Gillian Flynn

Flynn was born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in midtown Kansas City's Coleman Highlands neighborhood.^[7][8] Both of her parents were professors at Metropolitan Community College–Penn Valley: her mother, Judith Ann (née Schieber), was a reading-comprehension professor, and her father, Edwin Matthew Flynn, was a film professor.^{[8][9][10][11]} She has an older brother, Travis, who is a railroad machinist.^[8] Her uncle is Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Robert Schieber.^[8] Flynn was "painfully shy" and found escape in reading and writing.^[8] When she was growing up, Flynn's father would take her to watch horror movies.^[8][9]

Flynn attended Bishop Miege High School and graduated in 1989.^[8][12] As a teenager, she worked odd jobs which required her to do things such as dress up as a giant "yogurt cone who wore a tuxedo."^[12][13]

She attended the University of Kansas, where she received her undergraduate degrees in English and journalism.^[13] She spent two years in California, writing for a trade magazine for human resources professionals, before moving to Chicago and attending Northwestern University^[12] for a master's degree at its Medill School of Journalism in 1997.^[14][15] Flynn initially wanted to work as a police reporter, but she chose to focus on her own writing, as she discovered she had "no aptitude" for police reporting.^[16][17]