Gone Girl
Flynn invented the unreliable narrator as a weapon. She aims it at marriage and the result is one of the most propulsive thrillers ever written.
The Dunne Marriage
Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel opens on the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary in a small Missouri town, when Amy disappears. The media frenzy begins. Nick becomes the prime suspect. The novel alternates between Nick's present-tense account of the investigation and Amy's diary entries stretching back through their relationship, and nothing in either account is entirely trustworthy. Flynn's examination of performed identity, the mythology of marriage, and the way women are expected to be likeable makes the thriller hum with a deeper kind of dread. The novel spent over a year on the bestseller list and was adapted into a David Fincher film in 2014.
Reading Gone Girl
Trust
/
Part
"Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman.
"Gillian Flynn · Gone Girl
Flynn wrote Gone Girl while working as a TV critic. She had been laid off from Entertainment Weekly and said the anger and dark energy of the novel came directly from that period of frustration and uncertainty.
The David Fincher film adaptation in 2014 starred Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, who received an Academy Award nomination. Flynn adapted the screenplay herself, changing the ending from the book.