Camille Preaker, the heroine of Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, Sharp Objects, is a reporter for a second-rate newspaper called the Chicago Daily Post. In an effort to boost lagging sales with a sensational story, her crusty but compassionate editor sends her on assignment back home to the small town of Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover the grisly, unsolved murders of two preteen girls. Camille has to not only deal with the suspicions and gossip of Wind Gap’s leery residents but must also grapple with her obsessive, control-freak mother and her 13-year-old half sister, a borderline psycho who wields unnerving control over her schoolmates. To complicate matters, Camille herself, sharp as a tack and beautiful but emotionally distant (and a bit of a boozer), has been recently released from a psych ward: a “cutter,” for years she’s sliced words over nearly every inch of her body. As she comes ever closer to unraveling the mystery of the murders, she’s drawn deeper into the dark secrets of both the town and her family.
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Though she ran some medical passages past doctors and dentists she knew, she didn’t do a lot of research. “I didn’t want it to read like a police procedural,” she says. “I wanted to keep that sort of gothic-fairy-tale-gone-wrong tone.” When she was done she sent the manuscript, “whole hog,” to Stephanie Roston at the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency. “I had a conversation with her, and had lunch with her one time,” says Flynn, “and we just clicked. And, uh, then she sold it!”
