A Review of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Reviewing Gone Girl

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, is a thriller novel published by Crown Publishing Group on May 24, 2012. The novel centers on Nick and Amy Dunne’s marriage and what happens when Amy goes missing. Gone Girl is told from alternating points of view between Nick and Amy. Amy’s point of view is told by the journal entries she had been writing for years, which tells the entire story of her relationship with Nick. In it are the details of Amy’s marriage with Nick, how they both lost their jobs, and how their marriage deteriorated. Nick’s chapters take place in the present day with Amy missing. Nick tells the audience about the police investigation and the events leading up to Amy’s disappearance. Nick appears to be telling the truth because he tells the audience when he is lying and speaks truthfully, but is he? 

~Spoiler Alert~

Amy Dunne has expertly created a version of herself to play several roles in order to advance in life. Amy is a lying, manipulative, mastermind who concocts a plan to get back at her husband for cheating on her. She knows this is no easy feat and begins planning her disappearance a year in advance. First, Amy is a cool girl. She pretends to be someone she is not in order to get Nick to fall in love with her in the first place. Once she does so and finally thinks she is able to reveal her true self to Nick, she discovers Nick does not like her for who she really is. But then again, who is Amy? 
When she was a child, her parents wrote a series of children’s books based on a made-up character named Amazing Amy. From that moment forward, Amy had to be Amazing Amy whenever she was with her parents. Then, we have cool-girl Amy, Amy that was pretending to be someone else for Nick. Amy says that cool girls are “hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner” (225). In the diary Amy fabricates to implicate Nick in her disappearance, Amy is a loving housewife who supports Nick even though he abuses her and beats her. This is the Amy that Noelle, the police, and the public see when they read her diary. Amy must remake herself again when she goes to live in a cabin to hideout from Nick, everyone she knows, and the police. With Desi Collins, Amy must play a damsel in distress because he is the kind of guy that likes to fix women. Amy tells Desi about the abuse she endured while being married to Nick and how she had to escape because it was no longer safe for her. 

Amy is able to manipulate people into believing she is someone entirely different from who she really is. The real Amy is somewhat psychotic but intriguingly so. Amy performs her gender so well and is able to use it to her advantage when she needs to. Amy plays the dutiful daughter. Amy plays a cool girl that Nick Dunne can fall in love with. Amy plays Ozark Amy when she has to hideout in a cabin. Amy plays a damsel in distress in order to win over Desi. Amy performs each of her roles so well that the audience is in utter shock when it is discovered that the first half of the book depicts Amy falsely with a version of herself that she rewrote. 

Amy plays so many other roles in her life but Nick does too. Nick and Amy pretend to be other people in order to get them to like each other and once the masks come off, neither one of them likes the other. The relationship between Nick and Amy borders and blurs the line between love and hate. Even though the duo seems to hate each other, they know each other well enough to push their buttons. Nick’s lawyer says, “You two are the most f’d up people I have ever met, and I specialize in f’d up people” (389). Nick and Amy’s love story is filled with manipulation, lies, hatred, and deceit but it’s all part of a game. They are Nick and Amy, the perfect couple when they are pretending to be other people and the worst couple when they are being themselves. The way Amy dominates and manipulates Nick, along with everybody else in her life, makes her psychotic in the eyes of a reader but understandably so. 

Gone Girl is filled with strong language, sexual situations, and violence throughout, which makes the book geared for a mature audience. The plot is not hard to follow and is pretty straightforward but that does not mean it is predictable in any way. When Gone Girl was released in 2012 it received brilliant reviews and it is still well-deserving of its praise. Overall Grade: A

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn