Why We Should Stop Searching for the Next Gone Girl

Real women are flawed, in other words. Real women are not fantasies based on male ideals of strength and perfection. And sometimes, as is the case with Amy Dunne, real women are a little crazy. And while it's totally not okay to treat others the way Amy Dunne treats people in Gone Girl, we enjoy reading her because she's allowed to be complicated and imperfect and, most importantly, unlikeable in the way that men have been written since... well, forever.

Yet what has risen in Gone Girl's wake is a new and equally problematic female character archetype - the unwieldy off-the-rails woman. This woman is not any more complicated than the "strong female character." Her craziness is not a personality, and her bouts of insanity that not even she can control allow for absolutely any twist possible that the writer wants to imagine. How very convenient. How very lazy. How very problematic.