Gone Girl recap

On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne finds his wife Amy missing from their Missouri home amid signs of a struggle. Told in alternating voices, Nick's present-day account and Amy's diary, the story makes Nick look increasingly guilty as his lies and an affair come to light. Halfway through, the truth flips: Amy is alive and has meticulously staged her own disappearance, faking a diary and planting evidence to frame Nick for her murder as revenge for his infidelity and the collapse of their marriage. Her plan goes awry when she is robbed while hiding out and turns for help to Desi Collings, a rich, controlling old boyfriend. Broke and cornered, she reinvents her story: she murders Desi, then returns home drenched in his blood claiming he abducted and raped her. The public sympathy this wins her makes it impossible for Nick to expose her. She reveals she has made herself pregnant with his stored sperm, and Nick, trapped by the threat to the child and by her willingness to destroy him, stays in the marriage.

Nick Dunne and his wife Amy are former New York writers who lost their media jobs and relocated to Nick's small Missouri hometown, where he now runs a bar with his twin sister. Their marriage, once glamorous, has grown strained under money worries and distance. On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick returns home to find the living room disturbed and Amy gone. The police open a missing-person investigation that soon centers on Nick himself, whose flat affect and inconsistencies draw suspicion. The narrative alternates between Nick's account of the search and Amy's diary, which recounts how they met and married and how their relationship changed after the move, setting up a portrait of a troubled marriage and a disappearance that everyone is trying to explain.

The novel's turn is that Amy is not a victim but the architect of the whole affair. Furious at Nick's affair with a young student and at the ruin of the life she wanted, she faked her own disappearance and death, keeping a false diary and staging clues designed to send Nick to prison for murdering her, then went into hiding to watch him fall. Her scheme unravels when other people at her hideout rob her of her cash. Desperate, she contacts Desi Collings, an obsessive wealthy ex-boyfriend, who installs her at his lakeside house under his control. To escape and to rewrite herself as a sympathetic survivor, Amy seduces Desi, kills him by cutting his throat, and returns home covered in his blood, claiming he had kidnapped and assaulted her. The story makes her a national heroine, and the police case against Nick collapses. Nick knows the truth but cannot prove it, and the public adoration shields her. When he prepares to leave her, Amy reveals she is pregnant, having used sperm he had once banked. Unwilling to abandon his child to her, and bound to her by their mutual knowledge, Nick remains, and the book closes on the two of them locked together in a marriage built on fear and performance.