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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A Sweet Love Note About Life! | Neha's Notebook

Upon capturing a billion years of crazy experience in my notebooks, I am writing this sweet love note to you. I have not written it before because I have been wondering if you would even read it. It’d be useless to me if you wouldn’t ever read this note. I am writing this only and only for you after all. But at last I gathered enough insanity to express my heart out, and in case you too feel the same in your heart, you’ll surely like reading my thoughts. So let me begin by telling you how I have been feeling lately. Lately, I have been feeling that I am living in a video game, as if I am a character in some video game. I am constantly chasing some goal or milestone. But sometimes I also allow myself to relax, destress and just enjoy my life. For instance, by having a cup of hot coffee, by eating a chocolate, by taking a long walk in the park, by dancing and listening to music, by doing some fun activity that I used to do when I was not this old and grown up, activities like coloring, art journal, doodling and writing poetry.

During the evenings, while I am relishing the roaring orange-crimson sunset, I often feel like I am in love. As if I want to tell somebody I love the most that I like it when I catch them looking at me. And whoever, whatever I am, in this moment, I am completely theirs to own. I am saying this because I think that someone is not a true lover unless they are a lover forever and all the time. And therefore, I aspire to be in love all the time throughout my life, just like these pretty sunsets and like the poetry of Rumi and like the paintings of Van Gogh and like the tunes of Beethoven and like the lyrics of Gulzar. I feel it all nowadays, to tell you the truth. But most of the time I have been too scared to write to you all this. Once upon a time, I even wrote a letter to you but I ended up putting it in a glass bottle and letting a river float it away wherever it would. That kind of a person I have been, most of the time in my life. It is only now that I am learning to be fearless enough to tell you about my feelings.

Feelings and emotions are beautiful. The giftbox of feelings and emotions makes our life colourful. But so far so long, I have also learned that although we should embrace our feelings but we shouldn’t let these feelings drive our actions and habits. While we remain encapsulated with everyday mortal coils and the webs of humanly conflicts, we should carry the mountain of reason and understanding with us whereever we go, no matter how uncomfortable or restricting it may feel to us. Because my feelings mostly tell me that I don’t want to get up from my sleep in the cosy blanket, and I don’t want to eat healthy foods and I don’t want to go to the park, and all. So, that’s the reason I think reason is important too.

At the same time, you know, reason is not at all about practicality. I see that people talk about practicality all the time, but I have learned that practicality is often a disguise for extreme boredom. As we pop out of the toaster of life and become an adult, we stop believing in things like excitement, fun, and wonderful dreams that appear unrealistic. The idea of practicality is practically taught to us so we become too less practical actually. But I have also learned that we should embrace our boredom when it strikes, and also the feelings of blankness we feel when we feel like grieving about something. If you think about it, you will agree with me that life is full of grief. Grief over what someone said to us, all the words that hurt us, and all the disappointments and failures and heartbreaks we could never get over with.

Another thing I wanted to tell you in this note is that I feel that life is utterly, magnanimously, flamboyantly beautiful. Just look at all these birds flying from their nests towards the sky, the green-green leaves rustling and swinging merrily with the breeze, the trees standing tall and proud, the soil and mud smudged on playing kids’ dresses, the glitter dripping from the nightsky, the luminous gold outpouring from the sunshine, the blend of aromas scurrying from the hot kitchens, the smell of the fresh polish, the laughters on the faces of the loved ones, and all things like that.

To tell you the truth, I totally get it what Helen Keller said in this quote of hers, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” That’s true, dear friend.

Apart from these ponderings about feelings and emotions, I have been lately feeling an extreme love for words. Words, words, so many words! Call me a logophile, if you think. Words, to me, are like crystals and diamonds and sequins and gems and trinkets that I use to embellish and decorate my writing. Like favourite foods, words seem to endow me with utter pleasure.

By saying this, what I really wanted to tell you is that if you are crazy about something in your life, then by all means chase this craziness. Just like I am crazy about feelings and words and foods, you too must be crazy about something. So, I want to tell you that just keep being crazy. Do not ever let your craziness go away just because someone tells you that it’s bad or improper to be crazy. Do not put salt on your own wounds, my friend. Keep being crazy, and keep being in love. I will now end my note with this message, and promise you that I will write more love notes like this, for you. Do tell me if you liked it. And should you want to tell me about something you feel, do not hesitate to write a sweet love note for me. Writing that will make you feel good too, trust me!

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Creativity is in Little Things | Podcast #26 by Neha's Notebook

Birds flitting through the sky like thoughts through the mind.

The texture of the bark of a tree.

The variety of people walking all around like different voices of the heart.

What can be more creative than this?

Sometimes it happens that we look for big ideas and complex insights that we forget to pay attention to the little things that make life beautiful.

We often look at these little things when we are in the phase of life where everything is going low, when everything seems to be going against us. Herein, these little things are our sole comfort.

