Story Skeleton—Gone Girl

By Michelle Barker

Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. Our ongoing exploration now delves into mysteries, illustrating yet again the universality of story structure, albeit from a different angle.

Is it a Mystery, or…?

When it comes to mystery, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a genre-buster. The novel is presented in three parts, and each uses a different genre as a narrative mode. The first is a combination of mystery and the epistolary device of a diary; the second is a thriller; the third is psychological suspense. Ultimately the book is categorized as a psychological thriller, but the mystery elements play an important role in how the story is told.

When Nick Dunne’s wife Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick quickly becomes the prime suspect. Flynn uses a mystery structure to make the reader believe a crime has been committed. Amy’s diary entries describe a marriage on the rocks, and Nick proves himself an unreliable narrator with a motive. But at midpoint we discover (spoiler alert) that Amy is still alive. The threat is reframed, and suddenly what was a mystery is now a thriller. Amy hides out to watch her careful plan of destroying Nick come to fruition… until all her money is stolen and she must rely on an old boyfriend to save her. When he turns out to be as unstable as she is, she murders him to get away, blames the whole abduction on him, and returns to Nick who is awaiting trial. Here the novel shifts gears again, this time into psychological and emotional blackmail. The charges are dropped, and though Nick wants a divorce, Amy refuses, and he has no choice but to stay with her. Her final act—getting pregnant—traps him into unhappily-ever-after. 

In the first section of the book, the two POVs operate on different timelines. Nick’s is organized around the investigation into Amy’s disappearance, while Amy’s is comprised of diary entries beginning when she first met him—essentially filling in the backstory. What we will eventually find out, however, is that it’s all made up. The diary plays a key part in Amy’s attempt to ruin Nick.

At midpoint the mystery is solved and the thriller takes over. Both POVs are now in the same timeline but the roles are reversed. Nick goes from being the antagonist to being a victim. Amy goes from being the (pretend) victim to being the antagonist. The novel ends up being a tragedy for Nick, who does eventually emerge as the protagonist. Throughout, he attempts to save himself, and in the end he fails.

Gone Girl is a great novel to study for the mystery/thriller dichotomy alone, but it’s also useful for anyone who wants to craft a strong midpoint reversal or use an unreliable narrator. Flynn is a master at shifting reader sympathy. She manages to make the reader hate both narrators and yet at times also sympathize with them both. But mostly hate them. Proving the point that a protagonist does not have to be likable; they just have to be interesting.

Nick’s Plot Points

The Initial Puzzle

Since the novel begins on the day Amy disappears, Nick’s stasis is short. Two years prior, he and Amy had to relocate from New York to his hometown of North Carthage, Missouri—adding to the already fraught situation of them both losing their jobs and Nick’s parents being sick. Making the best of a bad situation, Nick and his twin sister Go bought a bar with money they borrowed from Amy’s trust fund.

The opening is littered with red herrings suggesting Nick is guilty before we even know a crime has been committed. Nick thinks of Amy’s skull, dreads seeing her, arrives at the bar stressed and needing a drink.

The day of Amy’s disappearance also happens to be their fifth wedding anniversary, which is significant because of the treasure hunts she orchestrates every year that lead to his gift, and which Nick consistently bungles because the clues are so obscure.

The inciting incident is a phone call to the bar:  the front door to Nick and Amy’s house is wide open and the cat is out. Nick comes home to find the iron on, glass on the carpet, the living room in disarray, and Amy gone.

By the end of that first day, he lets us know he has told the police eleven lies, and though we don’t know what he’s lied about, we do know one thing: we can’t trust him. Flynn does everything she can to give us a character we don’t want to like. When the police tell him he can go home, he goes to see his sister because all he wants is “a woman to fix me a sandwich and not ask me any questions.” He’s basically a card-carrying member of the Manosphere.

The Detective and His Methods

While there are two detectives on the case (Gilpin and Boney), when they find Amy’s anniversary treasure hunt, it’s Nick who emerges as the amateur sleuth. There’s no way the detectives could know the private jokes referenced in the clues, but more importantly, when the first clue leads to an unexpected pair of women’s underwear, Nick understands this will be a treasure hunt best solved alone. This becomes the case accepted plot point, driving his rising action as he uses what he knows about Amy and their relationship to track down the rest of the clues.

