She is currently writing her fourth novel; it is set to be published by Penguin Random House.
Early life and education
Flynn was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in midtown Kansas City's Coleman Highlands neighborhood.[8][9] Both of her parents were professors at Metropolitan Community College–Penn Valley: her mother, Judith Ann (née Schieber), was a reading-comprehension professor, and her father, Edwin Matthew Flynn, was a film professor.[9][10][11][12] She has an older brother, Travis, who is a railroad machinist.[9] Her uncle is Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Robert Schieber.[9] Flynn was "painfully shy" and found escape in reading and writing.[9] When she was growing up, Flynn's father would take her to watch horror movies.[9][10]
Flynn attended Bishop Miege High School and graduated in 1989.[9][13] As a young woman, she worked odd jobs which required her to do things such as dress up as a giant "yogurt cone who wore a tuxedo."[13][14]
She attended the University of Kansas, where she received her undergraduate degrees in English and journalism.[14] She spent two years in California, writing at a trade magazine for human resources professionals, before moving to Chicago and attending Northwestern University[13] for a master's degree at its Medill School of Journalism in 1997.[15][16] Flynn initially wanted to work as a police reporter, but she chose to focus on her own writing, as she discovered she had "no aptitude" for police reporting.[17][18]
She attributes her craft to her 15-some years in journalism. She said, "I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious."[21]
Some critics have accused Flynn of misogyny due to the often unflattering depiction of female characters in her books.[5] Flynn identifies as a feminist. She feels that feminism allows for women to be bad characters in literature. She states, "The one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing." Flynn also said people will dismiss "trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad, and selfish."[5] In 2015, Flynn explained her decision to write cruel female characters, saying, "I've grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains – good, potent female villains."[22]
In 2021, it was announced that Flynn would be running a book imprint for the newly founded independent publisher Zando.[23][24]
Books
When Flynn was working for Entertainment Weekly, she was also writing novels during her free time.[11] She has written three novels and one short story.
Gone Girl (2012) was released in June 2012 and concerns Nick Dunne, a small town Missouricreative writing professor whose wife, Amy, disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary. Gone Girl was No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list for eight weeks.[32] Culture writer Dave Itzkoff wrote that the novel was, except for the Fifty Shades trilogy, the biggest literary phenomenon of 2012. By the end of that year, Gone Girl had sold over two million copies in print and digital editions, according to the book's publisher.[32] Flynn wrote the script for a film adaptation of Gone Girl after 20th Century Fox purchased the film rights for $1.5 million.[33] The film was directed by David Fincher, who also collaborated with Flynn on the screenplay, and starred Ben Affleck as Nick and Rosamund Pike as Amy[34] and was released on October 3, 2014, to both critical acclaim and box office success.
The Grownup (2015) was originally published as a short story in the 2014 anthology Rogues, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, under the title "What Do You Do?". The story is about a sex worker who becomes a fake psychic and aura reader, and is then hired by a woman with a failing marriage and a disturbing stepson to purify her Victorian home. The story won the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Short Story.[35]
Comic book
Flynn was an avid reader of comic and graphic novels when she was a child.[36] She collaborated with illustrator Dave Gibbons and wrote a comic book story called Masks. It is part of the anthology series Dark Horse Presents and was published by Dark Horse Comics in February 2015.[37]
Television writing
Flynn was executive producer and cowriter, along with Marti Noxon, on the HBOadaptation of her novel Sharp Objects starring Amy Adams.[38] The miniseries was released in 2018 and received critical acclaim.
In February 2014, it was reported that Flynn would be writing the scripts for Utopia, an HBO drama series adapted from the acclaimed British series Utopia. The HBO series was to be directed and executive produced by David Fincher. In July 2015 the project was cancelled due to budget disputes between Fincher and HBO.[39][40] However, the project received second life at Amazon, with the streamer ordering the project to series with a 2020 release. Flynn wrote all eight episodes and served as the project's showrunner. Utopia was released on Amazon Prime Video on September 25, 2020.[41] In November 2020, the series was canceled after one season.[42]
She is currently writing her fourth novel; it is set to be published by Penguin Random House.[44]
Flynn is currently writing the film adaptation for her short story The Grownup, as she discussed in the Chanel Connects podcast in June 2022.[45]
In January 2024, Variety reported that Flynn is developing a limited series for HBO based on her novel Dark Places. She will serve as co-creator, writer, and co-showrunner. She holds the rights to the novel. Brett Johnson and Guerrin Gardner will also serve as co-showrunners, co-creators, and writers.[46]
Flynn married lawyer Brett Nolan in 2007.[48] They met during graduate school at Northwestern,[49] and began a relationship in their thirties.[21] They have two children.[11][50] Their son Flynn was born in 2010 and their daughter Veronica was born in 2014.[51] They reside in Chicago.[5][52]
"Gillian Flynn: A Howl". Time. Ideas. Dec 6, 2017. The outrages and allegations flash through my brain like a nasty, ludicrous slide show of twisted male power.
"Be kind to people dressed as food ("Costume drama")". The New Yorker. Work for Hire. Oct 10, 2016. p. 78. In the late eighties, my job involved going out in public dressed as a tuxedoed dairy product. Children ran from me.
"I Was Not a Nice Little Girl". Powell's Books. Jul 17, 2015. I was not a nice little girl. My favorite summertime hobby was stunning ants and feeding them to spiders. My preferred indoor diversion was a game called Mean Aunt Rosie, in which I pretended to be a witchy caregiver and my cousins tried to escape me.
Stratton, Beth. "Altering the Hypermasculine through the Feminine: Female Masculinity in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl." Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 38, no. 1, 2020, pp. 19–27.