But even otherwise also, creativity is in the small moments, in little things.

Kurt Vonnegut says, “Enjoy the little things in life because one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things.”

There are electric bhoots dangling in our mind stream like glittery disco balls. They make us feel happy, excited, worried or ecstatic. These are our emotionally-charged thoughts. These thoughts drive us into momentum to live our life. These sparky thoughts are often made up of the little moments we have experienced in our lives over and over, and that have made us feel good.

As we grow old, many of us go on towards chasing the lifestyle of ‘Quiet luxury’. While Quiet Luxury promotes following trendy styles and celebrity lifestyles, there is another kind of lifestyle called ‘Hygge’ that promotes cosiness, contentment and comfort that comes from enjoying the little moments. And contentment too is a luxury, isn’t it so?

Thich Nhat Hanh says that, "There is no way to happiness - happiness is the way."

Remember how even these little moments are created when big universes come together in congruence. The experience of this moment is not an ordinary thing, it is a finely-designed, mathematical and cosmic happening. Alan Watts captured the intensity of this in a quote.

“How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.”

What appears little is not that little. It is matter of utter significance, magnitude and pleasure.

How then can you enjoy the little moments?

Well, for instance, there is a Swedish custom called Fika. In this custom, people sit together to relish their daily cup of coffee with cookies and cakes. So, enjoy coffee and cookies first of all.

Let go of grief from the hurtful moments of the past.

Appreciate yourself for tiny-tiny things even if it appears crazy.

Thank or compliment someone.

Turn off your comparative mind. Just switch it off if you want to be happy.

Make a list of things that make you feel soothing, restful and excited. Then do them.

Celebrate small achievements. 

Focus on the positive (Literally!) 

Live each moment as if you’re in a constant meditation.

Take long walks in the park.

Feel cold breeze flapping and notice sounds of the birds and people. Colours and shapes and smells.

Make your loved ones laugh.

Laugh at yourself.

Have snacks and treats with loved ones.

Listen to your favourite music.

Cook a meal.

Art journal, color and scrapbook.

Practice externalisation of hurtful situations. 

Indulge in catharsis by watching an emotional movie.

Put gasoline of passion on the work you put in accomplishing your deepest desires. Set your heart on fire.

So, be cool, intense and restful!

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The Meaning of Life | Podcast #25 by Neha's Notebook

Life is only as meaningful as it is meaningless.

We laugh, we cry.

Storing our own potions of happiness in our hearts,

Blinking only when a warm salty tear rolls down our cheeks to make us pause and reflect,

What this is really all about?

A game, a dream, a delusion

But if it is an illusion, no one can deny that it is such a magnetic illusion

This world,

It gravitates our emotions towards itself

Its glitz and glamour,

Still, there is a glitch scurrying in this glitz

The scent of which,

Pours through our body and mind,

Like glittery molecules of chemicals streaming and swirling around in our bloodstream,

Making us feel happy, hungry, melancholic or puzzled.

The glitch is our shadow.

We live amongst shadows and walk among shadows.

Shadows, who are squirreled in the deepest recesses of our mind and who sleepwalk their way through life, 

Thinking "only if"...

So prefer not be a shadow.

Choose to be a sparkling ball of starlight.

Choose to be happy.

Smiles are in fashion, but happiness is rare.

Therefore, be the rare one. 

Like unread fiction books inviting you to give them a read, your mind calls you to reflect upon it.

There are mirrors all around who showcase for us what we need to pay attention to, the most, 

Only if we're willing to see through the illusion.

People are always supporting us even when they appear to be doing otherwise. 

Yet amidst this dreamworld, there are moments of comfort…

The chirping of blue-brown birds.

Flaring bonfires.

Clinking and clanking of utensils in the kitchen.

Numbing wintery cold freezing everything as if a chunk of the glacial ice.

Hot summer afternoons and books of notes and chronicles.

Cups of coffee and tables of breads and biscuits. 

A solace to cherish! 

There are bunkums of noise outside,

But there's also a center of stillness inside.

Arrive at this center and be restful. 

Herein sits the poetry of love.

Like a pearl in an oyster, 

An oyster, like which, we humans live layered with labyrinths of mysteries…

Mysteries, the clues to whose solutions, are there in front of our eyes but we lie to ourselves in order to believe that they are not true.

Perhaps because we think we won't be able to bear the reality if we believed that they are really true.

Unlike a geometry theorem in mathematics, any insight about life cannot really be deducted to ‘Hence, proved.’

Because life always challenges our notions and what we know about it from our intellect and experience.

The sole meaning of life is to live it.

Beauty and love and colors. The search for the truth. And should life have another meaning, apart from being lived, then there is a treasure waiting for us at the end of the rainbow of emotions.

So, never give up.

The meaning of life is to live and to never give up on this living.

Talking about the meaning of life, the Pulitzer-prize winning author Annie Dillard says, “We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.”

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