Gathering Evidence

Four clues are hidden at four locations along with four pieces of incriminating evidence—and now Nick’s presence is confirmed at each one. Four suspects emerge (besides Nick): a high school stalker, an obsessive ex-boyfriend, a group of squatters in the abandoned mall, and a man accused of raping Amy though the charges were dropped. But the more interesting structural function of this section is how Flynn uses contradiction to erode our trust in Nick. A neighbour claims to be Amy's close friend; Nick says they barely knew each other. Amy was apparently pregnant; Nick says she didn't want children. The credit card debt Nick denies appears in Amy's diary. Because we know Nick has already lied, and because a diary implies truth, Flynn tilts us toward Amy—which is exactly the trap.

The Prime Suspect: Nick

In an excellent turning point, we find out Nick is having an affair with Andie, one of his journalism students who is significantly younger than him. It explains his missing alibi and gives him a motive. It also reframes every prior scene: the inappropriate smiles, his lack of emotion, the burner phone. He is now a fully credible suspect.

As a plot point, Andie not only ratchets up the tension in terms of keeping the relationship a secret, she also changes how we view Nick. He has cheated on his wife and hasn’t been forthcoming with us about it. The reader doesn’t trust anything he does.

It then comes out that Amy was pregnant, turning public opinion even more against Nick. Andie gets clingy and Nick realizes it’s time to get a lawyer. He hires Tanner Bolt—a notorious defender of men accused of murdering their wives—who insists Nick cut all ties with Andie, but when he tries to do this, she bites him on the cheek.

The Treasure Hunt: Case Solved / (Best) Midpoint Reversal (Ever)

Amy promises a “big surprise” for the treasure hunt and she’s not kidding. First of all, she’s alive and this whole thing has been a setup. Usually Nick is hopeless at solving these treasure hunts, but Amy designed this one to make sure he succeeds. The previous treasure hunts referenced places that were memorable for Nick and Amy. This one references places where Nick and Andie had sex—confirming she knew about the affair all along.

Second: the woodshed is full of goods bought on Nick’s (fake) credit cards, along with Punch and Judy marionettes. “That's the way to do it,” was Punch’s (ahem) punchline every time he got away with murder. This time, the person getting away with it is Amy. The mystery has suddenly become a thriller. Instead of focusing on what might have happened in the past, the reader now becomes engaged in what will happen next. Will Nick outsmart her? Will Amy get caught? Or will he go down for her abduction and possibly murder?

Flynn uses mystery conventions to make us believe Amy is genuinely missing, Plus, the diary form—a format we associate with confessional truth—turns out to be pure fabrication, crafted for the police to find. The he-said-she-said narrative forms a great lesson for authors in how to sow doubt in the reader’s mind.

Rising Action

Part Two of the novel brings us Amy in the present tense and, in an Agatha-Christie-style reveal, we get the resolution of the mystery as she tells us what she’s done. Nick’s narrative goal shifts. In order to keep himself out of prison, he must now predict what Amy thinks he will do in order to do the opposite. He also must use what he knows about her to find her.

Nick lands a television interview where he confesses to the affair with Andie in an attempt to repair his image and lure Amy home. But Nick’s dark night happens shortly afterwards: the police find the woodshed, Go is taken to the police station, and the diary surfaces with references to antifreeze poisoning and implied assault. The thing he cares about most—his relationship with Go—seems damaged beyond repair. Nick is damned no matter what happens: heads he gets the death penalty for Amy’s murder; tails she comes home and he gets stuck with her forever.

Climax and Resolution

In the climax (Part Three of the novel), Amy shows up at Nick’s door bloodied and battered—all self-inflicted—with a story pinning everything on the old obsessive boyfriend, Desi. The reunion happens in front of the cameras, but the real confrontation comes in private when she tells Nick what happened (she drugged Desi and killed him, and made it look like he’d abducted and raped her). Nick has no choice but to welcome her back, and while he’s legitimately afraid of her, he also acknowledges his addiction to her toxicity.

He enlists Tanner Bolt and teams up with Go and Boney to find a hole in Amy’s story, but there isn’t one. The resolution comes when Amy uses his banked sperm donation to get pregnant—the child being the ultimate form of blackmail. He has no choice but to stay with her or he’ll never see his son.

Amy’s Plot Points

Stasis for Amy is her early relationship with Nick when she acts like Cool Girl (we’ll get to that). But after a few years, when her true personality comes out, Nick apparently loses interest. The inciting incident of Amy’s storyline is her discovery of Nick’s affair with Andie.

