With Gillian Flynn, the Gone Girl goddess, coming back to her hometown soon, why not flash back to the feature profile I put together in 2012. At the time, Flynn’s writing career and personal life had begun to soar. She graciously allowed me to visit with her in her Chicago home and to follow along as she appeared at a bookstore reading. That’s when it got really interesting—though I left this little detail out of my magazine piece. (Why oh why? It shoulda been the lede, maybe?) I was a passenger in Flynn’s car as we returned to her place from the suburban bookstore. At one busy intersection, she made a left turn…INTO THE WRONG, ONCOMING LANE, if I recall correctly. It didn’t take long to correct the driving error, but still. We joked about how maybe she was having the impulse to bump off this nosy writer. Whatever. Maybe she tells the story differently. Maybe she doesn’t even remember it. Although we shared a stage once in an event for the Mid-Continent Library, we’ve had little to no contact ever since. It certainly has been fun to follow her projects over the years, and nice to hear that she’s struggling to work on another novel. In any case, I’m sharing here the magazine pages of that story, published just about a dozen years ago, Nov. 12, 2012, in The Kansas City Star Magazine (remember when?). Some of the photographs are mine; I was happy to line us up with my friend Emily Railsback, who had recently resettled in Chicago, to shoot the cover portrait.