ABOUT THE AUTHOR

EVER SINCE her 2012 novel Gone Girl became a publishing phenomenon and then a hit movie, Gillian Flynn has been one of the hottest writers in Hollywood.

Adaptations of her previous two books, Dark Places and

Sharp Objects, became a foregone conclusion, and she subsequently collaborated with

Gone Girl director David Fincher on an American version of the acclaimed UK show Utopia, which will screen on Amazon Prime. She has also written the screenplay for a big-screen version of the early -80s Lynda La Plante mini-series Widows, which will be released in theatres later this year.

She wrote Sharp Objects, her debut novel, while working as a television critic for pop culture magazine Entertainment Weekly.

“I wrote it largely because, at that time, there weren’t a lot of novels out there that I could find featuring that kind of character,” Flynn tells TimeOut. “I was looking for the female counterpart to what I saw so often in literature.

“I wanted to see what violence looked like, generationally. Violence and aggression among generations of women. And self-harm.”

It’s not difficult to see a common thread throughout Flynn’s work — people doing bad things for relatable reasons.

“I’ve always believed there are two kinds of people in the world: people who either want to look under the rock, and people who don’t want to look under the rock. And I’ve always been like ‘What’s under the rock?”’