Modern Classic: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

A Masterpiece Beyond the Twist

Publishing Story

College for most people is not a time of voracious reading for pleasure. There are too many things to do. Too many friends. Too many distractions. Most crucially, plenty of assigned reading that makes picking up a novel rather than hanging out after a long day nearly unthinkable. So, I did not read Gillian Flynn’s 2012 smash hit Gone Girl the year it came out, but even as a college student I heard about it. That’s because Gone Girl was a legitimate sensation, the bestselling novel of the year, doubling the sales of John Grisham’s The Racketeer. This was a book big enough that it cracked the all elusive “general readership” such that even if you were only an occasional novel reader, you heard whispers about it. And by “it”, what I mean is “the twist.” If by some miracle you do not know what “the twist” refers to, you are extremely lucky, and give yourself the absolute gift of stopping this newsletter and go read Gone Girl before anyone spoils it for you.

Fortunately for a younger me, I had avoided knowing “the twist” before I read the novel even a couple of years after its publication. Because of its electrifying plot Gone Girl was talked about like a hyper commercial genre novel— something like First Lie Wins in today’s publishing landscape. What subverted my expectations at the time was that for a book that was this commercially successful and talked about in a breathless “you won’t believe what happens” manner, Gone Girl read absolutely nothing like Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown, the page-turning commercial juggernauts of the mid-aughts.

In reality Gone Girl is a modern classic, not just for “the twist” or its plot. The expectations of Gone Girl as any fluffy thriller are thrown out in the first pages as Flynn’s protagonist Nick Dunne opens the novel more like an essayist than an action hero. Here’s the passage:

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I'd know her head anywhere.

And what's inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? The question I've asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions storm cloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

Nick’s wife Amy — the titular Gone Girl — through diary entries writes even more so in this reflective manner throughout the book, telling the story of their marriage from her perspective. At times Amy sounds like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita: “I am fat with love! Husky with ardor! Morbidly obese with devotion! A happy, busy bumblebee of marital enthusiasm.” With literary ambitions like these on a line level, Gone Girl is far from a typical supermarket slasher. My favorite part re-reading the novel was noting the music of the way Flynn’s writing, especially her use of adjectives as modifiers:

“Leave her in knee socks and hair ribbons and let me grow up, unencumbered by my literary alter ago, my paper-bound better half.”

“I’m feeling like a shrill fishwife, or a foolish doormat—I don’t know which.”

“I rode up the elevator with four men, all balding and khaki’d and golf-shirted, lanyards bouncing off round married bellies.”

“She was shaped like some sort of origami creation: elbows in extreme points, a clothes-hanger collarbone.”

Gone Girl may have gone on to become an emblem for a whole genre, its success having a profound impact on the whole publishing market for years, but it is a classic in part because it has a style, a literary sensibility both in Flynn’s writing and the construction of the novel that, despite the subsequent outpouring of psychological thrillers, hasn’t and likely won’t be replicated.

The Twist *Spoiler Alert*

Before we unpack the influence of Gone Girl on books and writers, let’s take a second to appreciate what is one of the greatest twists of all time. I read Gone Girl again ready to find that the book is so much more than its central twist, but the way Flynn pulls off what she does is a dazzling and thrilling feat even if you already know the plot. Amy Dunne, the presumed dead wife, comes back halfway through the book—she has faked her own death and left a trail of hints that implicate her husband in her disappearance and presumed murder.

Putting this major twist smack dab in the middle of the book is just about the most difficult choice a writer can make. In the case of Gone Girl it meant that everything leading up to the twist had to have a plausible double meaning. Everything Amy Dunne says to the reader has to have enough reliability to relay some facts of her and Nick’s relationship, while being just unreliable enough that upon second think or read we take all the details and perspective that Amy lays on the story with a grain of salt. Rarely do I find writers pointing out what they are doing or saying in their own novel worthwhile, but in Flynn’s case she takes a deserved bow by telling you exactly what she’s pulled off after the twist happens (crucially in context of the story):

