Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn is an American novelist, screenwriter and former critic for Entertainment Weekly. Raised in Kansas City, Missouri, she later attended graduate school in Chicago and worked as a journalist in New York and Los Angeles. Her fiction draws on crime, horror and the Gothic while keeping its attention fixed on contemporary American life.

Flynn writes psychological suspense with sharp plotting and an acid sense of humor. Her narrators are often compromised, secretive or openly hostile; the question is rarely just who committed a crime, but who controls the story. Marriage, family damage, gender expectations and the performance of an acceptable public self recur across her work.

Her debut, Sharp Objects, follows reporter Camille Preaker back to a Missouri town marked by murdered girls and an oppressive family history. Dark Places centers on Libby Day, who survived the killing of her family. Gone Girl, Flynn’s third novel, became a number-one New York Times bestseller. She adapted it for David Fincher’s 2014 film and received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for the screenplay. Sharp Objects was later adapted as an HBO limited series.

Start with Gone Girl. Its alternating accounts of Nick and Amy Dunne’s marriage turn a disappearance into a precise contest over truth, image and power. It is Flynn’s clearest introduction: intricately structured, mordantly funny and willing to make both narrators deeply unsettling.