Love/Hate and Gone Girl

In tonight’s 21st Century Literacies class, my students and I were discussing different types of media, and we completed an activity called “Four Corners on the Media” from Renee Hobbs’s book Digital and Media Literacy.  The activity asks participants to discuss what we like/dislike about different forms of media.  Then a suggested follow-up activity is to write about a specific media text with which we have a love/hate relationship.

That writing prompt made me think of my experience reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.   A friend urged me to read the book saying, “I’ve never read a book where I disliked the characters so much and still kept wanting to read.”  She was right.  I couldn’t put that book down, but before I was finished, I so intensely disliked both of the main characters that I was fascinated by my response.  At times I became so irritated with these characters that I wanted to quit reading, but I couldn’t.  I was almost reading just to see if something bad would happen to them.