I hope you’re enjoying our first Livingston Loves lit book selection, “Gone Girl.” I’ll post some questions (and my answers) today based on Part One. Please feel free to jump in with your own comments and add any additional questions you may have. Here we go…
- What did you think of the chapter structure? Nick’s in first person and Amy’s being entries from her diary.
- Do you believe that Nick is involved with Amy’s disappearance? Why or why not?
- What do you think of Amy and Nick as characters? Do you find them sympathetic?
- Consider Nick and Amy’s marriage. How does it look on the outside compared to the inside. Did reading their story make you ponder your own relationship?
- What did you think Nick would find in the shed at the end of Part One?
- Well, I’m always a sucker for diary entries but there’s something cloying and suffocating about Amy’s entries. (More on that once we discuss Part Two.) Looking back, I think a more impartial narrator may have been a better choice. Or, at least, third person. Give us some distance between us and these two quite overpowering, at times, characters.
- I’m pretty sure that Flynn wants to lead us in that direction which is why I’m not buying it. I don’t totally trust him, but don’t think he actually killed her.
- I am finding both of them to be somewhat unlikable, which is okay since I still care what happens to them. Flynn gives us just enough info to go back and forth between liking/not liking but still making us care. Both of their backgrounds kept me from outright hating them. And Nick’s relationship with his sister, Go, saved him for me.
- Their marriage kind of creeped me out. Five years feels like a very short amount of time for them to be so incredibly dysfunctional. But it also made me think about marriages in general and how nobody ever knows what goes on between two people except them, and sometimes not even then.
- I finished this awhile ago so I don’t remember if I expected something in particular. I figured it had something to do with the clues and I was just anxious to turn the page and find out what was in the shed.
