#UTOPIA BOOK GILLIAN FLYNN SKIN#
#UTOPIA BOOK GILLIAN FLYNN SERIES#

“Most writers write because they want to either articulate things that are just under the surface, where we can all kind of connect. Thus, she explained, she rarely engages online. It’s a troubling scene, but Flynn’s message is clear: The internet isn’t innately bad, but in the wrong hands, it becomes the perfect venue for deceit and disaster. He commands them to make a fabricated story trend, and to make their comments as provocative as possible to rile the public into believing-and participating-in the narrative he wants to construct. In it, a cocksure antagonist gathers an army of social-media users into a room with phrases like goals, woke, and good vibes only decorating the walls. That said, there’s one scene in Utopia that’s telling of Flynn’s perspective. “Social media is designed to reward big feelings, sweeping statements and the like,” she wrote over email. I later asked her if she had any specific examples in mind of such offended, viral posts. “It’s not the 150 words of a well-crafted, nuanced thought process that’s going to go viral,” Flynn explained. Online, “some people are still making an art form out of taking offense”-as in, chasing virality by forming reactionary takes, a practice Flynn considers more destructive than instructive. Look at social media, for instance, she pointed out. “We’re all a little suspicious of each other.” She’s 49 now, and told me the thoughts that keep her up at night are about how facts have become as unreliable as her narrators, warped by the spread of disinformation in the age of “ alternative facts.” “You go online and you’re not sure what the truth is, and there are entire humans and industries that go toward swaying you toward the wrong set of facts and information,” she said. That gut feeling these days? A mixture of unease and distrust, not about relationships, but about the future. She merely followed an impulse that came from, as she put it, “a feeling in my belly.” As a newlywed and mom-to-be in her 30s, she’d been thinking about marriage, which inspired her to untangle the dynamics of a committed relationship. When she wrote Gone Girl, she explained to me, she wasn’t trying to be the voice of a generation of women. Still, Flynn hasn’t thought about Cool Girl and all she wrought in a long time.

#UTOPIA BOOK GILLIAN FLYNN SERIES#

Traces of the tale’s DNA can be found in subsequent page-turners like The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window, films like A Simple Favor, and TV series like Killing Eve.

Nick and Amy Dunne, the toxic couple at the story’s center, paved the way for a new literary genre, the “domestic thriller.” Amy’s monologue about being a “ Cool Girl,” a scathing passage about how she conforms to being the degrading, compliant version of women men often desire, captured something in the feminist zeitgeist, launching countless thinkpieces and critical essays. Her reputation as the writer of Gone Girl precedes her the novel, with its acute observations about gender roles, struck a nerve when it was released in the summer of 2012. My oeuvre and my career.”įlynn was being self-deprecating, but her pivot to adapting a British conspiracy thriller is a mystery worthy of interrogation. “My oeuvre, yes,” she interjected, laughing, as we talked over Zoom in early September. The drama, with its global scale and sprawling narrative, doesn’t exactly scream “Gillian Flynn.” What made the novelist and screenwriter want to add Utopia-a remake of a British cult hit-to her oeuvre? So Flynn fans might be surprised to find that Utopia, her new Amazon series, follows an ensemble of conspiracy theorists who seek a comic book they believe predicts the future.

“Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark.” And in Dark Places, Libby, the lone survivor of a massacre, admits her rotten core on the first page: “I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ,” she narrates. In Gone Girl, the best seller that catapulted Flynn to literary fame, the psychopathic Amy’s displeasure with her husband curdles into cruel mind games.

#UTOPIA BOOK GILLIAN FLYNN SKIN#

In Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, the journalist Camille directs her pain inward, slicing words into her skin and reducing herself to scars. Gillian Flynn has a penchant for writing angry women, women who become so paralyzed by their circumstances and suffocated by expectations, they’re driven to madness or something like it. With her new series, Flynn wants to help pop culture catch up to reality.

Utopia book gillian flynn