Craft Study—Using Show, Not Tell to Show Narcissistic Manipulation

Part I: Exposition—A framework for Human Design and why it matters to you as a writer

I think I’ve mentioned—if not here then certainly to anyone who will listen, that Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is one of my favorite books because it’s so well done in so many ways, and I love revisiting that work because it’s one of those pieces where I feel like I see something else every time I read it, and this time is no different.

The past several years have led to an excessively long and in-depth study and understanding of human nature, behaviors, traumas, triggers, and related outcomes. What I’ve discovered is that most of us are showing up with a combination of awareness and lack of awareness. This is by design. We have, and if you’ve studied any Jungian psychology you’ll know, a shadow and a light side. The light side is something that we are aware of. These are the strengths that we play to and the aspects of ourselves that have been the most validated. The shadow sides are those aspects of ourselves that we are less aware of and that without any illumination, if left to stay in shadow, are going to show up in a harmful way that’s often projected onto others.

It took a while for this to make sense in my own life, but in my work as a developmental editor at GracePoint Publishing with authors who work in Human Design and who write about it, I’ve come to establish a different framework that makes it even more practical—once you understand Human Design.

A detour into Human design—as a treat

In a nutshell, it’s a combination of modalities pursuant to who we are. It’s not prescriptive—like, it’s not a horoscope or a solution but rather a way to make sense of you. Your “type” is determined by your date of birth, time, and location. Respectfully, I do not understand how this informs, but I do know that HD incorporates multiple modalities for understanding people.

I liken this to the Buddhist parable of blind or blindfolded (depending on how you’ve heard it) people in a room touching different parts of an elephant. Each person has a different but very accurate interpretation of what an elephant is. Not only is that a metaphor for life—we all have different experiences that influences our very accurate understanding of what reality is because at the end of the day, it’s all in our heads anyway and is limited to what we allow ourselves to make of it, but equally, I feel it explains HD. Throughout history, people have and will continue to try to understand what exactly it is to be a human being.

Not everyone will be possessed by this curiosity, but certainly, I am, though, I’m also open to not having all of the answers but instead find this experience to be a playful exploration in understanding, like a Lego village. You build up something, this idea, this understanding, and then you get new pieces, or you take some away, and you tear it down again for a new understanding that fits whatever scenario you’re in. Writers who like my girl K.M. Weiland and who use enneagrams and Meyers-Briggs and archetypals for character ideation will likely really enjoy HD, and though I haven’t explored this, I’m tempted to play with creating characters and using their HD to influence their behaviors in a story. Scratch that. I’m going to try it.

I digress. So, circling back—in understanding who we are, our shadows and light, my type is among the most common—I’m a pure generator. I have a lot of energy that I burn through and once I’m done for the day, I’m done, and when I need to rest, I need to rest. Slowing down is in opposition to my nature because constant motion and activity and productivity is not only something we’re conditioned to do but it’s also something that distracts from aspects of shadow that cause discontent. We are very good at avoiding and projecting our discomfort.

Within your design, you have centers. Centers are things like your sacral, your spleen, your anja, your throat—basically, major organ centers and chakras. My design, my head, throat, anja, and heart are opened, which means that I absorb from others and have to be very, very aware to know what I want and need and to not be responding to what I sense others want and need. So, while I’m very sure of who I am and my values, I’m also very easily influenced. I knew I was suggestible, but now I know why.

Beyond that are the gates. We have our primary gates that have the most bearing on how we show up in the world and the others that alight in our centers. Depending on planetary movements for all but the Reflector types, the rarest, we progress through our gates at different times of year, which is also why thematically as individuals, you may find that you have patterns for how you work and relate and show up.

For example, I do the most of my work in the fall. I make most of my income then or I do work on projects that pay out later in the year. In winter, I rest. Once it’s cold, I spend a lot of time indoors resting and replenishing. It’s an annual representation of my daily expression as a generator—I burn up a lot of energy, and then I need to rest and recover. In the spring, I come alive. I’m born in the early spring, and this has always been an emergence of inspiration, new opportunities, and prolific but welcome and necessary change. Spring is a time of new growth and pruning what doesn’t deplete from my garden. Summer, too, is more playful and creative, but it’s a time to allow the new changes to take root, so come fall, I can harvest. That’s my year. That’s my day. The month has a similar flow where for about one week a month, I am exhausted, and I turn my light energy down because I need to rest.

