The Amazing Amy books, which are limping toward middle age, set the wild expectations people have of the real Amy.
QUEER AS FOLK GAY SEX SCENES TUMBLR SERIES
As for our heroine, she was the star of a series of books written by her overeducated and highly cultured New York literati parents. To me, “Nick Dunne” is clearly an Easter Egg, an homage to the class- and crime-obsessed magazine writer author of a slightly earlier time, Dominick “Nick” Dunne. The husband and wife at the center of Gone Girl are Nick and Amy Dunne. Her short but culturally significant one was enough to earn her considerable power. This is unheard of for a female writer, as women are not generally rewarded in Hollywood without a long track record. That Flynn has not published another novel does not mean she is slacking: she has chosen Hollywood and parlayed adapting all three of her novels into a showrunner position on a high-prestige HBO project. Flynn has done what women often deny themselves: instead of continuing along a charmed but familiar path, she swerved. She has catapulted into another stratosphere of fame and power.
Flynn’s canny choices make her a potent counterexample to the writer who toils with no hope of fame, money, or recognition, i.e. Gillian Flynn has not taken the expected path after a colossal hit. It’s art.Īnd let’s look at its author and her creative choices. Gone Girl is not just clever marketing and good timing. So let’s do something radical: let’s look at Gone Girl as literature. And I am passionate about Flynn’s book and her accomplishments, about the depth and the resonances of the novel she wrote which slyly tackles so many topics and themes beyond the obvious ones of a crummy marriage and a missing girl. Please email the editor if you would like more.ĭespite being enmeshed in the publishing world, I try to read outside of business hours: to read not like it’s my job, but like it’s my passion. I also am the creator of The Girl in the Title of the Crime Novel: The Great Crime Fiction Disambiguation Project, which was just getting going after the first four installments. If anyone knows from this phenomenon, it’s me: I cover these books, and month after month I sort through a pile of them and find a few to recommend. Of course, Gone Girl has spawned a genre’s worth of books about troubled marriages and pretty missing white women. The monotony of one writer after another discussing the book as a publishing phenomenon, the near ancestor of a proliferation of books categorized as domestic suspense or psychological thrillers, is not only not a novel observation it’s dismissive of Gone Girl as literature. As I read them, I sank into a familiar disappointment. Gone Girl is ten, and the virtual ink of the think piece is spilling all over the internet.