Gone Girl
BROWN BUTTER CRÊPES
I love New York in the springtime, because you really get to see how creative New Yorkers are. We can make anything into our own outdoor living space—we sunbathe on the melty tar roofs that our landlords have explicitly banned us from, stretch out and read on rusty fire escapes that haven’t been inspected since the 1970s, place seat cushions on cement stoops, and line the sidewalks with lawn chairs. We lay towels over goose poop and sidestep shards of broken glass in public parks, from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge, and we ooh and aah with jealousy about people who have actual “backyards,” which are almost always private alleyways where we pack ourselves in, shoulder to shoulder, over tiny Weber grills and think, “This is living.”
In the spring there are long, aimless bike rides and afternoons spent lying in the park, eating yolk-yellow mango slices from the man with the pushcart and sipping from enormous Styrofoam cups filled with Turkey’s Nest frozen margaritas (which, let’s admit it, are really just yellow Gatorade mixed with tequila), shifting with the position of the sun like houseplants bending and stretching toward the window.
Every year as the days get longer my attention span gets shorter, and I find myself scouring the bookstores for page-turners—pulse-pounding mysteries and thrillers filled with grizzled detectives and sassy, quick-witted heroines—the pulpier the better. In my younger years I held these cravings close to my chest, skittering furtively to those back shelves of the Strand and glancing around to make sure none of my classmates saw me thumbing through a copy of Scarpetta, but these days… not so much.
Last spring I got that familiar hankering, and with my arms still full of asparagus from the farmers’ market, I headed straight to the bookstore. Rather than ducking surreptitiously to those dimly lit back shelves, I asked a store employee for help. Without hesitation, she put her hands on my shoulders and led me straight to Gone Girl, her eyes wide and serious as she gave it to me. “You’re welcome,” she said, and walked away. The next forty-eight hours of my life completely disappeared.
Gone Girl is an easy read only in that it is absolutely impossible to put down. Beyond that, there is nothing easy about this book. Gillian Flynn creates a cast of characters as hard to like as they are to trust. They lie to each other and they lie to us, they pull us to their side only to fill us with disgust a few sentences later—it is a truly exhausting experience.
The novel begins on the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. The couple, who met in New York City, had moved the year before to Nick’s hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, to lick their wounds, having both been laid off, and to care for his dying mother and Alzheimer’s-stricken father.
The novel opens with Nick lying in bed, listening to the sounds of his wife cooking “something impressive” in the kitchen below him—“probably a crêpe,” he imagines. He walks downstairs and finds Amy at the stove, humming the M*A*S*H theme song (you know, the “suicide is painless” song—Flynn is a master of the telling minor detail) and making him breakfast. “Amy peered at the crêpe sizzling in the pan and licked something off her wrist. She looked triumphant, wifely. If I took her in my arms, she would smell like berries and powdered sugar.”
That evening at the bar he runs, Nick receives a call that his front door is wide open, and he goes home to find Amy missing and the house in complete disarray. As the days tick by and Amy is still missing, the investigation turns on Nick. What follows is one of the darkest accounts of a marriage gone sour that I have ever read.
Aren’t you just starving for some crêpes right now?
GONE GIRL
Brown Butter Crêpes
Serve these crêpes warm, topped with ricotta, or fruit and maple syrup, or butter, sugar, and lemon zest.
Makes 8 to 10 crêpes
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup whole milk
2 tablespoons honey
½ cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, browned and cooled, plus more for the pan
Beat together the eggs, milk, and honey in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment. With the mixer running, add the flour, salt, and browned butter. Cover and refrigerate the batter for 1 hour.
After the batter has chilled, heat a nonstick skillet or crêpe pan over medium heat. Add a little butter (even if you’re using a nonstick pan) and ladle ¼ cup batter in the center of the pan, swirling it around to coat the whole surface evenly. Cook until the surface is set and the edges are golden brown, 1½ to 2 minutes. Flip the crêpe over gently and cook for about 30 more seconds. Repeat with the remaining batter.