What’s in it for me? Learn all about one of the most iconic crime thrillers of the twenty-first century.
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl was a best-selling sensation when it was published in 2012. Since then, the material has retained a strong foothold in our popular culture consciousness – thanks in part to the film adaptation released in 2014. But the real reason the book continues to spark conversation is the unique way in which it exposes the inner lives of its two primary characters, Amy and Nick Dunne.
When the story begins, Amy and Nick have been married for exactly five years. But on the morning of their fifth anniversary, Amy goes missing. From Nick’s recollections and Amy’s diary entries, we enter a complex hall of mirrors as the layers of their relationship are peeled away and a disturbing yet darkly funny dynamic is revealed.
There’s a reason Amy is often listed as one of the most memorable characters in modern literature. In the sections ahead, we’ll look at the many potent themes the tale brings to the surface while delivering one twist after another.
A sudden disappearance
Our story opens on a fateful day: the fifth wedding anniversary of Nick Dunne and Amy Elliott Dunne. The couple are living in a modern home along the Mississippi River in North Carthage, Missouri. They moved here from New York City two years ago, when Nick’s mother was sick with cancer and receiving treatment.
While North Carthage is Nick’s hometown, Amy is a New Yorker through and through. She begrudgingly went along with the relocation plan, but Nick knew Amy felt completely out of place in Missouri. And there were further extenuating circumstances: when Nick’s mother became ill, both Nick and Amy were unemployed writers who’d lost their jobs after the 2008 economic crisis.
Money was never much of a concern for Amy anyway. Her parents had made a small fortune publishing a series of children's books featuring the character “Amazing Amy.” Some of the money from these books had been used to create a trust fund for their inspirational daughter.
Nick’s unemployment, however, caused him to sink into a depressive funk of sluggish, unkempt inactivity. He was in this sorry state when his twin sister, Margo (better known as “Go”), called to explain the level of help that their mother now required. Eager to relieve some of the burden from Go and to give his newly adrift life a purpose, Nick believed he had to move back.
Not long after they relocated to Missouri, Amy and Nick found out that Amy’s parents were broke. Book sales had plummeted, and the newest entry in the series was a flop.
In order to bring in some cash, Nick took a teaching job at the local junior college and borrowed money from Amy to open a bar with Go in North Carthage. Nick saw it as a fairly safe investment – after all, no matter the state of the economy, people would still drink.
All of this, along with the death of Nick’s mom due to cancer, adds up to intense stress and strain on what was once a happy marriage. And it’s in this environment that Amy suddenly disappears.
Love and lies
One early afternoon, while Nick is at the bar chatting with Go about the dire state of his marriage, he receives a call from his neighbor telling him the front door to his house is wide open. When Nick goes home, he finds that furniture has been broken and the iron has been left on. There are signs of a struggle – but no sign of Amy. The police are quickly called to the scene, and Nick’s entire life seems caught in a completely unexpected whirlwind, filled with questions he’s finding difficult to answer.
This early section of the book alternates between chapters from Nick’s perspective – but we’re also treated to entries from Amy's diary. In her own words, Amy fills in some of the gaps in the couple’s history. In entries that date back to the day she first met Nick at a party in 2005, we learn how Amy can recall every detail of their first kiss. As she describes it, she’s over-the-moon in love with Nick, and excited to get married and move into their own brownstone apartment in the city.
At first, she’s proud they don’t have typical relationship expectations. If Nick has to cancel a date on short notice, Amy doesn’t stress over it. She likes that they have their own cool, confident relationship – one that’s not threatened by the kind of hangups other relationships suffer from.
But as time passes, it’s clear that their strong bond is unraveling. Amy documents Nick’s downward spiral after losing his job. After the move, she writes, Nick continues to be distant and unhappy. He neglects to care for his mom and avoids his estranged father who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Month by month, Amy’s diary entries get increasingly worrisome. At one point, she describes how Nick has snapped at and assaulted her. In another, she wonders if Nick tried to poison her. Her diary entries end with her thinking that her husband might kill her – and wondering if she should buy a gun.
Meanwhile, in the days after Amy’s disappearance, Nick finds himself under more and more scrutiny from police detectives Rhonda Boney and Jim Gilpin. Even simple questions like, “Where were you that morning?” are hard for Nick to answer.
He tells the police he left home early after having breakfast with Amy – but he didn’t arrive at the bar until a few hours later. He says he was drinking his coffee at the beach – but everyone knows Nick isn’t a beach guy. Something is off, and even Nick knows that his lies are spinning out of control.
