Book Review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

"Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you?"

It can be silly writing a review about Gone Girl, one of the most commented books of the recent years and a best seller since the moment it was published, but I just read it and, as me just a month ago, maybe you haven't yet. Do it!

There are not wizards, vampires or dragons; it's mostly a story about two people but at the same time it's much more than that. Gilliam Flynn has given a new meaning to the expression "Til death do us part". We all create characters to face the world, different masks that we wear in different situations. That's the way we get friends, jobs, relationships, even love.

What is love then? a lie? one more role that we need to play? or maybe, as someone says in the book, is about been known by someone else. "He gets me. She gets me. Isn't that the simple magic phrase?".

For those who still don't know, Gone Girl is about a woman who disappears on her wedding anniversary. When the police start building a case the principal suspect will be, obviously, her husband. However the most interesting thing is not the investigation plot but the relationship between the couple. The faces they show to each other and the thing they expect of each other and finally the way they really end knowing each other.

Even though the book is about a couple relationship is not about romance. It's much more about the society today, about the lies we tell ourselves and the way we perceive each other. Maybe that's why the end of the book is so great and disturbing.

Just to end, I'm going to quote one of my favorites parts:

"And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They're not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you're not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn't want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version - maybe he's a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he's a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who like every fucking thing he likes and doesn't ever complain."

These words are pronounce by Amy (the wife). Maybe she sounds as a bitch but after all, and as she says, she is the bitch who made her husband a man.

Gone Girl
by Gilliam Flynn
A-