist, the novel switches to Amy’s current-day perspective. She expresses her happiness at being "dead," despite being very much alive. She feels liberated as she drives away from Carthage, leaving Nick to twist in the wind as she makes her escape. Far from being kidnapped, Amy has actually orchestrated an elaborate faked murder to get revenge on Nick. It seems to be working.
Amy’s in the habit of making checklists, and as she drives she reviews her to-do list for the day she disappeared. As she laid the foundation for her escape plan, she pretended to be afraid of blood. She didn’t mean to faint at the plasma center, but is delighted that she did as it helped to build a believable story. As soon as Nick left on the morning of their anniversary, she gashed her arm with a boxcutter and dripped blood all over the kitchen. She dressed the wound, fed the cat, and drove away. She promises to tell the reader more after clearing up why she faked her death.
Amy candidly writes that she made up "Diary Amy" in order to make sure Nick got the death penalty. Diary Amy is nothing like Actual Amy, her true self: a cold, unwaveringly scheming sociopath. She’s been faking her personality since childhood. Her parents struggled to have children, suffering through several miscarriages. Her mother named all of the failed pregnancies, calling each baby “Hope,” and mourning their loss on their death anniversaries throughout Amy’s childhood. This performative grieving put a huge amount of pressure on Amy to be perfect, as Rand and Marybeth kept reminding her that she was their only chance at parenthood. She felt compelled to be everything they wanted until she met Nick, who made her feel loved and appreciated for the first time. However, Amy also orchestrated their relationship to a tee.
The entire time she was with Nick she was playing the "Cool Girl,” an idealized version of perfect womankind that Amy believes every man wants. She says that she enjoyed some aspects of being the Cool Girl for Nick because she had thought of him as her equal. Before Nick, Amy felt like a product, the unsatisfying, imperfect real version of her parents’ “Amazing Amy” character. Her time with Nick, despite being an act, was the happiest period of her life because he actually wanted her to be happy. But she couldn’t keep the Cool Any façade up forever; she started to nag him and to let her dissatisfaction with their life slip through the cracks. When Nick began to treat her with resentment and to neglect—and eventually betray—their relationship, she began to loathe him in return.
Analysis
This chapter is the novel’s major turning point: not only is Amy alive, but all of Nick’s suspicions are true. She has orchestrated an elaborate plan to fake her death and frame Nick for her murder. However, instead of just being a gleeful recounting of a revenge plot, this chapter explores Amy’s motivations very persuasively. She appeals to the reader’s sense of justice as she describes the way society forces women to change themselves in order to merit safety and attention.
The way Amy recounts her transformation into the "Cool Girl" is a commentary on the incredible pressure women of all ages and classes face to conform to male fantasies and societal expectations. The "Cool Girl" is an ideal woman whose characteristics are perfectly aligned with her partner’s desires. She never nags, never gains weight, and never says no. Amy explains that it’s her experience that this is really what men want. She cynically assures the reader that even if their partner protests and claims he doesn’t want a “Cool Girl,” women shouldn’t expect that to be true. Worse, failing to be a “Cool Girl” is a recipe for disaster, as Amy states: “How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: ‘I like strong women.’ If he says that to you, he will at some point f*ck someone else. Because ‘I like strong women’ is code for ‘I hate strong women.’” She details a bleak vision of gender division where instead of demanding equality, women “across the nation participated in [their] own degradation.” Amy doesn’t see a way out of this, and so she decides to make it work to her advantage. In order to get what she wants, she has decided to wear the “Cool Girl” mask to its fullest extent. She adopted a persona perfectly calibrated to Nick’s needs to get his attention and win his love, molding herself into his perfect partner.
There were some upsides to this, she notes. There was a time when playing the “Cool Girl” actually made her better, forced her to stay on her toes and allowed her to enjoy life more. However, when circumstances changed, her enjoyment in playing the part evaporated. The strain of constantly performing this identity has diminishing returns, because the "Cool Girl" is not a sustainable persona. It creates unrealistic and damaging expectations that prioritize male desires over female authenticity. In many ways, Amy's “big reveal” is an extreme reaction to the toxically masculine idea of perfection that she herself had aided and abetted. Nick’s rejection fuels Amy’s anger and her elaborate revenge plot. Her meticulous planning to frame Nick for her murder is a way to reclaim control over how she moves through the world.
Paradoxically, Amy is only happy to practice the teachings of the “Cool Girl” because she thinks that Nick is wise to the trick. She explains that he was the only happy person she’d ever met who was her “equal,” and that she thought he knew that she was playing a role. A major part of her disillusionment with their marriage comes after she finds out that Nick didn’t know. He was not as perceptive as she thought he was, as he believed in the reality of Amy’s “Cool Girl” mask, and was disappointed when it turned out to be an unsustainable performance.
However, this facade is not solely about attracting Nick; it is deeply rooted in the pressures her parents placed on her throughout her life. Amy's parents, Rand and Marybeth, had a series of miscarriages before Amy was born, which they referred to as the deaths of the "Hopes." These lost pregnancies, Amy explains, intensified their desire for a perfect child who’d be able to take on all of their dreams and aspirations. When Amy was born and wasn’t immediately miraculous, Rand and Marybeth channeled these expectations into the Amazing Amy book series. The fictional Amy always succeeded and never faltered. Anything the real Amy failed at, “Amazing Amy” did perfectly. This constant comparison eroded Amy's sense of self-worth and authenticity, and so she started to deliberately shape her personality to dovetail with what she thought people wanted. “Amazing Amy” is the ultimate “Cool Girl” to Amy’s parents. In trying to live up to her, Amy begins her career as a lifelong “Cool Girl” cosplayer.
When Amy meets Nick, she sees him as another person to win over by being the "Cool Girl." The pressure from her parents and from Nick drive Amy to extreme measures when her marriage starts to crumble. Feeling betrayed by Nick's infidelity and frustrated by the collapse of their relationship, Amy decides to orchestrate her disappearance. The diary is a vital part of this plan; through the diary, Amy creates a record of how she tricked her entire community into thinking she was the perfect woman—essentially, a “Cool Girl”-turned-murder victim, someone who everyone would love and mourn.