From this point on, Nick struggles to keep his head above water. Nothing makes sense. The crime scene looks like it was staged. But it also looks like it was cleaned up. Traces of a large pool of blood are found on the kitchen floor.
There’s also a treasure hunt going on. Each year, to celebrate their anniversary, Amy created a complex trail of hidden clues that led to a present. The clues were always written in rhyming verse and referenced personal moments or inside jokes that only Nick would know – that is, if he could decode the hint and actually remember the small moment Amy was referring to.
The police find the first clue in Amy’s closet. Nick is able to figure it out pretty easily, and heads to his office at the junior college with Detective Gilpin. There, they find the next clue – as well as a pair of women’s panties. What size did Amy wear?
This clue leads to the empty house that Nick’s dad lived in before he moved into a health-care facility. But the clue he finds there proves harder to crack.
As the police continue to comb through his house for clues, and the press become more aggressive, Nick takes refuge at his sister’s home. But someone else tracks him down there as well – his mistress, Andie, who is also one of his students at the junior college. Nick’s lies begin to reveal themselves. He wasn’t at the beach drinking coffee when Amy disappeared; he was with his mistress.
As the police continue to pick at the holes in Nick’s story, there’s more disturbing news in the form of credit card statements. Apparently, Nick has multiple credit cards that are all maxed out with extravagant purchases of electronics, sports equipment, and pornography. When detectives Boney and Gilpin ask him about this, Nick can only plead ignorance.
But then comes the real bombshell: a neighbor claiming to be Amy’s best friend tells the police that Amy was pregnant. This neighbor also believes Nick killed Amy because he didn’t want her or the baby. All of this comes as a shock to Nick, who didn’t know anything about Amy having a friend – or being pregnant. The couple’s sex life had been nearly nonexistent lately, and they’d tried in-vitro fertilization in the past, but it didn’t work.
At this point, Nick is finally worried enough to hire lawyer Tanner Bolt – a high-profile defender of husbands accused of murder. While Nick hates being associated with Bolt, he knows he’s the best there is.
On the way home from his first meeting with his lawyer, Nick figures out the next clue in the treasure hunt. It leads to the woodshed behind his sister’s house. But when he opens the door to the woodshed, the world stops. It’s filled with the stuff from the credit card statements: the golf clubs, the big screen TV, the porn.
Then it hits him. The office at school, his dad’s house, the shed – these are all places he’s met and had sex with Andie. Amy knows he was cheating on her. Amy is alive. And now, Amy is taking her revenge.
A new perspective
The second part of Gone Girl starts from Amy’s perspective. But not the Amy from her diary entries – the real Amy. She describes how she cut herself to leave a pool of blood, and how she cleaned up that blood and staged the crime scene in a purposefully sloppy manner. She confirms that she spent a year carefully filling in her phony diary. She also describes inviting her pregnant neighbor over to her house for lemonade, and disabling the toilet so she could steal some of her neighbor’s urine.
Amy walks us through it all, step by step – how she spent the past year planning this elaborate crime. And we learn her motive: her anger over discovering Nick’s affair, and her general disappointment in all the ways Nick has changed over the years. He stopped being the guy she married and started being this distant, disillusioned, uncaring man.
Ultimately, she says, it was this lackluster version of Nick who killed the good version of her. He turned her into a boring suburban housewife who gets cheated on – the most insulting cliché! So why shouldn’t he be punished?
Amy confirms that she was happy once. In fact, those first two years of marriage were the happiest she’d ever been in her life. But she also tells us about the bitterness she has toward the “cool girl” myth – the fake personality women present to seem “cool” to guys. Cool girls never get angry and let guys do whatever they want. Cool girls are sexy, funny, and smart. They like beer, football, poker, video games, and dirty jokes. They’re into threesomes and anal sex. They enjoy eating hot dogs and cheeseburgers all the time – and yet are still thin.
Amy was pretending to be the cool girl because she knew it was what Nick wanted. But it wasn’t who Amy was. So now Amy’s driving off with $10,000 in cash that’s strapped to her body in a money belt. She’s chosen a quiet place in the Ozarks, where she can lay low for a while. She cuts and dyes her hair, and watches the TV coverage of her own disappearance.
One day, she sees a video that’s gone viral. A slightly drunk Nick is giving an impromptu interview to a young reporter at a bar – openly and honestly saying that he got to marry the coolest girl he ever met, and now he just wants her back. The video is working wonders at rehabilitating Nick’s reputation in the media. People are starting to feel sorry for him. Amy decides the investigation isn't moving fast enough, so she calls the anonymous tip line to help lead the police to her diary.
