Flynn grew up in Kansas City, Mo., to parents who make a lot of sense. Her mother was a reading-comprehension professor at the local community college. Her father was a film professor at the same school, and the movies he took her to see before age 10 were rarely, in her words, “princess-led”: “The Great Santini,” “Alien,” “The Elephant Man.” After college at the University of Kansas, Flynn moved to California, planning to establish residency and apply to Berkeley to get a graduate degree in English. In the meantime, she found a job working at a trade magazine for human-resources professionals based in Orange County. When it came time to apply for graduate school, she went to Northwestern for a journalism degree instead, and from there moved to New York. She got a job at Entertainment Weekly, where she worked for 10 years, serving as both the “Lord of the Rings” beat writer and the television critic. She was able to move back to Chicago, a city she felt was “her place,” and keep the job, until she was laid off in 2008, not long before her second novel was to be published.

She went for a depressing meal at a diner called the Hollywood Café and briefly wondered if she’d have to respond to the Help Wanted sign in the window. She’d been a waitress before, she reasoned; she could do it again. But she’d already written two novels, and her time as a journalist had instilled in her a helpful work ethic and lack of preciousness: She could write fast, under pressure.

Though she didn’t have an idea for a new novel when she got laid off, she decided to use her severance to work out the first chapter of “Gone Girl.” She sold the book on the strength of those pages, not expecting that it would go on to become a massive hit — just as a reactive mode of feminist critique was starting to shape online discourse. Headlines like “Is ‘Gone Girl’ Feminist or Misogynist?” and “How ‘Gone Girl’ Is Misogynistic Literature” gave way to editorials outlining Flynn’s transgressions against women: though, of course, not all female characters must be likable, none of hers were, except maybe Amy’s sister-in-law, Go, who nevertheless has what one writer deemed stereotypical “daddy issues.” Amy was seen to fortify all sorts of harmful clichés about women, particularly for the craven way she falsifies a rape allegation, but also because she’s superannoying.

The book is told in his-and-hers alternating viewpoints, and at first Amy’s side of the story comes in the form of grating diary entries written in the semi-ironic, overadjectived voice of a young person trying to conceal that she really wants to be a writer but is too in love with how clever she is to manage it. In fact, she is a 38-year-old woman who only recently lost most of her trust fund because her parents — rich off a long-running series of children’s books called “Amazing Amy” — overspent. She lies about everything, which we know because she tells us, smugly. Though her husband, Nick, is not innocent of the crimes of lying and of writerly obnoxiousness (they’re both writers, sort of), he’s at least self-hating and working class. Given the choice, Amy is not the one you would rather hang out with.

The question that spawned a thousand think pieces is whether Amy’s overbearing, sociopathic self-awareness was an intentional artistic choice, and therefore whether Flynn is reflecting the pressures of patriarchy or blindly perpetuating them. This is further complicated by the fact that the diaries are later revealed to have been fabricated by Amy as evidence of Nick’s abuse, which could be read as either another point for “sexist portrayal of women as crazy liars” or for “a capable woman, driven to extremes by the patriarchy, is establishing her agency, and in a really messed-up way becoming the writer she’s always dreamed of being.”

Flynn’s response to these questions is refreshingly pragmatic: She wrote a character, and she wanted to see what that character would do under certain conditions. Still, the furor upset her. Though she has always been aware of feminism in general, and identifies as a feminist, she says she could be better versed in feminist theory, and was blindsided by the occasionally vitriolic accusations of misogyny she faced. No, most women don’t falsify rape claims, she says, but most women also don’t frame their cheating husbands for their own murders. Flynn remembers one negative review in particular — of the movie adaptation, directed by David Fincher — which she paraphrased for me: “It ended by saying that Fincher and I had found in each other evil soul twins of death, that we were riding off into the sunset into hell and that on the back of our car it said, ‘Just Married.’ ” Reading it made her wonder, only half-jokingly, if she’d “killed” feminism.

Flynn drives a cherry red Jeep Wrangler Rubicon convertible, which is a little dirty, the floor inside covered in dead leaves. The day after I visited her office, she suggested we drive to her old Chicago neighborhood, Ukrainian Village, to recreate the daily “walk of woe” she took while writing “Gone Girl.” “Girls’ trip!” she said, in a sardonic imitation of a Valley Girl accent, as she got in the driver’s seat. “Let’s talk about female empowerment!” As we pulled out of her garage, she dropped the ironic act to earnestly make sure I had sunscreen; the top was liberatingly down.