Depression In Gillian Flynn's 'Sharp Objects'

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Everyone has a different life story, and not everyone knows what is happening in other people's lives. In the novel, Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn, Camille Preaker is a journalist for the Daily Post in Chicago. Camille is sent to write a report in her hometown, Wind Gap. This report is about the Nash family; they had a total of four kids, but Natalie Keene, the youngest girl in the family, gets murdered and they have no idea how and why it happened. When Camille first arrives in Wind Gap, she begins looking at the case and eventually solves the mystery of what was going on in Natalie's life. Gillian Flynn makes it very easy to predict if Camille will solve the mystery, also to characterize Natalie, and to question why Camille is deciding to solve this case herself. The author, Gillian Flynn, makes the reader predict throughout the whole story whether Camille will solve …show more content…

Two ways to describe Natalie are, depressed and very quiet. “It was that summer too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as to my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth,”(Flynn). Natalie shows her depression throughout the story in many ways. First, she has some extremely bad habits such as cutting herself, smoking weed, and overdosing on pills. Her reason for doing this is that she believes it will solve all of her problems. Although Natalie has two older sisters as great role models, she is the complete opposite of them. When her older sisters have problems, they always decide to talk to someone to get it out of their mind. On the other hand, when Natalie has a problem, she either does drugs, cuts herself, or runs away and makes bad choices with older men. The sad part about this is, Natalie's parents are unaware of the stress and depression she is experiencing. The author, Gillian Flynn, clearly shows what things happen in the real world every single