At the same time, Amy’s hideaway is no longer safe. Two neighbors noticed that Amy was carrying a lot of cash on her. They rob her, knowing she’s likely on the run and won’t call the police. Now, a penniless Amy needs to come up with a new plan. She decides to get in touch with a former boyfriend – a rich guy named Desi Collings who never stopped obsessing about her. Desi agrees to let Amy stay at one of his family’s cottages outside St. Louis.
In the meantime, Nick has been doing some investigating of his own. He knows that Amy had a couple unusual incidents with people she dated in the past. First, there was the man who ended up stalking her; then she was with a man who raped her. Both allegedly. After talking to these men, Nick realized both incidents were probably staged. Much like with his situation, this is how Amy got revenge after being disappointed by her former flames.
With a better understanding of Amy’s motives, Nick sees an opportunity to get his wife out of hiding. He goes on a national talk show and comes clean. He admits to being a bad husband who cheated on his wife. He confesses he’s made terrible decisions and has turned into a shadow of the man his wife married. In this interview, Nick is talking directly to Amy – he’s saying sorry and telling her to come home.
Nick can only hope that his apology reaches Amy. It becomes even more pressing when the police find Amy’s fake diary and finally arrest him. Nick is allowed out on bail. But if Amy doesn’t come out of hiding, he’ll likely be facing the death penalty.
An unsettling agreement
As it turns out, Nick’s apology works. When Amy sees it on TV, it wins her over. Nick has understood his failings and is willing to change. Plus, things are clearly not going to work out with Desi. He’s obsessive, controlling, and needy. So she comes up with a new plan: she’ll frame Desi as her kidnapper and rapist. To do this, she’ll spend a few days abusing herself with a wine bottle. Then she’ll seduce Desi, make him orgasm, kill him, escape, return home, and rescue Nick – who has clearly learned his lesson.
Later that week, Nick is at home when he suddenly hears a lot of noise coming from the press outside. Amy has driven right up to the house and emerged from the car in a bloody nightgown, with twine still dangling from her bruised wrists. After she runs into her husband’s arms, Nick quickly brings Amy inside to figure out what her new story is. When Nick learns that Amy has murdered Desi, he’s horrified.
Detective Boney also has trouble believing Amy’s story. But the press loves it, and Boney’s superiors are happy to put an end to the circus. Overcoming her captor, reuniting with her contrite husband, and getting a second chance at rebuilding their marriage – it’s exactly the kind of happy ending the press wants. And so it becomes the truth.
Over the next few months, Nick tries to figure out what to do. At first, he can’t sleep next to Amy, knowing she’s murdered an innocent man – even though Amy is effusive in explaining that she did it to save their marriage. He considers looking for a big enough hole in her story to get her arrested, and regularly meets with his sister and Detective Boney. But as time goes on, he can’t help but agree with Amy’s reasoning.
Could Nick really leave Amy? Would he be truly happy with anyone else? As Amy explains it, we all put on masks for those around us. We become different versions of ourselves. The best relationships bring out the best versions of ourselves. And to Amy, that’s what she and Nick had: they fell in love because they challenged each other to be better, funnier, more charming, and more interesting.
Nick has to admit that every other woman would probably pale in comparison to Amy. He also knows he was the best version of himself early on in their relationship. Maybe they could flourish again after all. That’s when Amy tells Nick she’d saved some of his sperm from the IVF clinic – and that she’s pregnant, for real this time. If Nick wants to be the father, he realizes, he’s going to have to play by Amy’s rules.
It’s over; the decision has been made. Nick is staying with his wife. He wants to help raise the child. And he’s going to rise to the challenge that Amy demands – to be his best, as both a husband and a father. As Amy puts it, “Unconditional love is undisciplined love, and as we’ve all seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.”
Final summary
Amy Elliott Dunne is one of the classic antagonists in modern literature. On her fifth wedding anniversary, she pulls the trigger on a plot she’s been planning for over a year and makes it look like her husband, Nick, has killed her.
The couple had been madly in love early on. But their relationship slowly disintegrated after Nick was fired from his job and they moved from New York City to Missouri to care for Nick’s ailing mom.
Resentful of the move, Nick’s loss of initiative, and his infidelity, Amy leaves a trail of clues that point to her husband as her killer. But once Nick catches on, he uses the media to communicate his apology and desire for Amy to come back.
With few options after all her money is stolen, Amy returns – after killing an ex-boyfriend to come up with a plausible story. Although he’s frightened of being married to a murderer, Nick is eventually won over by Amy’s devotion and the prospect of becoming a father.