For the next twelve months, she plans (rising action).

• She stockpiles money
• She crafts five years’ worth of diary entries
• She buys a car and hides it
• She secretly befriends Noelle Hawthorne and eventually fakes a pregnancy
• She goes with Nick’s mother to donate plasma as a way of showing us (and the police) her fear of blood (to make the idea of her cutting herself seem impossible)
• She increases the life insurance coverage on herself
• She takes out credit cards in Nick’s name and hides the purchases in Go’s woodshed
• She tries to buy a gun on Valentine’s Day as another clue that she’s afraid of Nick
• She orchestrates a loud argument the night before she disappears
• She sets up the treasure hunt and plants all the incriminating evidence

Amy’s point of no return is her staged disappearance. Her initial plan is to wait until Nick is arrested, knowing Missouri has the death penalty, and then commit suicide in such a way that her body is found, but she can’t go through with it. The trouble is—by staying alive she’s bound to run out of money.

Amy changes her appearance and hides in the Ozarks to wait out the news. But she miscalculates by befriending two strangers. She’s obsessed with watching herself on TV, and it’s possible these “friends” have figured out who she is. Afraid they’ll expose her, she calls the tipline to tell police about the woodshed and the diary, but when she watches a drunken blog interview Nick does, she starts to weaken and thinks maybe he still loves her.

At her midpoint, her two friends steal all her money. This money is key to her plan. Without it, she’s screwed. She reaches out to Desi Collings who (false victory) comes to her rescue. But it turns out Nick was right about Desi, and Amy has underestimated him. He actually is obsessed with her. All she wants from him is money, but he insists on helping her hide and then locks her in his isolated lake house where he intends to keep her forever.

Amy watches Nick on TV and falls for his shtick, believing he really is in love with her and just wants her to come home. But there’s only one way for her to escape Desi. In her dark night (which corresponds in timing to Nick’s) she drugs and murders Desi, plants evidence of rape/abduction, and escapes.

Her climax is her return to Nick where she turns him into the male version of Cool Girl—the doting husband who remembers every important thing about her and constantly looks for ways to make her happy. It’s fake, of course; she keeps a jar of poisoned vomit as a backup plan, and then when he finds it and disposes of it, she gets herself pregnant. He’s the one who wanted children. In her resolution, he is essentially her hostage.

Cool Girl and the Theme of Image

Besides telling a great story, Flynn offers interesting social commentary on the elevated place that image holds in our society (and remember, this novel was published in 2012). Amy is the child of psychologist parents with a perfectly curated marriage that feels fake. All of the supposedly happy marriages in the book are like that. Tanner Bolt and his wife always seem to be “starring in their own morning talk show.”

Amy’s parents are the authors of a once-popular children’s book series, Amazing Amy, and Amy grows up believing she has to live up to her perfect namesake. She hooks Nick by adopting the Cool Girl persona, in which a woman is considered cool by a man when they’re okay with whatever their partner does and never complain. As soon as Amy drops that persona, Nick loses interest in her.

Nick is undone by public perception for smiling at the wrong time and being photographed in situations that can be misinterpreted. Image is everything and cameras are everywhere: there’s the media battle to destroy and then repair Nick’s image, the fact that cases are decided in the court of public opinion, the feeling Nick has that he’s playing a role. Even his pretense at authenticity is staged—he’s the real man who cheated and is now apologizing for it. In the end, wooden puppets are exactly what Nick and Amy become. They’re the perfect couple, going through the motions and hating each other.

Once you trace this theme and see how entrenched it is in the novel, you understand why Flynn chose to end the book the way she did. It’s a smile for the cameras ending, and thematically it’s exactly what the story demands.

Why Mystery Writers Should Read Gone Girl

Gone Girl is a brilliant example of how to handle some tricky elements in the mystery genre: unreliable narrators, the purposeful withholding of information, red herrings, mystery versus thriller, and a pivotal midpoint reversal. Flynn is a master at crafting turning points that increase tension. She knows just how to keep making things worse for her protagonist, a key way to glue readers to the page.

Ultimately Flynn uses genre to play with our expectations and mess with us in the same way Amy messes with Nick.

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. She is the co-author of two craft books: Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling and Story Skeleton: The Classics. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.