Gillian Flynn's Reading List

"will someone please make a movie of this, please?"

"I will probably be clutching "Flowers in the Attic" in my gnarled hands on my deathbed."

"I was — and still am — an obsessive for Ellen Raskin's great puzzle mystery, "The Westing Game.""

"I’m rereading Columbine by Dave Cullen. In the light of the recent high school shootings here, it felt like a book I should revisit. There are so many shooters who pay homage to those two kids – that’s the incident that started it all. I remember thinking: ‘What an odd and horrible tragedy. I’m glad it’s over; I’m sure that won’t happen again.’ It seemed so completely alien and so strange. The fact that we’re still grappling with it, that there have been so many shootings…making no change at..."

"When I was very young – she was the first author that I read from the grown-up section in the library. The realization that every character in that book was evil slowly dawned on my 12-year-old brain. I realized there were different gradations of evil and it blew my mind. I gobbled her up. It made me want to be a mystery writer, the idea that you can be entranced by bad characters."

"The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams is one of my all-time favorite books, and she’s one of my favorite writers. Three teenage girls, the desert, the end of the natural world, hilarious ghosts, experimental lab monkeys – it’s a far-out freaky book that’s so beautifully written it’s unbelievable."

"I read Joyce Carol Oates’s short story ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ at college. I’d never had that experience where my blood changed temperature in my veins. I’ve probably reread it 100 times since then and still can’t figure out how it’s done."

"This great potboiler was the book that all junior high and teenage girls read and reread and passed around and hid from their mothers. It’s about a woman – and her four children – who is forced to go to live with her evil, rich mother and hides the kids from her father in the attic because she’s not supposed to have got married. It’s supposed to be for a couple of weeks, but it goes on for a year. [The children] slowly realize their mother is actually having a great time going back into her r..."

"It’s hard to make me cry, but the characters in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and A God in Ruins are so real that when bad things happen you ache for them. I cry because it’s so true…Those two books made me laugh out loud, too. She can do both within the space of a page. It would make me insane with jealousy if I had any chance of even being close to being that good, but I don’t so I can just sit back and enjoy it, let it flow over me."

"A YA novel that stars a young girl named Tabitha-Ruth Wexler who I loved from the beginning. I loved any great little girl who went around kicking everyone in the shins and is underestimated but turns out to be a little bit smarter than everyone else."

"My husband knows that I’m in a weird place if I’ve got a copy of that in the bath. I have no idea why I’d find comfort in a sociopath leading a queen to her death, but I guess part of it is that it doesn’t sound like my writing – it’s beautiful but it’s so different that I can escape from my brain."