I knew it was going to be bad. I knew it once I figured out the clue: woodshed. Midday fun. Cocktails. Because that description was not me and Amy. It was me and Andie. The woodshed was just one of many strange places where I'd had sex with Andie. We were restricted in our meeting spots. Her busy apartment complex was mostly a no go. Motels show up on credit cards, and my wife was neither trusting nor stupid. (Andie had a MasterCard, but the statement went to her mom. It hurts me to admit that.) So the woodshed, deep behind my sister's house, was very safe when Go was at work. Likewise my father's abandoned home (Maybe you feel guilty for bringing me here/ I must admit it felt a bit queer / But it's not like we had the choice of many a place / We made the decision: We made this our space), and a few times, my office at school (I picture myself as your student / With a teacher so handsome and wise / My mind opens up (not to mention my thighs!), and once, Andie's car, pulled down a dirt road in Hannibal after I’d taken her for a visit one day, a much more satisfying reenactment of my banal field trip with Amy (You took me here so I could hear you chat / About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat).

Each clue was hidden in a spot where I'd cheated on Amy. She’d used the treasure hunt to take me on a tour of all my infidelities.

The “loving” clues Amy gives Nick for their anniversary before she disappears all have double, hidden meanings that jab at him for his infidelity, but only Nick has the personal history to decipher the clues rendering them useless to the police. No idea is original and it doesn’t sound impressive to say “she’s not dead after all—huzzah!”, but the true feat of a great twist is all in the execution and the details. The twist in Gone Girl can’t be stolen or replicated because flying and then landing this plane in a way that doesn’t feel cheap or flimsy is extremely difficult.

The boldness of putting the biggest twist smack dab in the middle is also that the novel has to go on after the twist. Even successfully done it’s why you typically see these kinds of reframing devices if not sensibly placed at the end or near-end of the novel then at least used around page 60. One of my favorite books of all time, Shirley Jackson’s Hangsman, does this quarter-turn reframing brilliantly. Putting a reframing device or a before/after moment at page 60 essentially gives the writer a short-story length project and a novel-length project to complete.

What Flynn choose to do was basically write two full-length novels and make them work together. After the twist, she has to throw out Amy’s diary voice and insert her as a person; she has to throw out Nick’s hunt for clues and figure out a whole new plot once he’s in the know. Gone Girl is an all-time twist because Flynn executes the first half with the accuracy of a pin’s point and doesn’t fumble the second half of the novel in the slightest, finding new gears and basically handing over the steering wheel to Nick as he figures out how to dodge legal trouble and get Amy to come back. It’s no surprise given the impossible degree of difficultly to learn in the afterword of the recently published edition of Gone Girl that Flynn wrote “at least three versions” (emphasis mine) of the novel.

Influence

Gone Girl was such a phenomenon that it would create a reliable readership and publishing model for many years to come. While no one can specifically copy its mastery, the wildfire word of mouth that the twist created would be something writers, editors, and readers all began to chase. Perhaps the coolest result of this from an editor’s perspective is that Gone Girl carved out a space for mega bestsellers that weren’t by the established names of the Boomer generation — Steven King, Lee Child, John Grisham.

Gillian Flynn was not unsuccessful before Gone Girl, both of her previous novels Sharp Objects and Dark Places sold over 20,000 hardcovers, a number that easily would put her in the top 5% of fiction sales. 20,000 copies is, however, very far from establishing a household, brand name nominally. In the entire thriller genre Gone Girl made much more space for novels that followed to blow up based “on the read” rather than an author’s existing platform. This did not stop commercial forces from getting heavily involved—Reese Witherspoon’s book club, started in 2017, has been minting many of the bestselling thrillers ever since, and publishers often pay enormous sums for unknown writers to signal that a thriller is “the next big thing” (and they are surprisingly often successful in making it so).

While Gone Girl certainly didn’t invent the unreliable narrator, the revival and appetite for this convention that it caused in the genre is undeniable. Bestsellers that would follow by people who weren’t household names— books like Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window, The Woman in Cabin 10, The Silent Patient, Then She Was Gone — often had unreliable narrators and big reversal twists of varying calibers. Although Flynn hasn’t published another novel since Gone Girl in 2012, the novel established a readership, a way of publishing, and a market that is still going strong to this day.

