Last summer, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl – which sold more than two million copies and is being made into a Hollywood film – brought out unsettling streaks in some of my married girlfriends. With Flynn’s husband-hating heroine, Amy, as their role model, these women sat around planning the imaginary stitching-up and neutralisation of their spouses over last orders and a dwindling bowl of edamame beans. They hypothesised about their partners’ possible infidelities with a perverse enjoyment, and came out with oblique generalities (“nobody really knows the man they married”) in tones I’d never heard them use before. A year on, they’re actively planning their husbands’ murders.