See six domestic chillers for "Gone Girl" fans and ten must-read books if you loved "Gone Girl".You wrote a very gracious acknowledgment to your husband in the novel. When he read your draft, were you going, "Honey, it's all make-believe ..."? What inspired this examination of relationships in the first place?
Well, you know, I was a newlywed when I started writing it — because of the way my mind works, I am a worst-case scenario-ist. I spent a lot of time thinking about what marriage meant, and how marriage can go wrong. No one sets out to have a toxic marriage, yet you see them all the time, so what exactly happened? I had this basic underlying thought about how much of relationships are sort of a con game, in the early days, and we're all kind of con artists: We're trying to trick someone into loving us in a way, and we're not showing all our cards, we're not showing the real person you are going to get two or three years down the line when the mask starts slipping. I started thinking, what if I blow that up to a much bigger idea?
My husband is a very confident guy, and he didn't really blink. He just said "Don't censor yourself: write the book you need to write, and we'll worry about it later on." And then...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue