Gillian Flynn

Born Gillian Schieber Flynn on February 24, 1971, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Judith Ann Schieber, a reading-comprehension professor, and Edwin Matthew Flynn, who taught film, she was the younger of two children and has described herself as a painfully shy child who found her footing in books. Her father's film collection ran heavily to horror, and she had seen Psycho, Alien, and Bonnie and Clyde by the age of seven. She graduated from Bishop Miege High School in 1989, took degrees in English and journalism at the University of Kansas, and earned a master's at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism in 1997. She joined Entertainment Weekly the following year as a feature writer and rose to television critic, a post she held for a decade. Her debut novel, Sharp Objects (2006), about a reporter investigating child murders in her own troubled Missouri hometown, was nominated for an Edgar Award. Her second novel, Dark Places, followed in 2009. She married the lawyer Brett Nolan, whom she had met in graduate school at Northwestern, in 2007; the couple settled in Chicago and had two children, a son in 2010 and a daughter in 2014. Laid off from Entertainment Weekly in December 2008 as the magazine industry cut staff, she turned to fiction full time and wrote Gone Girl (2012), narrated across the alternating, competing accounts of a husband under suspicion and his missing wife's diary; the novel spent eight weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than two million copies within its first year. Flynn wrote the screenplay for David Fincher's 2014 film adaptation, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Her novella The Grownup, first published in George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois's 2014 anthology Rogues, won the 2015 Edgar Award for best short story. She has continued writing for the screen, co-writing the 2018 HBO adaptation of Sharp Objects, co-writing the heist film Widows (2018) with director Steve McQueen, and creating and writing Utopia, an eight-episode series for Amazon that premiered in 2020. She lives in Chicago with her husband and children.

In December 2008, Flynn lost her job as a television critic at Entertainment Weekly during the recession's newsroom cuts, with no other work lined up. She began writing Gone Girl soon after, drawing directly on the layoff for Nick Dunne's unemployment, the character's belief that the one thing he was good at had simply been taken from him.