There's something very androgynous about Flynn's female characters - I noticed this in her short The Grown-Up as well. Despite being very obviously about cis-women, despite the fact that Sharp Object's protagonist thinks she has a beautiful face, this is still written with much less gender-coded language than I am used to.

Camille is working for a second-rate newspaper out of Chicago when she is reluctantly sent back to her old hometown to cover a possible serial killer; a little girl is dead and another has gone missing a year later. Camille has a precarious relationship with her mother, a mysterious dead sister, a stepfather and a much younger half-sister she's never bothered to meet. (Sidebar: the description of her stepfather is one of my favorite lines, oddly enough: "Alan was, if anything, thinner than my mother with cheekbones that jutted out of his face so high ... overdressed as always, even for an evening of sweet drinks with my mother. [...] He sweated not at all. Alan is the opposite of moist .")

Her mother is a high-maintenance woman in all respects. As soon as her fluttering hands and attacks of nerves became apparent, I suspected

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy as the cause of death for Camille's much mourned younger sister. After all, it's much easier to get to the root of motivations in narrative fiction than in real life, which is the biggest block to both diagnosis and legal sentencing of MSbP.

"People whispered comfort about Marian being called back to heaven, but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby."

"[Adora] looked more comfortable in the Nash house than Mrs. Nash did. It was a natural gift for Adora, making other women feel incidental."

The behavior of the pack of housewives, the pack of preteen girls and all those ladies in between makes me feel as if Flynn is bludgeoning me with commentary on how society has shaped women into being sharp, caustic beings with one another. We cannot be friendly, because we must Compete.

Camille holds some gross opinions about women; she's not entirely wrong about "sometimes drunk women aren't raped", because their partners are equally or more drunk and therefore both sides have consent issues. She seems to have issues seeing rape culture for what it is, likely due to defensiveness about her own past promiscuity and what led her down that path (spoiler alert, it's not just "liking sex"). Just a page after her annoyed commentary to the Chicago detective about "liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination" she thinks of a past event in her teens: "... my first blow job, at age thirteen. A senior on the baseball team took me under his wing, then took me into the woods. He wouldn't kiss me until I serviced him. Then he wouldn't kiss me because of where my mouth had been. Young love."

The complex relationship she has with her mother and the burgeoning one with her much younger half-sister Amma are so delicately fucked up, it's amazingly believable. The mystery of the dead girls is almost incidental to finding out what the hell is even going on in her family. Once the murderer is revealed once and for all, the only surprise is my complete and utter lack of it. Not because it was oh-so obvious, but because

yeah, fucking Amma is a sociopath. Of course? Anyone who knew her was aware, they just never made the jump from "cruel thirteen year old girl" to "murderer and tooth collector of other small girls", likely due to the general consensus of serial killing being an exclusively male phenomenon. Come on girls, we can do anything we put our minds to!

Gillian Flynn writes some fucked up people and it is excellent.