Okay, so chances are you’re contemplating your own self and design, and maybe you’ve left this post entirely and you’re out there on a search engine figuring out your design. I’ll wait if you are. …right. Welcome back. (There’s more to HD than what I’m describing but (1) it’s complicated and I don’t even understand all of it, and I may never endeavor to really go like all in, but I might. Door is open. (2) it’s not necessary to delve into for this conversation.)

So, while our own sense of understanding who we are is important for how we show up for our writing, it’s also really helpful and interesting to understand characters and then to create behaviors and pathologies for those characters that exemplify how we show up in the world.

Because so much of my personal journey has been grounded in healing and how we should show up if we want peace in our lives and relationships and work and, even more harrowingly, in how we exist in this tumultuous and painfully corrupt world, I’ve struggled to write dysfunctional characters because those are the ones that make fiction good.

We don’t want self-actualized, healed, sagely mentors unless the script calls for a self-actualized, healed, sagely mentor and that’s not our MC anyway. That’s just the person who shows up to help that idiot Harry Potter not die while he’s trying to save the world from oppressive evil, or the keep Frodo out of the kitchen and on his happy little way into Mordor. Like, you have one job. And these are the characters who have both light and shadow sides. The light keeps them moving toward their character goal. The shadow keeps them stuck in fear and pain—the shadow causes them to project onto others, which creates a reaction, which makes for damn good fiction.

Part II: Applied analysis of Nick and Amy Dunne

Brief overview

• Why Amy is a narcissist

• How Flynn shows this in the Nick and Amy dynamic (and why Amy is the antagonist and Nick is the protagonist)

• How Flynn uses techniques employed by narcissists to manipulate the reader experience

By far, Amy Dunne is the most interesting character to me. We have to label Amy as a narcissist, and while I eschew labels IRL, for fiction, they’re essential. Amy has all of the hallmark traits of someone with narcissistic personality disorder that really have become more obvious and are even told to the reader via interactions with other characters. Here’s where Flynn is so damn brilliant—she creates empathy for the villain.

Tip 1: Make your reader CARE about your antagonist. Make them empathize.

Hopefully you’re aware that for a truly complex and deeply intriguing story you need to have balanced representation of the perspective of the “villain” or the antagonist, the person who is creating challenges for the MC’s character goal. And you may have more than one MC or you may have two MCs with a similar goal. But without really showing the humanity and the evolutionary pathology of a person who is in that role, you don’t create empathy necessary for complexity, which if it’s not complex, it doesn’t replicate the human condition and there are limitations on its success.

Now, if you write cozies or genre fiction that doesn’t do those deep dives because you’re reader just wants a good, happy experience, then while you might want to be aware of these things, you don’t want to make it so complex that your reader leaves feeling conflicted, so take this for what it is. As a writer, you must know what you’re writing and what kind of experience you want your reader to have. I want to give people something to think about for decades the way Flynn has to me. (Thanks, sis.) I love it. Literally, what a gift—a book and a story with characters I’m really curious about that I can spend years unspooling, much the way Nick in the opening pages of Gone Girl envisions doing to the coils and complex clock-like innerworkings of Amy’s vast and endlessly working brain.

That was what made me like Amy. I could relate. I could relate to having such a busy, complicated, and endlessly conversational mind that it makes you an outlier. I’ve often said I have Hermoine Granger syndrome—a compulsion to know everything about everything I find interesting. I have a 1 in my Profile for HD, and so this syndrome makes sense. Ones are investigators. This is my light side—I know that I love to read and research, and even when I shouldn’t because of time or more pressing priorities, I find myself drawn, moth like, to the flame of knowing and information. Though it's the aspect of awareness, this has, at less secure times in my life, led me to use research and information as a form of self-sabotage because I believed I couldn’t do something without knowing everything because I was terrified of being outed as an imposter.

