Gone Girl: what makes Gillian Flynn's psychological thriller so popular?

A tale of marital meltdown has Hollywood hot under the collar and is up for its first literary award – and deservedly so

Alex Clark

Tuesday 19 March 2013  guardian.co.uk

Gillian Flynn: no mystery as to Gone Girl's success

It's a pretty impressive comeback: less than five years after the financial crisis brought Gillian Flynn's decade-long career at Entertainment Weekly to a close, she has hit the jackpot. Gone Girl, published in the US in June 2012 and out in paperback in the UK at the beginning of this year, has now sold more than 2m copies throughout the world – 300,000 of them over here. It stormed the New York Times bestseller list and the film version is set to be produced by Reese Witherspoon; it will feature in this spring's Richard & Judy Book Club and, less predictably, last week saw its inclusion on the Women's prize for fiction longlist, where Flynn is keeping Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith and AM Homes company. As she might tell her former employers, that's entertainment.

Why is it so popular? Well: the straightforward answer is that it's pretty gripping. It immerses you almost instantly in a mystery – the disappearance of Amy Dunne, a woman in her late 30s who has left New York to accompany her husband Nick back to his native Missouri. A picture of marital disharmony is rapidly conjured up: the couple have both lost their jobs as magazine journalists and now live in a soulless, rented mansion, courtesy of Amy's trust fund. While Nick goes out every day to work in the bar that he and his twin sister have bought – once again with Amy's money – she struggles to fill her days. More deeply rooted problems hover in the background. Nick can't stand his cruel father, parked in a nearby care home; Amy loves her parents, but might have preferred them not to base a phenomenally bestselling series of children's books on their only daughter – or, at least, an idealised version of her.

And then, on their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears. Crucially, she doesn't simply walk out of her life: mayhem at the mansion suggests a more brutal scenario and brings the cops running. And with that, we're off.


But what's really ingenious about Gone Girl is its structure: Amy and Nick take turns narrating events, but not from the same point in time. While Nick charts life from the moment of Amy's vanishing, she fills in their relationship from the very beginning, painting a picture of a couple so ludicrously, impossibly golden that we begin to smell a rat almost immediately. If things were so great then, we wonder, how can they be so crappy now? Could Amy possibly be embroidering reality? And when is she writing all this, anyway? Where on earth is she?


Flynn's coup de grace is to provide us with not one but two unreliable narrators. Just as Amy is sugar-coating the past, so Nick is being economical with the truth of the present day; we know he's lying to the police because he tells us so, but he doesn't tell us what he's hiding, or why.

It's clever stuff, and pacily written, with some deft touches – I loved the horrible truth of a couple who founder because he can't decode the romantic treasure hunts she constructs to demonstrate how close they are. And that might be the key to its success: lots of thrillers take place in families or marriages, but few are so adept at inhabiting two genres at once. More usually, you find yourself racing through the personal relationships to get back to the mystery, or shrugging off the whodunnit element because the characters are so engaging. Or, even worse, feeling that the author wanted to do the same. Gone Girl manages, somehow, to convince you that it can be more than one book at the same time. Whether that's enough to secure its further passage in the Women's prize for fiction, where it will come up against the irritatingly persistent question of what constitutes a "literary novel", is another matter.