Review on Gillian Flynn’s psychological thriller “Gone Girl”

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

CREEEEPYY!! (shudder)..not scary but chillingly creepy-both the characters as well as the way long-term relationships are portrayed. The story is about a couple-two very sick-minded persons- both narrating alternately.(Spoiler alert) The woman, Amy Elliot Dunne, is a classic sociopath-extremely manipulative, grandiose sense of self-worth, thinks whatever she does is correct (one of the cases whose moral compass changes as she deems fit!)- while the guy, Lance Nicholas Dunne, is a tremendous dickhead (for want of a more proper adjective). Both of them are hateful characters to the extreme. The main similarity between them-they both are PATHOLOGICAL LIARS! You end up feeling they both deserve each other completely and they do end up with each other. Non-poetic justice! However, Nick at least was a flawed human and though he was pathetic in every sense, I still pitied him at times. But Amy, she was purely crazy. I had the bad luck to be friends with a real sociopath recently until I realized she had every textbook symptom of Antisocial-Personality Disorder and then started distancing myself without much luck. (She still doesn’t want to let go of me as a friend even though she hates me thoroughly and has tried to harm me several times…she actually is like the younger version of Amy.) So yeah, the character of Amy really stroke a chilling chord with me. However, the creepiest part was how the book portrayed long-term relationships-the initial excitement and feeling of being the best with your loved one, the subsiding interest after sometime, growing discontent and boredom and resentment, increased half-lies, lies by omission, white lies and then manipulations, love eventually turning to hate. Yes, this was a highly unusual couple, but don’t most long-term relationships reflect most of these phases? Makes one realize just how much of Amy and Nick are there in every person. That under similar circumstances, we might also try to manipulate people, tell such pathetic lies, make such gross errors of judgement and then get stuck in such a quagmire of our own selfish mistakes, woven lies and manipulations. (SHUDDER)!!!

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