Gone Girl Chapter Summary

Section 1 Summary (Chapters 1-8)

In Part One of Gone Girl, titled “Boy Loses Girl,” the chapters alternate between the perspectives of Nick Dunne, the main character, and Amy Elliott, Nick’s wife. Nick’s chapters focus on present day, while Amy’s chapters are her diary entries from the past, integrated into the story to give insight on her overall personality and her feelings towards their marriage and relationship. Nick’s present day starts with Nick waking up in their rented house in Carthage, Missouri, his hometown. His narration explains that he and Amy moved back to his hometown after losing their New York magazine writing jobs, also because of his parents’ dying condition. Though today was their 5-year wedding anniversary, Nick expresses
The Luminol sweep of the kitchen indicates that Amy experienced massive blood loss. The cops also found records of a great amount of credit card debt all under Nick’s name. Nick claims that these two pieces of evidence have nothing to do with him, but, like the cops, the reader feels suspicious of Nick’s actions. The cops also inform Nick that Noelle, their neighbor, was telling the truth, and her and Amy were in fact friends, a detail Nick must have missed while he was busy ignoring Amy and being an overall terrible husband. The media believes Nick to be guilty, so Amy’s parents and Go strive to help Nick repair his image at Amy’s candlelight vigil. Nick’s speech at the vigil was ruined when Noelle approached him in front of the crowd and announced Amy’s pregnancy, another detail of which Nick was painfully
She reveals that her plan has been in the works for a year, and that the diary entries from Part 1 were filled with lies in order to build the case against Nick. For example, she reveals that her fear of blood was a lie, included in her diary so that detectives would dismiss the idea that she cut herself in order to spill the blood in the kitchen, but in fact she did cut herself to do exactly that! Amy tells the reader that the personality she built for herself in her diary differs from her true self. In order to woo Nick, she changed her personality to fit a kind of cool vibe that would attract guys, and she has kept it up until now. She is unable to keep up this fake persona, so she decides to fake her death in order to