Joe Goldberg works in a bookstore in the East Village in New York City. He watches a woman enter the store and is immediately attracted to her. They discuss books and flirt. Joe examines her, trying to understand her based on the crack in her phone screen or her choice in books. When she passes him her credit card, he reads that her name is Guinevere Beck. She tells him to call her Beck.

Over the next few days, Joe thinks about Beck constantly. Using her name, he scours her social media profiles. Beck is a writer who moved to New York from Nantucket. She is studying writing at graduate school in the city. Her father had an alcohol addiction and died young; his death had a profound impact on Beck and her siblings, Anya and Clyde. Joe finds Beck’s “ridiculously safe and expensive” (14) West Side address on the Internet. He watches Beck through the window of her parlor-level apartment. He sees her walking naked around her apartment and becomes concerned about her “deluded sense of privacy” (15). Joe secretly watches Beck for two weeks, lusting after her. One day, he sees a man walk into Beck’s apartment.