'Gone Girl' represents a much-needed departure from Bridget Jones Gone Girl is the latest novel to create a bit of a buzz. It is Gillian Flynn's third book, but neither of her previous works has taken off like this. Only published in June 2012 stateside, it's already sold more than two million copies globally - 300,000 of them here in the UK. And now a film adaptation is in the works being headed up by Hollywood A-lister Reese Witherspoon. The book tells the story of Nick and Amy, a young married couple that both lose their New York jobs and move to small town Missouri. When Amy goes missing, suspicion surrounds Nick, and as the story is told through alternating narrative voices, sometimes made deliberately unreliable, the reader is left wondering what really happened. I won't go any further than that - I don't want to ruin it. What is interesting, aside from the plot itself, is that both of Flynn's other novels deal with characters that are afraid of commitment, whereas Gone Girl deals with how it feels to be in a long term relationship: "I liked the idea of marriage told as a he-said, she-said story, and told by two narrators who were perhaps not to be trusted," the author has said. This fascination with the long term, rather than a series of hook ups and break ups signals a move away from "the single gal" as the principle driving force in fictional representations of women in popular culture. It's not so much Sex and the City, as Sex and the Nitty-Gritty of Everyday Life. She cites Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the ultimate tale of marital stagnation and the power of shared dark secrets, as an inspiration, describing marriage as "the ultimate mystery." Gone Girl is a move away from the single gal representation of women in popular culture shown in Sex and the City And so it is - many is the time we look at a couple, shake our heads and say, "you never know what goes on in other people's relationships." Whilst Gone Girl is probably not quite representative of the average marriage, it is a compelling little exploration of how a story evolves between two people, like an extended piece of improvisation, and as the couple creates the story, so the story creates the couple. And then what happens when one half stops the dialogue, stops the co-operation and the communication, and starts writing a different story in which they alone are the hero or heroine. Crucial to the success of Gone Girl is Flynn's ability to write from Nick, her male lead's point of view. She can snap convincingly between perspectives, and it gives the whole book an even-handedness that is often missing from relationship-based novels. She has called herself "part guy," and her former life as a journalist in the rough and tumble world of entertainment news (yes, she lost her job too) certainly suggests she can look after herself in a male dominated industry. Gone Girl is a much thriller as relationship novel, and part of the thrill is finding a writer who can represent life from the perspective of both genders. After all, we're not so different really. We just need to create the space for more female writers to make that clear.