Background and career
Gillian Schieber Flynn (; 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 published in 40 languages, 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 May 2025, she was working on her fourth novel, another psychological thriller, to be published by Penguin Random House.
As of 2025, Flynn had published three novels and one short story. While working at Entertainment Weekly, she wrote her first novel, Sharp Objects (2006), a psychological thriller about a reporter investigating a series of murders in her hometown. Partly inspired by Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, the book was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar for Best First Novel, and won the Crime Writers' Association's New Blood and Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. Sharp Objects was later adapted into a celebrated 2018 television miniseries starring Amy Adams. Flynn's second novel, Dark Places (2009), follows a woman who begins to question whether her incarcerated brother was truly responsible for the murder of their family during the Satanic panic era of the 1980s, when she was a child. The novel garnered positive reviews, though its 2015 feature film adaptation, starring Charlize Theron, was criticized as "dull" and "implausible." Flynn made a cameo appearance in the film. As of 2024, Flynn is developing a limited series for HBO based on the book, where she will serve as co-creator, writer, and co-showrunner. Her third novel, Gone Girl (2012), centers on Nick Dunne, a small-town Missouri creative writing professor, and his wife Amy Elliott, who mysteriously disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary. Gone Girl topped The New York Times Bestseller list for eight weeks, with over two million copies sold by the end of 2012. Flynn adapted the novel into a successful 2014 film directed by David Fincher, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Flynn's short story The Grownup won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Originally published under the title What Do You Do? in the 2014 anthology Rogues, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, it was later released as a standalone publication in 2015. The narrative follows a sex worker turned fake psychic, hired by a woman to cleanse her Victorian home, which is troubled by a deteriorating marriage and a disturbing stepson.
An avid reader of comic and graphic novels when she was a child, Flynn collaborated with illustrator Dave Gibbons and wrote a comic book short story called Masks. Part of the anthology series Dark Horse Presents, it was published by Dark Horse Comics in February 2015.
Alongside Marti Noxon, Flynn co-wrote and served as an executive producer for HBO's 2018 adaptation of Sharp Objects, for which she received nominations for the Primetime Emmy and the Writers Guild of America Award. In 2014, it was announced that Flynn would write the scripts for an HBO adaptation of the British series Utopia. Initially, the HBO series was to be directed and executive produced by David Fincher, but budget issues between Fincher and the network led to its cancellation in 2015. The project was later revived by Amazon, which ordered it to series with a 2020 release. Flynn wrote all eight episodes and served as the project's showrunner. Utopia premiered on Prime Video on September 25, 2020, drawing mixed reviews. The series was canceled in November 2020 after one season. In 2025 it was shared that Flynn started work on an upcoming HBO limited series adapting Dark Places.
