How we cite our quotes: Chapter.Paragraph
Quote #4
"One time I was walking down the street and [Hilary Handy] came up to me, this strange girl, and she looped her arm through mine and said, 'I'm going to be your daughter now. I'm going to kill Amy and be your new Amy. Because it doesn't really matter to you, does it? As long as you have an Amy.' Like our daughter was a piece of fiction she could rewrite." (11.121)
While she's not aware of it, this statement by Marybeth Elliot is actually super ironic: Amy is a piece of fiction and she's constantly rewriting herself. She's Amazing Amy, Cool Amy, Avenging Amy. And while she claims that Real Amy is pretty awesome, we think there's a possibility that she may not even totally know who Real Amy is. There are so many different versions of Amy that she might as well not even be real. Which, of course, she isn't, but you know what we mean.
Quote #5
The "little brown house" story was about my father, and Amy is the only person I'd ever told it to: that after the divorce, I saw him so seldom that I decided to think of him as a character in a storybook. He was not my actual father—who would have loved me and spent time with me – but a benevolent and vaguely important figure named Mr. Brown, who was very busy doing very important things for the United States and who (very) occasionally used me as a cover to move more easily about town. (17.121)
While rewriting reality is a way of life for Amy, it's also a defense mechanism Nick commonly resorts to as a way of ignoring things that are too painful for him to fully process. In this case, his childhood fantasy of his father being an important government man who loved him but couldn't be there for him is less painful than the truth: that his real father is mentally and verbally abuse and drove his mother away from him.
Quote #6
She liked to discuss Amy, as if Amy were the heroine on a nighttime soap opera. Andie never made Amy the enemy; she made her a character. She asked questions, all the time, about our life together, about Amy […]. It was Andie's favorite bedtime story: Amy. (19.24)
Andie's fascination with the wife of the man she's sleeping with is kind of creepy, but it provides yet another example of Amy's unreality. On top of her multiple personalities, she's a character in Andie's childlike imaginings of her.