The Movie

It’s impossible to talk about Gone Girl without addressing the film adaptation. In part, because Gillian Flynn as an author disappeared from publishing like Amy Dunne after the blockbuster success of the book and the award-nominated film. A large part of this is due to the fact that Flynn herself was nominated for many of those awards for adapting her own novel for the screen. Like many uber successful novelists— George R. R. Martin and, most recently, Coleen Hoover— Flynn was sucked up into Hollywood and entertainment after success on the screen. More than a decade has passed and Flynn has only been seen in the book world as a publisher, promoter, editor, and not as a writer. It’s part of the larger shift we’re seeing from all types of promising writers, who are dragged away by other concerns once they find literary success. The last writing Flynn published was The Grownup, a long short story, published in an anthology put together by none other than George R. R. Martin.

Teamed up with one of the best directors of a generation, David Fincher, Gone Girl the film is a masterpiece in its own right. Common to film-to-book adaptation, the movie absolutely takes over the images in your mind of the characters (a gentle reminder to always read before watching, and definitely in this case). This is in part natural for any adaptation, but particularly potent in the case of Gone Girl, in that it’s basically universally acknowledged to be a perfectly cast and acted film. Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike give the best performances of their careers, perhaps, as Nick and Amy— “normal”, beautiful, and charismatic in all the right ways (and Pike was deservingly nominated for Best Actress). Affleck in particular translates the novel character pitch perfect to screen, stoic and smarmy in all the wrong moments. The movie also uses Affleck’s public reputation, the fact that, like Nick the character he is both extremely likable and profoundly hateable depending on the circumstance (charming at an awards ceremony, disgusting when he cheats on his wife with the 28-year-old nanny). Affleck is so well cast it has you almost wondering if Flynn based Nick on Affleck (she didn’t). The side characters are no less iconic, with Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry also giving stellar performances, this time against the types they are usually cast as and play on screen.

Even the poster art is amazing.

Besides perfect casting, the film also provides a counterpoint and makes an argument that we often misuse the term “cinematic prose”— what has now become shorthand for a certain type of screenwriterly, short, punchy sentences and set pieces. Flynn’s writing is anything but cinematic in this more commonly used sense in the novel, and Fincher’s eye shows that cinematic can mean something more like “how memorable images and powerful moments translate to a visual medium.” The sugar storm of Nick and Amy’s romance is dazzling and fairytale-like on screen, it gives you something that the prose can’t. On the opposite end of the spectrum (spoiler alert), Desi’s killing and Amy’s cover up is far more horrific and shocking to see than it ever could be on a printed page.

Plus, because Flynn is the screenwriter, she gets to trim the parts of the plot that maybe she better reconsidered (the homeless boogeyman subplot) and rework her best lines into the movie, like the opening scene (see above) or the Cool Girl monologue. Overall, the movie will likely help continue the Gone Girl legacy — at a box office of $370 million it’s safe to say that more people have seen the movie than read the book — but unlike say Hitchcock’s Psycho or The Notebook, the book it’s based on will remain a classic in its own right.

Legacy

What makes Gone Girl enduring and a “modern classic” beyond the twist is its social commentary. The most subtle of which is the struggle of class differences that emerges when revisiting the novel without the distraction of the plot’s uncertainty. There is a north/south divide of culture and of working-class/elitist backgrounds that is a steady drumbeat throughout. Amy has New York family money and Nick is a Mississippi striver, and these histories influence their characters and relationship almost as much as their genders do. Amy, for one, even in the worst situations, is never fearful that things won’t work out (even when she has no money and is one step from being imprisoned for life). In contrast, Nick has the shattered confidence and latent pessimism of a person who knows the chasm is always waiting below them (no wonder it takes him more than half the novel to find the gumption to try and solve his predicament). Gone Girl has the literary specificity of a time and place, a direct response and encapsulation of the 2008 financial crisis (Amy’s journals cover the time from 2005-2012). Nick’s layoff is a catalyst for the plot and Nick’s hometown, which Amy despises so much, has been devastated by globalization. These are not the themes that Gone Girl announces in neon lights on the page, but are a testament to how careful observation and character work can create a rich and rewarding experience.

