That book club debate about unreliable narrators turned my best week into a mess

Last Tuesday, my book club finally had a solid debate about 'Gone Girl' and I thought it was going to be the highlight of the week-everyone was fired up and sharing great points. But then our moderator threw in a curveball about whether the author intentionally made both narrators unlikeable, and suddenly three people stormed off because they felt it was a personal attack on their reading choices. Has anyone else had a book club night go from amazing to awful over a single topic like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

hayden_butler271d agoTop Commenter

Oh wow, that's rough but I gotta push back on something. The moderators question wasn't really about whether the author made both narrators unlikeable-it's more that Gone Girl is written so each narrator's version of events is deliberately skewed from the start. That debate getting personal instead of staying about the book is a shame, but the question itself was a pretty standard literary take.

sean_johnson161d ago

Didn't someone on a podcast point out that Flynn actually said in an interview she wanted both narrators to be "reliable but not trustworthy"? That always stuck with me because it changes how you read the whole thing. It's not even about liking them or not, it's about realizing the book is literally built on the idea that memory and truth are flexible. So the moderator's question was fair game, it just got derailed when people started taking sides instead of talking about craft.