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FBI veteran Candice Delong has analyzed Gone Girl‘s antiheroine Amy Dunne’s story in a video with Vanity Fair.

Delong doesn’t buy it all. In her analysis, which you can view above, Delog diagnoses Amy with Munchausen syndrome and challenges the detectives in the story for not being more suspicious.

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Andrew Shaffer (pseudonym Fanny Merkin) has written a sequel for his Fifty Shades of Grey parody novel.

Gone Grey, the follow-up for Fifty Shames of Earl Grey, was influenced by Gillian Flynn’s hit thriller, Gone Girl. The story follows the protagonist, Earl Grey, as he deals with the disappearance of his wife.

Follow this link to download the free eBook. For more Fifty Shades laughs, check out this trailer of the film adaptation re-made with legos.

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Thanks for talking to Boomerang Books, Claire Smith.  You’re the marketing assistant at Walker Books, Australia, and you’re going to share your Christmas picks with us. But first let’s find out about you and some books you’ve been working with. Walker Books  (based in Sydney)  is known for its children’s and YA books. Which do […]

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The summer is almost upon us, which means the season for blockbuster movies is here. With the successful adaptation of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn I thought I would talk about some other movies that come from books. Like me, I am sure a lot of people out there would prefer to read the book […]

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Crafting the screenplay that would take her bestseller Gone Girl  from page to reel, in a film by David Fincher and starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, Gillian Flynn was comfortable with her three (yes, three) lead characters. More of a challenge was making the internalized plot points visual.

Talking to Newsday, Flynn said,

“It’s a story about storytelling, and in the 24-hour media world, no matter what the content, the media has a disproportionate voice in all our lives. I wanted it to be a third character in a way — Nick, Amy, but also the media. We all weigh in on everybody’s life no matter what. And there seems to be a constant audience monitoring our lives.”

Translating Nick and Amy’s tale — which sold 6 million copies in hardcover alone — Flynn used her third player, the media, to comment on its power to reshape perception and belief about the husband and wife. And during the screenplay-writing process, she swapped pages with director Fincher, whose notes helped accentuate the visual moments that would define their connection and alienation.

Flynn told Newsday,

“It was not the type of book you look at and think you can just slap it onto the movie screen. It’s very internalized, it relies a lot on internal narratives and first-person writing. My first challenge was to externalize what needed to be shown on screen. My concern was once I did that it would be all engine and lose those more specific, character-driven moments. I wanted to make sure I maintained the meat of the relationship.”

To convey the couple’s bond, Flynn sometimes moved beyond the Nick-Amy-media trio, and brought in the viewer’s perspective.

Newsday’s John Anderson describes the scene: Nick is being interrogated and a detective questions why he, as a loving (and non-homicidal) husband, does not know his wife’s blood type.

“‘Should I know my wife’s blood type?’ her partner asks, somewhat guiltily, after Nick has left the room. The answer, essentially, is of course not.

“‘I knew men would be squirming uncomfortably, not knowing their wives’ blood type,’ (Flynn) laughed. ‘How many people know it? I liked that idea, of voicing what every guy in the audience was going to be thinking.’”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Anticipation is steadily growing for the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling thriller, GONE GIRL. The studio has just released the first trailer and it certainly captures the essence of the book. Ben Affleck stars as Nick Dunne, a man who has become a suspect in the disappearance (murder?) of his wife.

Have you read the book? Are you excited about seeing the film?

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"I remember her as a plain-looking girl, narrow as a stick, shy, prudish, wouldn't want to show an inch of skin from chin to ankles when about," said our unreliable narrator.

The ensuing discussion on 'unreliable narrators' includes reflections on the writing strategy found in "Gone Girl," a recent NY Times best selling novel by Gillian Flynn.  The novel has been variously described by the critics as a literary mystery novel; a frightening portrait of psychopathy in a failing marriage; a love story wrapped in a mystery--suspenseful, funny, and chilling, sometimes all at once.   As each turn in the plot begins to dawn on a reader, sluicing through remaining chapters is like downing successive boilermakers lined up on the dark, mahogany bar steadying his elbows.

Reading up to the point of revelation, the chapters alternate between the husband, Nick, who narrates in first person and gives a chronological progression of the story line from the day his wife, Amy, has disappeared, and the diary entries of Amy during the earlier time period leading up to her disappearance.  It is essentially the story of a failing marriage.  Nick has lost his job as a writer for a magazine publisher in NY, is unable to get another job, and has burned through his savings.  He decides to return to his midwestern hometown to help his twin sister care for their cancer-stricken mother, and maybe get another career start.  He borrows money from Amy, drawing down her trust fund, and partners with his sister to open a bar in town.  To keep up his credentials as a writer, he also teaches a journalism class at the local community college.

From Amy's diary entries we notice she is unrelentingly optimistic and supportive of Nick, even as he seems to decline into a narcissistic, self-centered and immature man.  Why Amy, an attractive daughter of a wealthy family, well educated, and clever, should remain so supportive of Nick seems a mystery to us.

(spoiler alert: it's a good read, so if you enjoy a good mystery, get the book and read it before returning to the writing crafts discussion).

Suddenly, Nick's narrative startles the reader: during a police investigation of his wife's disappearance, he admits to having an affair with one of his young students.  At this point, if the reader has limited patience with mundane, modern romance plots, he's hoping Nick will quickly be convicted and hopefully executed for 'disappearing' his wife.  We suspect Nick has proven himself to be an unreliable narrator about what was going on.  However we notice we're only half-through the book, so we decide to continue a bit to see if the author has any other surprises (it should be said all the author's surprises are well earned and fit her plot).

