Gone Girl by Gillian FlynnIn 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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