![]() “How did these men get through the day? How does it work in their head? I feel like our culture overall is very hard on women who love the wrong men, but strangely not as hard on the men for being wrong. “That was my whole drive for doing this,” Kepnes adds. “He’s also very sweet in a few scenes,” she points out, alluding to the times Joe acts like a kind, normal boyfriend, even as those moments become material for Joe to later gaslight Beck. ![]() When Badgley, who plays Joe, discovered fans camped out in his mentions because they were attracted to his character, he first tried to correct them, in a series of exchanges that went viral. And Kepnes watched in real time as people used social media-something Joe obviously disdains in both the book and the show-to dissect every melodramatic moment and each thing they hated about Joe, while also recognizing him in other dangerous relationship tropes, and, in some cases, loving him. Fans congregated on forums, discussing the details that had read as normal courtship upon first watch but contained sinister undertones they’d never noticed before. I still can’t wrap my head around it.” Old friends reached out to her, saying they had watched the show. ![]() “And suddenly it was like, this book is the thing that everyone’s talking about. “There’s so much out there, so there’s no way to know,” she points out about the seemingly endless options that people can stream, and binge, and talk about with their friends online. Kepnes now calls that second life a “bizarre” experience to have been a part of. People became obsessed with Joe, and obsessed with his obsession with Beck. It was only when the show hit Netflix, shortly after Christmas, that it hit a critical mass. A few viewers caught on, but perhaps some people’s preconceived notions about the network kept the series from achieving mainstream appeal. You came to Lifetime last September, as a series starring Penn Badgley and Elizabeth Lail as a millennial cat and mouse. You was first published in 2014, as a stomach-churning second-person narrative designed to make the reader feel like Beck through forced perspective in which Joe attempts to convince you that everything he does is all for you a second novel, Hidden Bodies, was published in 2016. He’s “holier than thou,” Kepnes points out, and operates from a moral code that allows him to believe he’s doing people favors by killing them. He is quick to judge and even quicker to condemn, and pities the people in Beck’s life whose standards for living he doesn’t agree with. “He feels like he has really bad luck,” Kepnes offers of her villain, who operates under the rock-solid belief that everything he does-the stalking, the gaslighting, the murdering-is for some greater good. And yes, along the way, he kills people: a trust-fund bro Beck was sleeping with a best friend he believes was secretly in love with her. He begins to follow her, thinking that he is her protector, all the while talking to her in an inner monologue. Her name is Guinevere, but she goes by Beck, and Joe interprets light flirtation as irrefutable truth that she came to find him-that the book was an excuse that their encounter was love at first sight, rather than one of the millions of random encounters people have throughout their lifetimes. ![]() The “he” is Joe Goldberg, a 20-something bookstore manager from Brooklyn who begins obsessing over a grad student who walks into his shop one day to buy a novel. That’s what people are going to say he is.” He just killed a few different people.’ She asked, ‘Do you hear yourself?’ And I realized, Oh, God. “I remember finishing and my friend told me, ‘I can’t believe you wrote about a serial killer.’ I was like, ‘No, I didn’t. “I never used that phrase the whole time that I was writing,” she says firmly over coffee on a crisp Friday afternoon. Caroline Kepnes did not think she was writing a book about a serial killer until after she finished You. ![]()
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