Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne inGone Girl(2014).Photo: Merrick Morton/20th Century Fox/Regency/Kobal/Shutterstock
It’s a matter of when, not if,Gone Girlwill get a sequel.
“For a while, there were no diary entries at all, and the whole thing was done from Nick’s point of view,” Flynn, 51, tells PEOPLE. “I did try different endings. I tried an ending where the grifters come back and give Amy her comeuppance and land her in jail. I wrote it all the way through and it just never felt right because I just thought, I can’t picture that ever happening to Amy.”
Where does Flynn store all her scrapped chapters for safe-keeping?
“I am the least-organized human in the world,” she says with a laugh. “I wish I could say they were all in one particular space. I had to actually dig to find what we put in this new edition. There are still some, I think, probably on old computers. They were all literally all over the place.”
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courtesy of Penguin Random House; Heidi Jo Brady
Prior toGone Girl, Flynn published her novelsSharp ObjectsandDark Places. In the 10 years sinceGone Girl, she’s kept busy in the film and television space, including writing the screenplay for the 2018 movieWidows, and serving as writer/creator on the Amazon Prime Video seriesUtopia. But fans are still waiting for book 4 — and she feels the anticipation.
“Oh yeah. It’s a fictional pressure, I assume, but at the same time, to be honest, I wish I had published something five years ago. Because now I can feel the pain of: ‘Ten years after she publishedGone Girl, she’s finally publishing the new one and it better be good because it took 10 years for her to do it!’ " says Flynn.
For now, the author says she’s “solely dedicated” to writing her next novel and letting her “imagination go totally loose again.”
“I’m struggling in the first draft of the book, and I’ve definitely had those moments where I think, ‘Do I even know how to write a book?’ and I get very frustrated. Every once in a while I’ll flip open a little bit of a previous novel and read and go, ‘Oh right, this is what my voice sounds like. This is what I do. This is how it goes. I remember now.’ That makes me feel better.”
While Flynn confirms her long-awaited next book will not be aGone Girlsequel, she isn’t opposed to returning to that story sometime soon. (Spoiler alert: the novel ends with Amy, back from framing her husband Nick for her own murder, revealing she’s pregnant, causing Nick to begrudgingly stay in the marriage to raise their child.)
“I will fully admit that, now that the child that would’ve been born 10 years ago, once that child hits 13, 14 in real time, I may indeed want to go back in and update and play around with what the hell would’ve happened once Amy was a mom,” Flynn says. “Because that is the stuff of wonderful gothic nightmares, I think.”
Flynn says she’s “excited” thatGone Girlhas stood the test of time after a decade: “I am proud that it has enough persistence in pop culture that now parents are recommending it to their kids when they’re old enough. I think that’s really cool.”
source: people.com
