"Amazing Amy stands for a newer creation: lovely girls, expensively educated to seize success for themselves (Amy has diplomas from Harvard and Yale), and yet still groomed for the dream of a beautiful dress and a white cake. As Nick puts it in the novel, 'Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it.'

"If no longer vital to a woman’s status as a human being, marriage is still understood as her crowning success, the event without which her life won’t be truly complete. When Amazing Amy grows up, she can’t not get married. The world is still no place for single women. They are regularly bombarded -- and I say this, let’s face it, from experience -- by both well- and ill-intentioned comments about their inability to find that special man."

--from Elif Batuman's terrific though spoilery essay on GONE GIRL, "Marriage Is An Abduction," for the New Yorker.