Hey waves listeners, we're off this week for the holiday season, but don't worry we will be back

in your feeds on January 5th. We will have an amazing chat with author and fat activist Aubrey Gordon

on her new book, you just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat people. You won't want

to miss it. In the meantime, we wanted to bring you one of our favorite episodes from 2022.

Slate Staff writer Heather Schwadell and Slate Books and Culture columnist Laura Miller talk about

how Jillian Flynn's Gone Girl changed the publishing world forever. Happy holidays will see you in 2023.

Welcome to the Waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and framing your bad husband for murder.

Every episode you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off our minds and

today you've got me Heather Schwadell, a Slate Staff writer and me Laura Miller, Slate's Books and Culture

columnist. And today we're celebrating the 10-year anniversary of a little book called Gone Girl

by Jillian Flynn and we're attempting to reckon with all that it has brought in the publishing

industry and beyond. I remember what a big deal Gone Girl was when it came out, it was the book

of that summer. I read it on the beach along with everyone else and probably I wanted to read it

in the first place because critics like you, Laura, were raving about it. It got such amazing

reviews out of the gate and you've written a lot about Gone Girl and its imitators over the years.

Yes, I have. I was really floored by Gone Girl when I first read it, which was just before it was

published. It's such a clever, well-written, insightful thriller and it's set in the sort of

post-recession late-auts among sort of Brooklyn culture journalists who are coping with not just

the recession but the kind of collapse of the glossy magazine industry where you can make a living

writing quizzes and interviewing musicians and filmmakers. I knew that really well. I could

really identify with that and it was also a great riff on middle-class life and gender relations

with its famous cool girl rant. The thing that really amazed me about it was that central twist,

...