This article first appeared in the November 2024 issue of Kansas City magazine.

Men aren’t the only nasty villains. A lot of novelists and screenwriters let you think they are, but not Kansas City native Gillian Flynn. She writes about women who are cruel, mean or—at their best—a mess. Never has the fairer half of the population felt so seen. 

This month, November 21, Flynn comes to Kansas City to take the stage at the annual Writers for Readers fundraiser, a conversation and banquet co-hosted by the Kansas City Public Library and the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She’s lending her talent to raise money for the Writers for Readers initiative, a program that employs three creative writing graduate students to teach the art of writing to teens and adults in free classes at the Library. 

Flynn is probably best known for her 2012 novel Gone Girl and the corresponding hit film of the same name starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck. The story’s protagonist fakes her own death and endlessly trolls her too-nice Midwestern husband all up and down eastern Missouri. 

Right now, Flynn is working on a second adaptation of her novel Dark Places, which follows her tortured lead all around Kansas City as she works to understand and solve her family’s decades-old murder. 

And not too long from now, expect to see Flynn’s remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, a project underway with Tim Burton. 

But Flynn is exploring and exposing more than just the voices of her novels’ edgy female characters. She is also making her mark in the physical world by attempting to draw out the voices of real women and writers looking to break barriers and enter the publishing world. Flynn is doing this through her own book imprint under the Zando umbrella. 

Ahead of the Writers for Readers fundraiser, Flynn talked to Kansas City magazine about why it’s important to have a variety of voices represented in literature. 

As we deal with book challenges and censoring, we talk a lot about the importance of making sure people see themselves on the written page. How do you think about that in your work? 

I think it’s crucially important. Books have saved my life and molded my life over and over. I think there’s a true value to recognizing yourself in characters—characters who on the surface may be very different from you, characters who may seem very much like you and are able to articulate ideas and feelings that were roaming around your head and you didn’t even know it. There’s a lightning strike when you have that moment of recognition with a character, a moment that is like nothing else in the world, really, except for meeting that person who’s going to be your friend or soulmate. It really is that shocking, sometimes, and important. It gives everyone a vocabulary and another way to explain who we are. 

What characters have you felt that way about? 

Oh boy, I’m so bad at that. But I do have one: Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. I remember reading her as a kid and Meg being described as, like, a little young for her age and still wanting to play rough-and-tumble games when the girls were getting older. And kind of being nerdy. Then she went on all these amazing adventures. I remember thinking, “Oh, that’s me.” 

How about the value of finding your place in a book? It’s always thrilling to me to find the place I live on a page. Libby Day in Dark Places uses the computer lab in Central Library, where I work. 

We don’t get to see that nearly enough with Kansas City. With Dark Places, in particular, you could drive around with Libby and the book and see so much of Kansas City. The unnamed area that she lives in is by my folks’ house in the Westport/Roanoke area, and I could drive you over there—that kind of “out back,” “over there” or whatever it is she calls it. Whitney Terrell [an author and UMKC professor who will be speaking with Flynn at the banquet] does that wonderfully, too, in his books. I love being in Kansas City. The Midwest is criminally underrepresented. 

When you visit Kansas City from Chicago, what are the places you make sure to go? 

My mom picks us up, and the kids and my husband and I all are ferried straight from the airport to Winstead’s, where we have lunch and probably a skyscraper. It’s a tradition. We always like to hit Gates; it’s my family’s barbecue of choice. I know that’ll be controversial.

Writers for Readers is a ticketed fundraiser and takes place on the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus: UMKC Student Union, 5100 Cherry St. | Room 401. Buy tickets here.