Since my companion died in August, I’ve doped myself before bed with genre fiction and a bottle of wine. After 10 years of legal assaults, including three simultaneous ones as of this writing, alcohol is the only thing that quiets my mind and affords me a few hours of oblivion. I’m into my third novel by thriller writer Gillian Flynn. (The movie Gone Girl, about a woman who fakes her death to frame her husband for murder, is based on a Flynn novel.)

The woman in this photo, Marty Grist, has persecuted a friend of the writer’s for several years by lying about him in social media and on public record. Her reign of malicious self-publicity abruptly ended when she testified to a judge (the most recent of numerous) that he’d “hacked” her phone, computer, and email account (from his house across the street) and said she had some record (“someplace”) that proved he was a disbarred attorney who had “embezzled” from his clients (both serious charges and both false). She reported on Facebook, besides, that he had mooned her friends and provoked invisible dogs to howl at her for hours. She has two daughters and teaches children for a living. (The writer’s accuser, who was isolated as a child, is also the daughter of a schoolteacher.)

I won’t give away its plot, but her novel Sharp Objects involves “MBP” or Munchhausen (Syndrome) by Proxy. It’s a mental illness that induces a caretaker, usually a parent and usually the maternal parent, to sicken a child to get attention. Recall the movie Sixth Sense.

Flynn, besides being a delicious writer, plays rock-‘em-sock-‘em with feminist dogma. Her villains, who are seriously villainous, are all women.

If Flynn is a feminist, and I think she is, she’s the real thing. None of her female characters are weak, least of all the monstrous ones. I’d call her honest negotiation of male-female dynamics (thoughts, actions, interactions) “refreshing” if that word weren’t moldy. She’s bravely candid (she’s accurate), and she doesn’t play for (or pander to) a “team.” There’s nothing flinching about her or her writing.

Munchhausen by Proxy, pathological behavior that figures in her novel Sharp Objects, exemplifies (with science) that there are women who commit heinous abuses to draw attention to themselves and excite drama, and this is one of the motives the FBI remarks is common to cases of false accusation. It’s also a motive for bullying, which can include crying wolf  (BullyOnline.org, now defunct, formerly had a page devoted to MBP). The disease MBP is just a metaphor writ large for what women do when they go wrong: They poison. (Both false accusation and crying wolf figure in the plot of Flynn’s novel Gone Girl.)

Flynn’s stories involve violent murders by people of the “fairer sex,” but the female violence they portray best is the psychological kind: sinuous, spiteful, and constant.

Mainstream feminists militate against the notion that women are attention-oriented, competitive, or catty…or that they can lie unconscionably to exact petty revenge for some perceived slight.

That’s a fictional bubble in need of collision with a sharp object.

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