Abruptly, Amy's diary entries end, and she begins narrating what has been occurring to her since the day of her disappearance.  The diary, discovered by police investigators as she had planned, was prevaricated by Amy to point suspicion toward Nick.  She is actually in hiding now while the police investigation into the disappearance draws tighter around Nick.  Amy is revealed to the reader as a psychotically unreliable narrator, and further story events are stunning.

Even more stunning is the story denouement, as Amy checkmates Nick into continuing their marriage, and on her terms.

Nick's example of an unreliable narrator lies in his omission of key information that would have led us to form a different view of his character, up until he makes the disclosure of infidelity.  This is one of the more common signs of unreliable narrators, where the narrator hides essential truths, mainly through evasion, omission, and obfuscation, without ever overtly lying.  Other common types include contradicting oneself, or explicitly lying to other characters.  Holden Caulfield, in Catcher in the Rye, signals his unreliable narrator's role with various instances of evasion, obfuscation, and lying.  In his case, it all seems to work agreeably well in the story as the bravado of a sensitive, confused youth, facing entry into an adult world.  Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, occasionally falls into a role of unreliable narrator as he reports events he couldn't have known about, and obfuscates with intentional fantasy.

Another memorable story of an unreliable narrator was in I am the Cheese, by Robert Cormier.  It is a very dark and discomforting novel in which we think we're accompanying a boy, Adam, riding his bicycle from Massachusetts to Vermont to visit his father there in a hospital.  The family had been in a witness protection program as a result of his father being a whistle-blower on some sort of government corruption scheme.  A subsequent auto accident involving the family killed the mother and injured Adam and his father.  During his bicycle trip Adam meets with various spooky events and people, and a sort of deja vue atmosphere prevails along the way; he oddly recalls seeing some of the places before.  When he gets to the hospital and is being interviewed there by a doctor, we realize Adam has some sort of psychiatric condition and is actually himself a patient there, as are some of the people he has reported meeting on his trip.  In fact, the entire bicycle trip has been occurring on the hospital grounds.

However, none of these unreliable narrators come even close to the psychopathic performance of Amy as an unreliable narrator in Gone Girl.

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I spent part of this day in the cold, white weather, by my mother's grave.  I spent part of it watching the news, wondering about the state this country is in.  I spent part of it reading the still incoming essays by the two dozen YoungArts writers I'll meet in Miami in just a few days and part of it receding into that safe hollow where story still lives within me, if I listen hard, if I wait.

I came to this computer just now to see what a handful of these new Florence paragraphs look like on this big screen, because I will never believe in the sentences I make until I see them and remake them and endlessly reshape them until they are set, a tableau vivant.  When I arrived, this bit of thrilling something was right here, waiting for me:

A.A. Omer, who just hours ago named Small Damages number one within the Best Writing of 2012 category, has today named this book of mine to her top five reads of the year.  Here, on this list, it joins Gone Girl, Drowning Instinct, Pandemonium, and Blood Red Road.

I have no idea how I got this lucky, but I hope you don't mind if I directly quote:

2) Small Damages by Beth Kephart
Every paragraph, sentence and word was important and a story that could’ve been dull was made captivating. Werewolves, vampires, dystopian worlds are fun but sometimes it’s everyday life and everyday problems that’s the most interesting.

A.A. Omer, I need to throw you a party.  A very happy new year to you!

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One of the things I think has made Gillian Flynn's GONE GIRL so successful is voice.

Voice is always one of those tricky things. Scholastic editor Cheryl Klein defines it "by using the formula VOICE = PERSON + TENSE + PROSODY + (Diction + Syntax + Tone + Imagination + Details). Defining the imagination of Voice, Cheryl says, '[t]he imagination of a voice sets the range of subjects, images, diction, kinds of and examples of figurative language, and references that the voice can include.'”

Agent and author Donald Maass says voice is "the thing...every novelist already has... . It may be comic, deadpan, dry, pulpy, shrill, objective, distant, intimate, arty or a thousand other things. It comes through in the story that an author chooses to tell and the way in which they choose to tell it."

Here are some quotes I highlighted while reading GONE GIRL. You'll notice they're not big statements on the plot (except for the last one, which sums up the entire story in all its twisted wonder), but tiny observations -- metaphors used to paint a picture of characters, of setting, small things that were fresh and interesting and right. In other words, great examples of voice.

characterization and metaphor:
"They have no hard edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish -- expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other's spaces liquidly. Making it look easy, the soul-mate thing." (p 27)

setting and metaphor:
"It was the best time of day, the July sky cloudless, the slowly setting sun a spotlight on the east, turning everything golden and lush, a Flemish painting." (p 31)

characterization:
"His shirt wasn't wrinkled, but he wore it like it was; he looked like he should stink of cigarettes and sour coffee, even though he didn't. He smelled like Dial soap." (p 33)

characterization and metaphor:
"He spoke in a soft, soothing voice, a voice wearing a cardigan." (p 199)

and the quote that sums up the entire crazy ride:
"Our kind of love can go into remission, but it's always waiting to return. Like the world's sweetest cancer." (p 392)

Have you read GONE GIRL? What were your impressions? Any other authors or books that get voice just right?

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