Interview: Gillian Flynn
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Gillian Flynn has a message for her readers: She is not one of her characters.
The author of this summer’s best-selling thriller Gone Girl has been mistaken for one of the seriously twisted offspring of her mind since the publication of her first novel, Sharp Objects, in 2006.
“I guess I should take it as a compliment that people assume all my books are true,” Flynn says from her home in Chicago. Sharp Objects includes a dysfunctional relationship between a Midwestern mother and daughter, and Flynn found that people were eager to read it as a thinly disguised memoir. “Everyone assumes that my mom is just this evil sociopath,” she says with a laugh. “And my mother is this tiny little blonde thing beloved by everyone. She loves it! She’ll come to my readings and give me the evil eye.”
That inclination to read into Flynn’s real life via the nasty sociopaths she gleefully conjures up has been taken to an extreme with Gone Girl, featuring married couple Amy and Nick, two of the screwiest, most unreliable narrators of recent memory. “Family and friends, the first question they get is, ‘Oh, how is she?’” Flynn says. “It’s always kind of whispered. ‘Is she OK? Are things OK with you?’ I get the sense that some people don’t believe me, that it’s, ‘She doth protest too much! She’s really messed up.’”
To set the record straight in time for the holidays, Flynn talks to eMusic about how a non-sociopath would handle the most stressful time of the year. Good news! She passed with flying colors. Here are the results:
She would never spit in your food, no matter how obnoxious you get during dinner.
Say a family member is getting poisonous at the table. What would Flynn do? “Well, Amy would definitely make quick work out of those people,” she says. “There’s that one great scene when she gets annoyed with Greta in the Ozarks and when Greta goes into the bathroom, she goes into her fridge and spits in everything. Gillian would not do that. Gillian would probably duck out quietly, talk behind the person’s back briefly, and return to dinner with a smile on her face.”
She goes full bore with Christmas gift prep, but won’t buy anything intended to make the recipient look like a murderer.
One of the treats of Gone Girl is watching seemingly innocuous occurrences slowly reveal themselves as the work of a master manipulator. The most elaborate of these is a treasure hunt for a series of anniversary gifts that have a blackly comic double purpose. So how does a non-sociopath shop for Christmas? “I actually do have a weird little Amy streak in the sense of my crazy preparation,” Flynn admits. “I’m one of those people who buys gifts throughout the year and hides them away with little cards. My family has weird collections. My mom collects heavy metal, anything made out of metal. It just has to have a weird shape and weigh a lot. My dad collects cereal stuff and comic books. My aunt collects Chessie, a mascot for a train company. So I have a drawer full of this hodgepodge of items.”
She is an inveterate list maker, like Amy, but her lists are never part of an intricate, sinister plot.
“I have these crazy to-do lists that just go on for pages and pages,” she admits. “For a while, when we were moving into our house, I had ‘Unpack,’ ‘Really unpack,’ ‘Final unpacks,’ ‘Final final unpacks.’ Sometimes I put something really simple on the list, like ‘Answer that email,’ just to feel accomplished.”
You never have to worry if you’ve been poisoned at her house.
Anyone is capable of anything in Gone Girl, but you never have to subject the food at Flynn’s house to a sniff test for the bitter almonds of cyanide. That’s because Flynn isn’t the cook of her family; she’s the eater – though she does stock the table’s lazy Susan. “There have to be olives,” she says. “But not the fancy kind. The cheap black olives from the grocery store.”
She most definitely did not write Gone Girl as a genius double bluff like the one pulled off by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Probably.
When asked if she wrote the book just so she could turn around and tell the police no one would be so dumb as to write in a book what they planned to do in real life, Flynn laughs. “[My husband and I] are coming up on our five-year anniversary. So if you hear that my husband has gone missing…”
