Hawkins’s strong, flawed women
The novelist talks her interest in troubled characters and the success of The Girl on the Train
Book review
Into the Water Paula Hawkins Doubleday Canada
Into the Water is Paula Hawkins’s difficult second novel, except it’s her sixth. Before her 2015 thriller The Girl on the Train sold more than 20 million copies and was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster, Hawkins, then a freelance business journalist, wrote a series of romantic comedies under the pen name of Amy Silver (there were also a couple of non-fiction books providing financial advice to women and parents).
Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista and All I Want For Christmas did not set the publishing world alight, and Hawkins was on the verge of giving up on novels when she decided to turn to the altogether darker subjects of alcoholism and domestic violence. Buoyed by a loan from her father, an academic and journalist, she gave it one last shot.
The gamble paid off, and last year Hawkins leapfrogged George R. R. Martin and Dan Brown to claim a place on Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid authors, with annual earnings of $10 million.
Meeting Hawkins, one gets the impression that despite the riches, she might actually prefer to be slumming it as Amy Silver, or at least as a financial hack at a newspaper. “I miss that buzz when something exciting happens in a newsroom,” she says. “And obviously, journalists are fun people, so I miss that, too.”
She looks shell-shocked by all that has happened over the past couple of years, as if she had gone out with a metal detector looking for bits and bobs and stumbled on a treasure chest.
Despite the success of The Girl on the Train, she is nervous about the release of the followup, a dense thriller set in a fictional town told from the point of view of 11 different characters.
“People talk about books all the time and you expect them to do great things and then they sink. So this is, you know, the nerve-racking time. The weeks before.”
When did she know The Girl on the Train was going to be big? “Well nobody expects this, nobody expects things to take off in quite the way that (the novel) did. I thought that it felt like a quiet book, actually.”
Into the Water has much in common with its predecessor, featuring, as it does, a succession of flawed women and thoroughly unlikable men — in this case, rapists, pedophiles and murderers. There are moody daughters, mysterious sisters, grieving parents and corrupt cops.
“I wanted to do something about family and community, and I wanted to give it that feeling you get in a small town where everybody knows each other,” Hawkins says. “I’ve never lived in one before.” Hawkins grew up in Zimbabwe and moved to London when she was 17, before studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, but has always “wondered if living somewhere where everyone knows each other’s business actually makes you more secretive, like you feel you have to hide more.”
Hawkins is very, very good at creating strong but ultimately flawed women, modern-day witches. Rachel, the anti-heroine of The Girl on the Train, is an alcoholic painted so painfully brilliantly that her story was at times hard to read. “I think that Rachel, for a lot of us, she’s where we might have gone, where we’ve all seen ourselves,” Hawkins says. “Given the right circumstances — job loss, marriage breakdown — I could have slid off the edge just like she did.
“Pretty much everyone in my books is a little bit troubled, but those are the things that are interesting, aren’t they? Pulling apart people whose lives are going a bit wrong and finding out why and getting into the psychology of it, and watching them work through it. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m interested in.”