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12 pages, Audiobook
First published May 12, 2015
“She didn’t have anything in her teeth.”This book was sold with a blurb as being "for fans of Gone Girl." With all due respect, there is no comparison. It is more The Devil Meets Prada or Four Blondes than anything else. At best, it is the poor man's Gone Girl, a fake $5 knockoff of the original.
I took my time leaning over the table, slurped my wine from the rim to spare my white jeans. Never fuck with a rich white bitch and her white jeans. “Not in her teeth. Up her ass, on the other hand . . .”
Luke’s laugh was the standing ovation. He shook his head, impressed. “You can be pretty vicious, you know?”
“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.Now, Knoll:
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.
Pretty girls had to appear as though they weren’t trying to be pretty, which I had made the fatal mistake of doing at Bradley. There were times Nell went out in her father’s polo, nasty old Uggs, and sweatpants, no makeup, just to prove her loyalty resided with her own gender. Pretty girls also had to have a self-deprecating sense of humor and point out when they had a blistering pimple and talk about their explosive diarrhea to assure other girls that they weren’t interested in the role of man-eating minx.As you can see, there is no comparison as to whose words are far more effective.
His wife, body mean with Equinox muscles, cheery blond hair swept away from her face in a ninety-dollar blow-out. I always eye the wife first; I like to know what I’m up against. She was wearing the typical Kate uniform: white jeans, nude wedges, and a silky, sleeveless top. Hot pink, I’m sure she spent a few minutes debating it—was she tan enough, maybe the navy silky sleeveless top instead, can’t go wrong with navy—and over her shoulder, a cognac Prada the exact same shade as her shoes, the perfect match more age revealing than the skin starting to pucker in her neck. She had at least ten years on me, I determined, relieved. I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself when I turn thirty.None of the women eat. They're all medicated up the yin-yang, spray-tanned, Botoxed Bergdorf blondes whose greatest desire in life is the ring, the husband in finance, the designer child, the summer house in Nantucket. The artificiality of it would be humorous, except that everything in this book reeks with tension-filled misery.
I’m pretty—I have to work at it, but the raw materials are there. I’m four years Luke’s junior, which isn’t as good as eight, but still, something. I also like to do “weird” things in bed. Even though Luke and I have very different definitions of “weird” (him: doggy style and hair pulling, me: electric shocks to my pussy with a ball gag in my mouth to stifle my screams), by his standards, we have a freaky, fulfilling sex lifeAnd it's not a pitiful as in "poor girl, she has so much going for her, but she doesn't realize her full potential," as much as it is "wow, what a sorry excuse for a human being. But really, what's between her legs is more interesting than what's in between her head, which is, frankly, nothing at all.
Whew! LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE turned out to be a very long and tedious read for me that I really struggled to finish.
In a nutshell, this story is about a damaged, but fortunate 28 year old woman (with a secret past) who is in the process of planning her wedding soon to be part of a very affluent family, while at the same time, ruminating about an upcoming documentary depicting a disastrous and shocking time in her young 14 year old life.
I am sorry to say that despite the sensitive and horrific subject matter that comes to light, the deep emotional impact of the situation(s) were greatly lacking from my point of view, and boy....did it take a long time to get there.
Gillian Flynn-like.......I don't think so.