Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
Summary
On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne comes home to find his wife Amy missing from their house in North Carthage, Missouri, with a broken table and other staged signs of a struggle. The novel alternates between Nick's account of the investigation, which builds a case that increasingly looks bad for him, mounting debt, a life insurance policy he took out on Amy, and an affair with a much younger student named Andie, and diary entries Amy supposedly wrote across their marriage, tracking two magazine writers who lost their jobs, moved from New York to Nick's hometown for his dying mother, and slowly stopped loving each other. Midway through, the book turns: Amy is alive, and every diary entry was fabricated, planted evidence in a plan she spent over a year building specifically to see Nick convicted of her murder, or driven to suicide by public disgrace. The plan nearly comes apart when a motel robbery leaves her broke, forcing her to take shelter with a controlling ex boyfriend, Desi Collings, whom she eventually kills after staging her own captivity on her own body to make his death look like self defense. Watching Nick perform grief and contrition on national television convinces her he might actually be worth keeping, so she returns home claiming Desi kidnapped her, a story neither Nick, the lead detective Rhonda Boney, nor Nick's twin sister Go can disprove. Amy inseminates herself with sperm Nick had banked years earlier, and uses the pregnancy to force him back into the marriage on her own terms. The book ends with Nick trapped in a life scripted entirely by his wife, playing the husband she wants him to be as their child's birth approaches, and one small flicker of pity from him that unsettles her more than his hatred ever could.
Flynn splits the book almost exactly in half between Nick and Amy's competing, increasingly unreliable versions of their marriage, and the midpoint reversal genuinely changes how a reader has to read everything that came before it. It moves fast and mean, closer to a thriller's pace than literary fiction's, and Amy's icy, controlled voice, especially a widely quoted riff on performing an easygoing Cool Girl for men, has stayed with readers longer than the plot mechanics around it.
Historical Context & Significance
Crime fiction's own prizes recognized Gone Girl where the major literary prizes mostly passed it by: it was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel, the Macavity Award and the Barry Award, without winning any of them. In Britain it made the 2013 longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction, whose judge Natasha Walter noted at the time how rarely crime writing reached that list at all. The National Book Award passed over it entirely in 2012. Contemporary critics disagreed less than the prize lists suggest: Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, called it wily, mercurial, and subtly layered, while Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Giles named it an ingenious and viperish thriller.
David Fincher's 2014 film, adapted by Flynn herself and starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, earned Pike her first Academy Award nomination, for Best Actress. The novel had already sold more than two million copies within its first year and has since passed twenty million worldwide, a commercial afterlife no prize list ever fully captured.