But we’re past that now, and to be sure, that kind of insecurity was never Amy’s problem. But I related to that. What’s more, as Nick introduces Amy, we understand she’s complicated, but expressed through Nick’s tired, we just get the feeling that he’s a man who doesn’t really appreciate his wife and it sounds like he’s just annoyed that she has needs or emotions. And that, too, is relatable, so we immediately feel sorry for Amy. It’s the ground work for a reversal, and here’s where the genius begins.

Tip 2: Use your character’s blind spots, their flaws, as a metaphor for the structure (this is complicated, but it’s worth trying to notice and replicate)

Flynn plays with the reader the same way a narcissist jerks you around in a relationship. Damn she’s good. Not only is she revealing Amy as a narcissist the way you or I would if we were married to her, but so, too, does Flynn use her unreliable narrators to jerk us around to ensure we get the full trauma bond experience. Good times!

Amy is introduced in her own words through a contrived narrative that suits the impression she wants to create for us. In this case, the police. (Sorry if you haven’t read the book—you’ve had over a decade, so IDK what to tell you. Go read the book and then come back because there are more spoilers. Unlike a narcissist, I don’t want to ruin your life like that.) We meet diary Amy, a besotted, lovesick girl who is meeting Nick at a party that’s so pitch perfect we swoon along with Amy. Just one olive, though. (This is also brilliant as narcissists will create ways to make you both feel “special” and exclusive, which helps them isolate you and to create the idea that you’re soul mates. Amy even uses the term “soul mates”.)

Tip 3: Create moments that are tangible to show what you’re not saying about the character

So, we have this seemingly sweet beautiful woman who has been disappointed over and over and over. She is emblematic of the zeitgeist of the day—she is a feminist but also a romantic. She wants to find love with the right person. She doesn’t want to settle, and she doesn’t want to make herself small or less to appease someone else. She wants a man who will make her both protected and empowered, someone who—as Amy says, “will fuck me properly”. And that, too, is relatable. She makes a point about the respectful men, the ones who treat your like you’re made of glass or like you’ll break, the ones like Desi, the ones who are so self-aware that they are afraid of their own passion. For anyone who’s been in their 20s trying to find some undefined “right” person who they trust they will know on sight, it makes so much sense.

Tip 4: Make your characters vulnerable and relatable. Give them issues that are relevant to your reader. Using social or cultural concerns is a good way to approach that—social injustice.

She’s just vulnerable enough, and so we believe her. Just like you would if you met one in real life. Whatever their narrative is, there is only a sliver of truth and authenticity, and they know how to act because they’ve studied personalities enough, they’ve learned how to respond well enough to get their needs met (and we all do this—we all are actors—we learn it in childhood), to know exactly what you want to hear. The really good ones are extremely dialed in and can rely on intuition as well. What’s more is that they know how to be charming and are extremely disarming. It doesn’t help if they’re, like Amy, distractingly beautiful.

Flynn used a very classic narcissistic personality for Amy because the subtypes can be so hard to discern. For example, a covert narcissist will have the aggrandized sense of self, but they’ll use self-depreciating tactics to get attention, sympathy, and feedback. If you’re insecure or codependent, two things I was, covert insecurity can give you pause and lead you to wonder if you’re a narcissist. Here’s the best litmus test—you meet a woman who is sad because she’s just miscarried her baby. You don’t know her very well, and you’ve never had a baby, but she’s very sad and you want to be helpful. What do you say? How do you feel? How do you know what to say?

If you empathized or tried to put yourself in her shoes—imagined what it felt like when your puppy died or your grandmother or you picture your niece or nephew and imagined your sibling’s pain should that child have not survived or maybe you picture yourself in her shoes and really feel her pain, then you’re not a narcissist. You might be insecure, you might have a few narcissistic behavioral qualities, but you’re not a narcissist. Your ability to give a shit about other people’s feelings and to prioritize meeting the needs of others over your own sets you apart from the people who fall into this category.

So, this is Amy’s type. We’ve met her. She’s beautiful and charming. She’s clearly interested in Nick, but oh no—they lose touch! We see a flash of narcissistic rage when Nick finds Amy at the bodegas in Manhattan and they reconnect. She’s angry she didn’t hear from him—and we’ll find out what she did in that little relationship hiatus later. It’s all carefully scripted to strike just the right tone. Narcissists, you’ll see curate their experiences to manipulate your emotions. Again, so fun.

