Title: Gone Girl

Text type: Thriller

Author: Gillian Flynn

A gripping storey based around the disappearance of Nick Dunne’s wife, Amy Dunne, the fictional thriller, Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. Told from both characters perspectives we unravel the case of the missing girl and learn that there are two sides to every story.

Amy Dunne, “cool girl”, and wife to Nick Dunne, disappears on “the day of” leaving “loving husband”, Nick, startled, but not shaken. This thriller set in North Carthage, Missouri, starts off from Nick’s point of view on the day of the disappearance of his wife. It than flicks back and forth between Nicks journey and Amys previous years diary entries. Until the journal is found. We then change to whats happening in not just Nicks, but Amy’s life, real time, as they travel back to apparent normality.

Gone Girls explores the theme of men and masculinity in comparison to females in real life. In this day and age, with everyone voicing their opinions, feminism is a very widespread issue and is placed in the media a lot. It is a well talked about topic and everyone seems to have formed an opinion over it. In the marriage of the Dunne’s, Nick, stereotypical, is the man of the house. He shares strong opinions and wants woman to like and take care of him. From the outside, he is once again a ‘normal’ looking male, but from the inside, he states – “In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottle so rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me”. Amy, on the other hand, is the ‘classic’ female. She cooks, she cleans and of course is the more quiet one that has the upper hand in the household. But in being the stereotypical female, she has something not quite right going on in her mind. These characters are both based on the clichéd images we have all got in our heads of males and females. The married couple is related solely to what we, as humans, picture when we are to think of a ‘couple in trouble’. They are images the media has put into our heads and they are now being portrayed in Flynn’s fictional novel. So in keeping with relatable, familiar marriage type characters, no wonder when Amy fakes her own death, Nick is immediately the main suspect for murder.

For me, I found that I could not personally relate to this novel on a higher level. To read a novel such as this I found it enriching and gave an insight into something that usually wouldn’t be on my mind. To see revenge on a bigger scale and the lengths someone would go to be manipulative from being dissatisfied. The lengths Amy Dunne went to to get back at her cheating, lying husband, made her evil personified. I found it intriguing to absorb myself in a text such as this as it shared views with me of events, even though fictitious, such as the faking of a pregnancy, murder and false accusation of rape. The way Flynn described them and really explored what was in the head of the characters made them seem posable. It made me think, somewhere, and for someone, this could really be happening.

Overall, this is one of my favourite books I’ve read. I could not connect to it what so ever but the book made me feel angry and intrigued. How it was told from two points of view, and at times confusing, it all unravelled in the end as we saw into both characters mind and thoughts. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.