Book Review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn | Summary and Life Lessons

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

In the deepest recesses of our brain lurks a noodle-shaped city. Within this noodle city, scurry our thoughts, shuffling through the brain coils like frantic centipedes. It’s a dark place. Nobody knows what goes on inside there. Whether monsters lurch or angels dance, nobody can tell. We can only feel the distant vibrations of the whispers and echoes rising out of this dark place. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn takes us on a peregrination through this dark place with the cue of a story – the story of a husband and wife, both of them close to psychotic, in fact not close but totally psychotic.

On the day of their fifth anniversary, the wife Amy disappears all of a sudden from their house and police is brought into picture. Upon several investigations, the clues, most of them, point towards Nick, the husband, as the suspect behind her disappearance. Blotches of blood that were wiped off by someone, were discovered in their kitchen, as well as some other clues such as Amy’s diary, colossal-amounting credit-card bills, a woodshed with the things bought from the credit cards and more likewise.

Nick’s life becomes miserable as all cameras flash at him, sloshing him with negative limelight and asking him the recurring question, “Where is Amy?” To this, he doesn’t seem to have any answer. But as chapters unfold, he too accepts his guilty over certain aspects of their marriage. For example, he admits being in a secret affair with a woman named Andie, one of his young students. But despite admitting everything he might have been guilty for, his mind becomes kerfuffled with the way the clues uncover and make him the culprit of his wife’s disappearance-slash-murder.

With some more hints that Nick discovered privately, he became certain that his wife Amy had been framing him. Upon digging deeper and further, his belief that Amy is a total psychopath, becomes stronger and stronger. On the flip side, Amy is depicted to be escaping her house with a sharp plan. Apparently, she had been outlining this plan for the past year, meticulously planning every detail and every move, scruplously placing all the clues in their respective positions where they will be found by the police and prove Nick as a suspect of her disappearance.

The twist of fate comes when Amy loses all her money to two goons who pretended to be her friends and robbed her of all cash. She then calls support by secretly calling one of her school friends Desi, who gets fooled by her pitiful words and takes her into shelter in his luxurious lakehouse. However, there too, Amy feels nearly imprisoned and having no freedom of her own. So she makes another plan. She kills Desi, abuses herself to make it look that Desi abused her and then returns to Nick with this storyline.

Nick understands that she is lying and is actually a criminal. He asks her for divorce. But before he does, Amy already tells him that she is pregnant. She threatens him to drop his desire for separation, otherwise she will turn his own child against him. In the end, both of them make a mutual pact. They spend the rest of the lives together with each other, believing that their projected versions of each other were true, and denying the real versions of each other.

The story epitomizes a smorgasboard of insights and life lessons. Here are 10 insights I learned from the reading of this book.

1. Although we have a deep urge to see the real versions of others, but in most cases, if we could really see their real selves, we would end up hating them.
2. Public appearances matter.
3. Appearances are superficial in nature.
4. Life can take a twist any moment.
5. Relationships are delicate bonds. Handle carefully.
6. Trust your instincts but don’t believe your feelings.
7. All the people who we come across in our life, we wear their characters as costumes in our psyche.
8. A psychopath never changes. Only promises to change.
9. Lying to oneself and others doesn’t change the reality of who we are, what we did and what we are doing.
10. Don’t try to be the “Cool Girl” or the “Nice Boy”. Trying to please others only makes things complicated in the end. Just be yourself!

Wrapping up the review, I’d say, give it a read and immerse yourself in its mystery and thrill. This mystery-thriller is 588-pages long and written in the form of chapters alternating between Nick’s dialogue and Amy’s diary entries. The book murmurs like a hallucination and echoes like the whispery rustle of the nighttime leaves, long after I have finished it. At the same time, it is slightly creepy and snarly to the inner self, not forgetting the entanglement of psychological games and tendencies prowling in our heads like some secretive jerks.

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Choose Your Words Wisely | Podcast #29 by Neha's Notebook | Poetry

A word is a door. Behind each word is a world, one beautiful than the other, full of magic, miracles, charm and wonder. As a word is uttered, it opens a door in the space of the mind, and this door leads to a land full of possibilities. Sometimes it leads to a painful moment of the past while sometimes, it opens into a wonderland of future.

The human mind is a container of zillions of such words, each locked in their little-little caskets, jingling like crystals, and producing the music of assorted thoughts. When one of these little containers is stirred or triggered with our attention, it crackles open into another world, a new world is spun for us to witness, feel and experience. Sometimes a memory, sometimes a song, a book, a fantasy, a dream.