Tip 5: Leave situations open to interpretation—don’t ever tell readers how to feel. Don’t make villains obvious. Make them figure it out for themselves. Y’all enjoy your fight!

So we’re getting love bombed by Amy—we’re learning her story through her eyes. Meanwhile Nick is in present time, his wife is missing, and he’s being really cagey. He’s not really that concerned that she’s gone—he’s really just a fish out of water. Nick is the other half of any narcissistic relationship.

Codependent people—anxious and avoidant types, people who are not secure, draw to each other like magnets, and it’s the worst and most dysfunctional attraction because it’s volatile and not sustainable because you have two people who are looking outward to get their needs met, two people who need constant validation from the other person to know that they’re enough. And Nick is very much emblematic of the emotionally avoidant man, the man who was raised to be a man while being constantly told he was not a man, a man whose creative curiosities and sensitivities were oddities in his rural Missouri township. When people grow up believing that they are wrong, that their nature is wrong, that they are not enough, they struggle to really show up for anyone, themselves included. This avoidance is the exact worse thing for someone like Amy, someone who needs constant stimulation, feedback, and approval.

Because of this, Nick’s lack of decisiveness or confidence in his ability to act comes across as indifference. Because he struggles to express any range of emotions other than “I’m a smiling and happy man—see how happy I am?” and misogynistic fury inherited from his father, he doesn’t seem to be that upset, which the reader interprets as guilt. And Nick is not blameless, but his behaviors make sense in the context of this kind of relationship dynamic. For a book that is such a bastion of the psychological thriller genre, the characters’ behaviors are textbook.

Anyway, relative to the way Flynn manipulates the reader, we are basically experiencing Nick through Amy’s POV. We’re getting a little bit of Nick’s story, and these narratives because there’s such disparity in Amy’s glowing and adoring memoirs of their early courtship versus Nick’s embittered cynical fury on their five-year anniversary, causes readers to try to fill in the gaps. We assume something must have happened because right now, we don’t know that both of these characters are unreliable narrators, and if you’ve ever been in a relationship with a narcissist, then you know that the narrator is very, very unreliable, and that can really mess with your own sense of reality. Read on.

There will (should) be signs best witnessed in hindsight

The story builds like this for Part I. Through Nick’s investigation into Amy’s disappearance and past, we learn that she was all of these things that help put together the narcissistic profile, but it’s sprinkled throughout so nonchalantly that you really don’t see it until the end and you go back and go, “Ohhhhh,” which is exactly what you want. You don’t want the reader to go through it squealing, “Run, Nick! She’s a narcissist!” You want them to go through it like they’re being slammed around a Tilt-a-Whirl, just like they’d feel if they were with a narcissist.

I digress, so here are the signs Flynn drops us (breadcrumbs, if you will—narcissists, such as Amy often only ever give you breadcrumbs) that Amy is not who she wants us to think she is.

--the “It” girl at school—the girl boys wanted and the girl who girls wanted to be

--she was aesthetically stunning and had no problem attracting men

--she was brilliant, competent, capable, and quick-witted

--she would idealize partners, expecting them to be perfect and then withdrawing coldly when they ultimately disappointed them, when they turned out to be just humans (this is because narcissists cannot cope with their own flaws and when they see them in others, they get angry—kind of like emotional vampires…exactly like emotional vampires. Your flaws are their oak stake. You may as well stab yourself now and get it over with. I’m kidding. Don’t do that. No stabbing.)

--Amy has some male friends who she keeps at “just the right arm’s length”—Nick reflects on the way she clearly wants him to play protector / hero while allowing her to have her freedom, which indicates the cognitive dissonance she feels at both believing she’s a victim and very, very deserving.

--Nick outright says Amy is righteous and recalls an experience where she punished a truck driver by calling to report him repeatedly until he was fired just because he cut her off. Narcissists believe in revenge and retribution and punishment. You will not know what you did, but you will know you did something wrong. They will bait you and manipulate you into reacting and because you’ve told them so much truth about you and because they know your weaknesses, you’re screwed.

