Gillian Flynn Is Obsessed With Conspiracies
Gillian Flynn has a penchant for writing angry women, women who become so paralyzed by their circumstances and suffocated by expectations, they’re driven to madness or something like it. In Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, the journalist Camille directs her pain inward, slicing words into her skin and reducing herself to scars. In Gone Girl, the best seller that catapulted Flynn to literary fame, the psychopathic Amy’s displeasure with her husband curdles into cruel mind games. And in Dark Places, Libby, the lone survivor of a massacre, admits her rotten core on the first page: “I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ,” she narrates. “Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark.”
So Flynn fans might be surprised to find that Utopia, her new Amazon series, follows an ensemble of conspiracy theorists who seek a comic book they believe predicts the future. The drama, with its global scale and sprawling narrative, doesn’t exactly scream “Gillian Flynn.” What made the novelist and screenwriter want to add Utopia—a remake of a British cult hit—to her oeuvre?
“My oeuvre, yes,” she interjected, laughing, as we talked over Zoom in early September. “Let’s use those words a lot. My oeuvre and my career.”
Flynn was being self-deprecating, but her pivot to adapting a British conspiracy thriller a mystery worthy of interrogation. Her reputation as the writer of precedes her; the novel, with its acute observations about gender roles, struck a nerve when it was released in the summer of 2012. Nick and Amy Dunne, the toxic couple at the story’s center, paved the way for a new literary genre, the “domestic thriller.” Amy’s monologue about being a “,” a scathing passage . Traces of the tale’s DNA can be found in subsequent page-turners like and , films like , and TV series like .
