A
LSO BY
G
ILLIAN
F
LYNN
Dark Places
Sharp Objects
This author is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at rhspeakers@randomhouse.comor (212) 572-2013.
http://www.rhspeakers.com/
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Gillian Flynn
Excerpt from “Dark Places” copyright © 2009 by Gillian Flynn
Excerpt from “Sharp Objects” copyright © 2006 by Gillian Flynn
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flynn, Gillian, 1971–
Gone girl : a novel / Gillian Flynn.
p. cm.
1. Husbands—Fiction. 2. Married people—Fiction. 3. Wives—Crimes against—Fiction. I. Title. PS3606.L935G66 2012
813’.6—dc23 2011041525
eISBN: 978-0-307-58838-8
JACKET DESIGN BY DARREN HAGGAR
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY BERND OTT
v3.1_r5
To Brett: light of my life, senior
and
Flynn: light of my life, junior
Love is the world’s infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.
—Tony Kushner, THE ILLUSION
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Boy Loses Girl
Nick Dunne: The Day of
Amy Elliott: January 8, 2005
Nick Dunne: The Day of
Amy Elliott: September 18, 2005
Nick Dunne: The Day of
Amy Elliott Dunne: July 5, 2008
Nick Dunne: The Night of
Amy Elliott Dunne: April 21, 2009
Nick Dunne: One Day Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: July 5, 2010
Nick Dunne: One Day Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: August 23, 2010
Nick Dunne: Two Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: September 15, 2010
Nick Dunne: Three Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: October 16, 2010
Nick Dunne: Four Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: April 28, 2011
Nick Dunne: Four Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: July 21, 2011
Nick Dunne: Five Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: August 17, 2011
Nick Dunne: Five Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: October 21, 2011
Nick Dunne: Six Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: February 15, 2012
Nick Dunne: Six Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: June 26, 2012
Nick Dunne: Seven Days Gone
Part Two: Boy Meets Girl
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Day of
Nick Dunne: Seven Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Day of
Nick Dunne: Seven Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Five Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Eight Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Seven Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Eight Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Eight Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Eight Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Nine Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Nine Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Nine Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Ten Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Ten Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Ten Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Ten Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Ten Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Eleven Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Fourteen Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Twenty-six Days Gone
Nick Dunne: Thirty-three Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Forty Days Gone
Part Three: Boy Gets Girl Back (Or Vice Versa)
Nick Dunne: Forty Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Night of the Return
Nick Dunne: The Night of the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Night of the Return
Nick Dunne: The Night of the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Five Days After the Return
Nick Dunne: Thirty Days After the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Eight Weeks After the Return
Nick Dunne: Nine Weeks After the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Ten Weeks After the Return
Nick Dunne: Twenty Weeks After the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Ten Months, Two Weeks, Six Days After the Return
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Excerpt from Sharp Objects
Excerpt from Dark Places
part one BOY LOSES GIRL
NICK DUNNE
THE DAY OF
When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head . You could imagine the skull quite easily.
I’d know her head anywhere.
And what’s inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? The question I’ve asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?
My eyes flipped open at exactly six A.M. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said—in my face, first thing I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless.
At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen .
I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house, which we still called the new house , even though we’d been back here for two years. It’s a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would—and did—detest.
“Should I remove my soul before I come inside?” Her first line upon arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri hometown, in her firm hope that we wouldn’t be stuck here long. But the only houses for rent were clustered in this failed development: a miniature ghost town of bank-owned, recession-busted, price-reduced mansions, a neighborhood that closed before it ever opened. It was a compromise, but Amy didn’t see it that way, not in the least. To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife. I would drag her, caveman-style, to a town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live in the kind of house she used to mock. I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us was always angry. Amy, usually.
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