We see this most pronouncedly with the treasure hunt Amy does for the anniversaries. She’s historically used it to affirm her limited negative believes spawned by insecurity that Nick doesn’t love her. He’s not paying attention to her. She doesn’t matter.

Now, Nick is a bit neglectful, but the biggest aspect of Amy that’s narcissistic is that she pretended to be someone she wasn’t to get Nick. Narcissists will say whatever you want to hear. I have heard from phone addicts that no, they, too like to plug their phone up and have meaningful conversations, after I described having a drink with a friend and she spent all of the time playing on her phone, we barely talked. I’d talked about how certain types of friends only talked about themselves (I feel like I do this sometimes, so I try to be really, really mindful to not let my bullshittery run the show, and I try to not always talk about “issues”.) and never asked anything about me. Part of me used to like this because it let me stay invisible, but that’s not healthy and real friendships have to be about mutual interest and exchange. So, this information gets leveraged later. They know they can hurt you by showing dispassionate disinterest. They know your weaknesses, what boosts your ego, etc., so they can get what they want from you because while they may allegedly love you, it’s not you. It’s how they feel in response to you that they love. It’s how you make them look or feel. It’s what you do for them. As soon as your stop providing whatever it is they want from you, you’re screwed.

And you’ll feel like it’s your fault. Throughout the marriage as Nick became increasingly tired and disillusioned, his melancholy complicated by their twin layoffs and his mother’s cancer, he stopped trying because nothing he could do was good enough. But, because Flynn is manipulating our impression of these characters and because so often the scapegoat character in a marriage, the vulnerable part of the codependent bond (and note, both characters can be narcissists, and I do think that this is somewhat happening here, which is why Nick isn’t blameless and it’s why we can’t unequivocally get on his side), is predisposed to also be the fixer, to make the effort, to accept blame and accountability, we see Nick apologizing and feeling like a bad person for his—albeit, foolish, reactions to his marriage to Amy.

Nick has an affair, and that’s the point that—yes, as Nick says, we stop liking him. It’s hard to champion a cheater, even if he’s been starved of attention and any kind of support. The story of him kissing his wife’s shoulder and masturbating alone is so resonant for anyone who has ever been soul-crushingly lonely even though they’re not really alone. Being alone is preferable to loneliness.

And had it not been for the logistics of his life, the bar—the money of Amy’s tied up in it, he’d have divorced her, and like most narcissists, Amy knew he was getting ready to leave, and that’s why she put her plan into action (that and it was the anniversary). But if you have experience with narcissists, they know when you’re pulling away, when you’re about to stiffen your spine and get TF out of dodge, and so they do what’s called hoovering. Amy’s treasure hunt was both a masterful hoover—and Nick responded just like a codependent in a trauma bond, swooning, falling in love again, and feeling disoriented over his behavior during his deep discontent and misery.

Nick, like many who end up in these kinds of relationships, will regress in terms of security and maturity. It takes so much awareness and personal conviction and actionable choice to not get sucked in and to end up in a cycle of love bombing, infatuation, disillusionment, discard, and hoovering. This cycle will break you and it will make you feel like you’re crazy and wrong and broken and the problem. And so, you get desperate. And in Nick’s case, that was desperate enough to drink the from the well of young, innocent, undemanding and uncomplicated Andy’s attention and affection.

Affairs are so stigmatizing that this was just the right behavior to jerk the reader back to team Amy—narcissists are good at leveraging your reaction to their behavior as proof of their victim status, and again—they never take accountability no matter how badly they hurt you, no matter how unfortivable it is. They’re always, always, always provoked and that is your fault. They cannot be held accountable for what they do. And this is why Amy feels no guilt whatsoever when she sets Nick up to die in prison for cheating on her. She so dramatically conflates the metaphor of his “killing” her love with infidelity to killing her—and perhaps it was that painful, I would imagine it would be because even though Amy is a reactive, manipulative monster of a character, she’s still a human being. She’s sensitive and hurting and is projecting all of her pain and suffering onto everyone around her. Like a child would, like my three-year-old did when her dad died.