Class is a leitmotif of Gone Girl, but gender is what makes this novel Flynn’s magnum opus. Flynn uses the essayist style of Amy Dunne and the entirety of the novel as a vehicle for commentary on relationships and particularly heterosexual ones. What keeps Gone Girl from being a cloying pontification is not only Flynn’s ability to wrap the commentary in a dazzling plot, but the subversive choice to not make Gone Girl a “he said, she said” in the conventional sense as the setup of wife/husband perspective primes the reader for. Instead, Flynn shows how a society dominated by patriarchal beliefs predicated largely on rigid heterosexual relationships isn’t “women vs. men” but a society where everyone hates women.

Nick silently hates women, using his position of power to take advantage of his student, repeating the mantra of his father in his head “bitch, bitch, bitch.” Amy meanwhile is even less forgiving, painting other women as stupid, pitiful creatures:

Nick and I, we sometimes laugh, laugh out loud, at the horrible things women make their husbands do to prove their love. The pointless tasks, the myriad sacrifices, the endless small surrenders. We call these men the dancing monkeys.

Nick will come home, sweaty and salty and beer-loose from a day at the ballpark, and I'll curl up in his lap, ask him about the game, ask him if his friend Jack had a good time, and he'll say, “Oh, he came down with a case of the dancing monkeys— poor Jennifer was having a 'real stressful week' and really needed him at home.” Or his buddy at work, who can't go out for drinks because his girlfriend really needs him to stop by some bistro where she is having dinner with a friend from out of town. So they can finally meet. And so she can show how obedient her monkey is: He comes when I call, and look how well groomed!

Wear this, don't wear that. Do this chore now and do this chore when you get a chance and by that I mean now. And definitely, definitely, give up the things you love for me, so I will have proof that you love me best. It's the female pissing contest—as we swan around our book clubs and our cocktail hours, there are few things women love more than being able to detail the sacrifices our men make for us. A call-and-response, the response being “Ohhh, that’s so sweet.

Their husbands are the “dancing monkeys” but there’s no mistaking in every situation but Amy’s own that the women are the fools:

I am happy not to be in that club. I don’t partake, I don’t get off on emotional coercion, on forcing Nick to play some happy-hubby role—the shrugging, cheerful, dutiful taking out the trash, honey! Role. Every wife’s dream man, the counterpoint to every man’s fantasy of the sweet, hot, laid-back woman who loves sex and a stiff drink.

I like to think I am confident and secure and mature enough to know Nick loves me without him constantly proving it. I don’t need pathetic dancing-monkey scenarios to repeat to my friends; I am content with letting him be himself.

I don’t know why women find that so hard.

Even Gone Girl’s famous Cool Girl Monologue (more like an essay in the book), a seemingly feminist deconstruction of the patriarchy is a call that is coming from inside the house. Amy is less a feminist hero and more a feminist antihero in every regard. It is possible that Flynn meant to make Amy an unlikable female character and fly in the face of what many in the early 2000s said couldn’t be done. But Amy is an antihero because despite all of the horrible things she says and does, she is always the smartest person in the room. Or, as Nick memorable says with a certain dry humor at one point: “Something bad was about to happen. My wife was being clever again.”

It’s Amy’s rendering as an antihero — Nick and Amy as a symbiotic, toxic pair — that gives Gone Girl its sharpened edges even many years later. Flynn deconstructs a standard heterosexual relationship layer by layer with the chilling effect of showing how all of these love stories start out as sugar-cloud unique fairytales and end as a tangle of cliches. To come back to Gone Girl again and again is to marvel at how Flynn could capture a topic this broad, universal, picked-over, and yet still surprise us at every turn.