Inside a Mystery Writer's Mind

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Lately I’ve had a little obsession with thriller/mystery novels. The past three books I’ve read have fallen into that genre: Gone Girl and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn and The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. All of these books were very intense and sometimes disturbing reads, with each of them having major plot twists throughout the book and a surprise ( or predictable if you figured out the mystery ahead of time) ending.

The major theme in these three books was the betrayal of family. In Gone Girl, a wife fakes her own death and pins it on her husband so he will be sentenced to the death penalty. Sharp Objects’ main character’s mom is an abusive mother who drugged and killed one of her daughters and attempts to do the same thing to her oldest daughter. The Girl on the Train focuses on a women driven to alcoholism due to her inability to conceive a child. When she becomes an alcoholic, her husband becomes abusive and has an affair with another women. He ends up marrying the other women and has an affair during their marriage too.

The family dynamics in these books were so toxic and unhealthy that it made me wonder how an author could come up with such disturbing relationships. I became curious to find out if either Gillian Flynn or Paula Hawkins had troubled relationships or rough family histories that inspired them to write books centered around family betrayal.

After doing some research about the family histories of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, I found that they each had the exact opposite of a what would be considered a disturbed family history. Gillian Flynn was raised in Kansas City by her parents, who were both college professors. She is now happily married with two children. Paula Hawkins also had what seemed to be a happy upbringing . She was born in Zimbabwe where her dad worked as an economics professor. She attended the University of Oxford and later worked as a journalist for a newspaper in London before writing The Girl on the Train.

So if both of these authors had no previous unhealthy family dynamics, how could they even begin to imagine these books in which the main characters are surrounded by disturbing and insane family members? I'm curious if they ever get suspicious of their family after writing books where the main characters could trust no one, especially not their family. I’m pretty sure if I wrote one of those books, I would think twice about trusting my family again, even if the story was just fiction.