My sweet, sensitive child screamed that she hated me when she’d get upset, and I couldn’t understand until her therapist explained that to her, I am like God. She can’t process the totality of existence and the permanence of death, and to her, I am what controls everything, so why would I let her daddy die? And so I understood and felt so much pain for her suffering, and I could understand why she was so angry. But what a child doesn’t understand is that God, the controlling factor of our feelings and how we show up in the world and of our ability to take accountability is not external—it’s internal. It’s the God within that enables us to heal from the inside out. (And you can call “God” whatever you want. I also say the universe, knowing, inner light, helen, whatever. (I don’t say helen—I just made that up, but I don’t hate it.)

Had Nick grabbed any other crutch that a person absolutely might be inclined to in these circumstances like alcohol (my former toxic coping crutch of choice), shopping, drugs, gambling, whatever, it would’ve been different. It would’ve not been seen as such a betrayal, an absolute gut punch to his wife. And because we are human and most of us empathize and we project and can relate to betrayal, we turn on Nick. Just like Amy wants us to. She wants everyone to hate Nick. Classic narcissistic move. The smear campaign.

Even if they let you go, they overt ones who are the most toxic still want to control you. You don’t get to get away. You don’t get to be happy—not after you failed them, and you will pay. So, many of them don’t set you up for murder, though some might now that they have a roadmap, but they’ll ruin your life in other ways. They’ll lie about you to all of your friends. They’ll spin things in a way, such as Amy did with Hilary Handy or the man who allegedly raped her or with poor, obsessive besotted Desi, that frame her as both victim and heroine.

(Don’t think that I’m not aware of this in my own life, the fact that I was put into those roles without wanting to, but the difference is—I don’t want get off on it. I don’t use it to get attention. I don’t want attention or pity or consolation prizes or whatever else it is that narcissists use exaggerated versions of their suffering for. I just want to be normal and happy. Narcissists don’t want to be okay. They must always have some kind of drama. A medical ailment. A stalker. A weather catastrophe. If circumstances don’t present themselves, they might create them—such as Amy pretending she had a blood phobia. That served a lot of purposes for her.

A more covert person might eschew going to the doctor, they might claim to be “too busy” despite evidence to the contrary, and they will want sympathy when they do anything for anyone else—they’ll want to be acknowledged and rewarded for the effort of doing anything for anyone else, which is so draining for anyone on the receiving end of that “help” and “generosity”. Everything is a barter to them provided they don’t just outright assume that they’re entitled to whatever you have to offer them (ex: men who believe that women are obligated to cook and clean for them regardless of that person’s efforts elsewhere or physical or emotional needs is a common example of this kind of narcissism. This belief is often motivated by religious zealotry and employment of patriarchal ideals, which the narcissist uses to justify imposing his will on his partner without any kind of empathy or concern for their needs. No one owes anyone anything.).

It was in Sharp Objects where Flynn writes about Camille’s toxic mother who has Munchausen by proxy that everything bad that has ever happened to anyone else happens to my mother. Narcissists leave no air in the room whatsoever. They suffocate you (which might explain this dream I had the other day—someone whose narcissistic behavior affected me was near me in the water where we were treading above the surface. I had a dive mask on, and I couldn’t breathe all of the sudden. I woke up while I was trying to get it off.).

I’m going to leave this off because I think that just this analysis of Part I really reveals how Flynn shows us that Amy is a narcissist while also revealing how their manipulation works by manipulating the reader with the structure in terms of both dual narrative voices and the different time periods in the book. This created a really nice effect that is both perfect for the psychological thriller genre—you must be kept guessing, and that is representative of what it feels like to be with a narcissist—you are always guessing and walking on eggshells, and how they operate. It’s so subtle.

What ensues in the subsequent parts is Amy truly becoming a victim of her own circumstances. In true narcissistic fashion, she uses, manipulates, rationalizes, and cajoles and acts to reset her life in a way that undeniably champions her. She justifies and genuinely believes that she’s the victim and the heroine and that she had every right to do what she did and that anything good that happens next—her book deal, Nick’s capitulation, the replenishment of her trust fund from sales of the Amazing Amy books, are all things that she deserves, and she grew as a character not at all. Amy is the most dynamic character with a flat arc I have ever seen. So good.