Gone Girl 10 Years Later: Author Gillian Flynn Says She’d Be ‘Surprised If I Didn’t’ Write a Sequel

For Gone Girl‘s 10th anniversary, author Gillian Flynn tells PEOPLE, “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”

It’s a matter of when, not if, Gone Girl will get a sequel.

Gillian Flynn, author of the bestselling psychological thriller, is celebrating 10 years since the book first hit shelves in 2012, and publisher Penguin Random House is commemorating the anniversary with a special edition, in bookstores now. The reissue features never-before-seen passages written by Flynn that didn’t make the final cut. As she puts it, Gone Girl went through a “zillion” drafts.

“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.”

“She’s just such an alpha,” Flynn says of the character, played by Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike in the 2014 film adaptation, for which the author also wrote the screenplay. “She would figure her way out of that. I just couldn’t picture her contained in a cell — or maybe I didn’t want to. I just felt like she is the alpha shark of this whole relationship and story … I would’ve believed that she killed them off sooner than I would believe anyone would’ve gotten ahead of her.”

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.”

Prior to Gone Girl, Flynn published her novels Sharp Objects and Dark Places. In the 10 years since Gone Girl, she’s kept busy in the film and television space, including writing the screenplay for the 2018 movie Widows, and serving as writer/creator on the Amazon Prime Video series Utopia. 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 published Gone 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 a Gone Girl sequel, 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.)

 

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“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.”

“I would say I’m a little more sure than never-say-never. I think I would be surprised if I didn’t, to be honest. But don’t hold me to it,” she says of writing a sequel. “I do think it’d be fun to play in real time, and I would be ready by then to revisit them. I’d have enough space from Nick and Amy to go back in and get what that’s like as the true nuclear-bomb family.”

Flynn says she’s “excited” that Gone Girl has 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.”

[via]