Words are also malleable goldlike constellations shimmering in the galaxy of our minds, waiting to shapeshift into a new form. Words are treasure, each one similar to a gemstone, a bead, a pearl, a jewel. Like treasures and jewels, words can embellish, adorn, colour and decorate our minds.

Words are catalysts and accelerators for our transformation too. Sometime they can lead us to open the door of a fresh perspective, a positive growth mindset, a healing emotion, or likewise.

A word is an image. Each image corresponds to some of our memory or experience. Therefore, each word is a doorway into the past and future, into both the land of gold and the land of ghosts. A word can turn out to be an arrow or a mesmerising flower, a flavour or a majestic tower.

Words can hurt and words can heal. Words can come out of anger or words can come out of love.

So, choose your words wisely.

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Success, failure and temporary feelings | Podcast #28 by Neha's Notebook

Failure is a Pandora’s box. It makes you feel pathetic. It makes you feel like you are a nobody. But success too is equally a pandora’s box. Success is a complicated thing. Once you succeed, you get to think, “Phew, now I am somebody!” After all the effort and the work you put into something, you finally have that moment. But the moment you think you are somebody, the world hits on your chest with a hammer telling you that no, you are not a somebody. You are a nobody. Often, this hitting comes in the form of comparison. You get to see someone else who is doing far better than you. You thought that you have arrived somewhere but as you look outwards you feel that you are back to the drawing board.

And then you begin again, in a race to reach the point when you will again get to feel that you are a somebody. From somebody to nobody, from nobody to somebody, we are always spinning in this circle of time. When we observe this circle of time occuring inside us, it becomes easier to step out of it, and understand that both of these feelings, high and low, are simply parts of a process of life – a process of becoming better, of becoming wiser, of rising beyond temporary feelings and of keep going.  

Am I a somebody or am I a nobody? It’s just a matter of time. Otherwise, I am none of these. Its only my thinking that makes me a somebody at one point and a nobody at the other point of time.

If you allow people and comparisons to determine how you should feel about yourself then you will end up living an unsatisfactory, discontended and unhappy life. Whether you feel like a somebody or a nobody, remember that it’s just a matter of time. Both of these are temporary feelings and soon enough they will dissolve back into the space. But when they go, they leave us with a sense of re-understanding of our identity, which is more than a person or an individual flitting through the space-time. Remember, feelings are simply visitors, let them come as they come and let them go as they go. Understanding this enables us to manage these emotions.

The reality is that, you are not as bad as you think you are when you have failed, and you are not as good as you think you are when you have succeeded.

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There is no substitute of hard work | Podcast #27 by Neha's Notebook

HARD WORK, SMART WORK AND BEING EASY ON YOURSELF

Look at the artists. How meticulously they doodle each flower and each dot to create beautiful, enchanted and picturesque worlds. Look at the Bollywood superstars. How they dedicate themselves to immersing into their characters by working day and night. Talk about programmers, who spend night after night coding everything from awesome video games to the mechanisms of our microwaves. Look at writers, who rework and rework their pieces until they read perfect. There, literally, is no substitute for hard work.

On the flip side, when we think about smart work, smart work is actually a mutual of hard work, and not an alternative. Smartness is a skill we can use to provide boundary to our hard work. Smart work is something that is required in managing daily to-dos and juggling multiple projects. But it is not exclusive or a substitute of hard work. Smart work doesn’t mean going lazy on the details of our work. Smart work is required in the process of managing the hard work the right way so we don’t get burned out. But hard work is something that has no shortcuts. It is true that some jobs do require more thinking than more doing, but most jobs, especially the creative ones, require the quality of hard work. Mostly, what needs to be done, needs to be done. And it’s always good for us if we give our best in whatever we work we do. Hard work refines our character from the inside out; it polishes our penchants and prepares us to share our innermost gifts in the best possible way.

However, at the same time, hardwork doesn’t have to be too effortful. it can be effortless like nature. Lao Tzu said that, "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." Hard work doesn’t mean being anxious or stressed or overwhelmed. Put a pinch of smartness into it, and you’ll find that physical exhaustion actually feels good if it ends in joy. And do remember to put love in everything you do. So much so that hard work doesn’t feel hard at all.

But by any means hardwork doesn’t mean being hard on yourself. Have a good night’s sleep. Eat good food. Relax. Enjoy and have leisure time. And master the art of smart work the way working moms do. Work hard, but manage it the smart way. You can only work hard if your body and mind are functioning at their greatest capacity, and they work at their greatest capacity when you are absolutely easy on yourself.

Working hard is not an oldtimer, orthodox concept or something that needs to be changed. One doesn’t need to choose between hard work and smart work. Both of these are required for the proper functioning of an individual’s routine. Working hard and managing smart is one of the best possible ways to accomplish your daily tasks.

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