Gillian Flynn

Gillian Schieber Flynn (/ˈɡɪliən/; born February 24, 1971) is an American author, screenwriter, and producer, best known for her thriller and mystery novels Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009), and Gone Girl (2012). Her works have been translated into 40 languages^{[citation needed]}, and by 2016, Gone Girl had sold over 15 million copies worldwide.

Flynn was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in the Coleman Highlands neighborhood. Both of her parents were educators: her mother, Judith Ann (née Schieber), was a reading-comprehension professor, and her father, Edwin Matthew Flynn, taught film. Flynn has an older brother, Travis, who works as a railroad machinist. She has described herself as a "painfully shy" child, finding refuge in reading and writing. Her interest in storytelling was further cultivated by her father's love of horror films.

As a young woman, Flynn worked assorted jobs, including selling honey-baked ham and giving out yoghurt samples in the mall, dressed as "a tuxedo-clad cone." She attended Bishop Miege High School, graduating in 1989, and went on to earn undergraduate degrees in English and journalism from the University of Kansas.

After spending two years in California writing at a trade magazine for human resources professionals, Flynn moved to Chicago. She attended Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, where she completed a master's degree in 1997. Initially aspiring to become a crime reporter, she ultimately chose to pursue a career in creative writing.

After graduating from Northwestern, Flynn worked freelance briefly at U.S. News & World Report before joining Entertainment Weekly in 1998 as a feature writer, eventually becoming a television critic. She was made redundant in December 2008. Flynn credits her years in journalism with helping to hone her writing skills, stating that journalism taught her the discipline of writing without waiting for inspiration. She said, "I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious."

Flynn's portrayal of complex, morally ambiguous, and often unflattering female characters has drawn criticism from some critics, who have accused her of misogyny. However, Flynn identifies as a feminist, and has defended her choice to write female characters who defy conventional expectations of women as inherently nurturing or morally virtuous. She states, "the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing." To her, people will dismiss "trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad, and selfish."

In 2021, Flynn was appointed to lead a new book imprint – Gillian Flynn Books – for the independent publisher Zando. As of 2024, she was working on her fourth novel, to be published by Penguin Random House.

As of 2025, Flynn had published three novels and one short story.