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I positively hum around him, fussing and fixing. I have become a strange thing. I have become a wife. I find myself steering the ship of conversations—bulkily, unnaturally—just so I can say his name aloud. I have become a wife, I have become a bore, I have been asked to forfeit my Independent Young Feminist card.
This quotation comes from Amy’s diary early in the novel, where Amy is trying to make sense of the internal conflict she feels between her identity as an independent woman and her role as a wife. Here, she describes in a tone of surprise how happy she is in her new hyper-feminine roles, even though she barely recognizes herself and knows she’s endorsing a toxically masculine ideal. So many aspects of her personality have had to change for her to “become a wife” that she feels Nick has made her into “a strange thing.” She uses a metaphor to describe how she awkwardly shifts conversational topics so she can name-drop Nick, saying finds herself “steering the ship” towards moments when she can mention him. She’s never felt like this about a man before, and so she feels that this level of devotion and obsession is contrary to her politics. Amy's reflection on forfeiting her "Independent Young Feminist card" underscores this tension: she’s caught between her feminist ideals about how partners should interact, and the joy she feels at acting like a stereotypical wife for Nick. Far from laughing at women who treat their spouses like princes, she finds herself becoming one, “fussing and fixing” everything for him.
That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.
This quote is from the explosive first chapter of Part 2 of the novel, and is basically a deconstruction of an important part of Amy’s worldview. Here, Amy criticizes the unrealistic and contradictory expectations placed on women by toxic masculinity and the patriarchy to be the "Cool Girl." She argues that men’s universal ideal woman is not real, but is instead a construct designed to fulfill their desires without challenging them. Being a “Cool Girl” isn’t about the woman herself at all: it’s about meeting the needs of her partner’s ego, being whatever they want her to be, and anticipating their needs. The detailed list of attributes of the "Cool Girl" makes it clear that Amy thinks these standards are impossible for most people to maintain. Her scathing tone reveals her frustration with this persona. Even though she can be the “Cool Girl” very effectively, she doesn’t want to have to do that in order to be loved or wanted. The pressure to be the "Cool Girl," Amy is implying, forces women into a performance that is neither sustainable nor authentic, and in which they have to put up with a great deal of humiliation and discomfort.
I am almost my normal weight again, and my hair is growing out. I wear it back in a headband he brought me, and I have colored it back to my blond, thanks to hair dye he also brought me: “I think you will feel better about yourself when you start looking more like yourself, sweetheart,” he says. Yes, it’s all about my well-being, not the fact that he wants me to look exactly like I did before. Amy circa 1987.
Trapped in Desi’s lake house, Amy describes how her captor has—very sweetly and gently—begun to force her to change back into the version of herself she was in boarding school. In the guise of trying to help her get over her trauma, Desi takes Amy’s appearance in hand. She isn’t able to leave the house, and so she can only eat what he gives her. He feeds her very limited calories so she can get back to being a size 2, and asks her to dye her hair back to its natural, covetable blond. Desi's actions have very little to do with Amy’s well-being, and are actually about making her conform to his idealized version of her. By dictating her appearance, he strips away her autonomy and reinforces toxically masculine gender roles, ones where women change themselves to suit their men’s requirements. The sarcastic tone Amy takes here makes the manipulation behind Desi’s seemingly caring words clear: of course all of this is because “he wants [her] to look exactly like [she] did before.”
