Trying to review this book feels like looking back on a past relationship. Sure, we had some good times, and those are the things I'm most likely to remember and latch on to. But also we had some rough times, and eventually it ended, and maybe I kind of hated it on some level. 
 Gone Girl starts with the good times, both in the figurative sense I just made up and in Gillian Flynn's writing style. She's really a narrative force to be reckoned with, and I think I may even read some more of her stuff, despite my ultimate anger with this novel. This book is intensely readable, Flynn's words just flying off the page. I'm particularly impressed by her ability to write in several different voices, alternating between two complicated, complex narrators without skipping a beat (for a while, anyway). 
 The first half is AMAZING. Just flat out one of the most interesting, thoughtful thrillers I've ever read. I flew through the first 200 or so pages in a flurry, unable to put it down. Then the twist happened. 
 I'm not going to say what it is, because it's kind of the whole book. I think even mentioning that there's a twist is kind of a spoiler, but I am the last person I know to have read this book, so maybe it's ok to say that much. But I will also say that I have no idea how I feel about it. Part of it is cool and interesting, but part of it is also so maddeningly unrealistic, and forces such a sharp turn in the narrative structure of the novel, that I also kind of hate it. 
 There's also the fact that, once The Twist happens, the book just starts to take on water. It gets heavier and heavier, harder to explain, heightening from places that are already bonkers, with Flynn trying to bail out this massive tanker of a story from totally sinking under its own weight. In the end, I think she fails. It's just too unbelievable. Characters that started out seeming incredibly real start to seem like Heath Ledger's Joker or something. People get way stupid and start making incredibly idiotic mistakes that heretofore they definitely would never have made, all in the interest of servicing the overburdened plot instead of the characters. Oh, and the ending sucks. It feels like Flynn just giving up on trying to make this whole thing make any sense. 
 That's not to say that all of this doesn't remain readable. My reading speed definitely slowed down towards the end of the book, but Flynn's just so good with words that I stayed interested in her prose more than anything else. 
 The thing is, I did truly love the beginning, maybe even first 2/3rds of Gone Girl. It's just at one point it started to get a little crazy (and anti-feminist, I think?), and we had to break up. But I'll remember the good times, and I will laugh and reminisce, and then I will stop because this is just a book and not a person.