UMA THURMAN SAVED MY BOOK
The Kill Bill star told author Alex Michaelides how to rewrite his debut thriller... now it’s a No.1 bestseller and the film rights have been bought by Brad Pitt
Alex Michaelides has just flown in to London from the US, where his first novel has become a publishing sensation. The Silent Patient has gone to No.1 in The New York Times bestsellers list and the film rights have been bought by Brad Pitt. Everyone is talking about it. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ says the Cypriot-born author. ‘Absolutely incredible.’
It will become all the more incredible when Michaelides explains the genesis of his book, a story that involves Uma Thurman, Agatha Christie, the Turkish army and the 41-year-old’s early struggles with intense psychological problems. ‘Don’t they say that happy childhoods are not conducive to writing?’ he asks. ‘When I was younger I lived in a state of constant unease. One psychoanalyst has called it “nameless dread”. It means living your life feeling anxious and not knowing why.’
Nameless dread haunts the pages of The Silent Patient, a tense psychological thriller, obsessive love story and murder
mystery that begins with the death of 44year-old fashion photographer Gabriel Berenson in his north London home, apparently shot repeatedly in the face by Alicia, his younger artist wife.
Alicia refuses to talk during a murder trial that attracts worldwide attention, and continues her silence when she is placed in a secure psychological unit. Then a young psychotherapist, Theo Faber, decides to make Alicia speak. By the end of the book, which you’re likely to read in one sitting, we have learnt as much about Theo as we have about Alicia’s silence.
‘At school in Cyprus I was fascinated by Euripides’s myth of Alcestis,’ Michaelides says. ‘She died to save her husband and then, when she was brought back from death, she wouldn’t speak to him. That’s so unsettling and I never forgot it.’
Michaelides was born in Nicosia in 1977, three years after the Turkish invasion of the island. ‘We were brought up with propaganda about the Turks and the threat of another invasion,’ he says. ‘As a child you lived with that fear. I was always quite scared, always on edge.’ He attended the English School in Nicosia, where he was deeply unpopular with his peers. ‘I was bullied badly because I just wanted to read books,’ he says. ‘When I was 12 I received a letter signed by the entire class saying: “We hate you.” Psychological stuff is really hard to recover from, it leaves you for ever distrustful.’
Then, when Michaelides was 13, everything changed. ‘I discovered Agatha Christie,’ he says. ‘I read the lot in one summer and it was probably the happiest experience of my life.’
Michaelides left Cyprus to read English at Cambridge, then took an MA in screenwriting in Los Angeles. But he still carried his burden of anxiety. From the age of 20, he was in therapy, and in his early 30s he decided to train as a psychotherapist, working at a mental health unit in London. The institution appears, lightly disguised, in The Silent Patient. ‘The place was crumbling, there was just no funding,’ he says. ‘But it did wonderful work. We took kids who were scared and lost, and put them in a functioning community that healed them.’
Not long after that, Michaelides stopped having the therapy which, increasingly, he’d been finding distressing. ‘There came a moment when I just got up and said something pretentious like: “I feel like I’ve been abused and I paid for the privilege.” It was an awful moment, but it felt good to go out the door.’
He had learned that not all therapists are seekers of truth and light, an insight that is central to the plot of The Silent Patient.
He returned to scriptwriting. ‘I did a film called The Brits Are Coming. We had Uma Thurman, Tim Roth, Stephen Fry and Sofia Vergara. Uma and I became good friends. She transformed me as a writer. She would say: “It’s not EastEnders, every scene has to be an attempt at an iconic image.”’
Michaelides showed Thurman an early draft of The Silent Patient. ‘She said: “The first time we meet Alicia she can’t just be standing there, maybe she’s slashed her wrists. And she should be a painter, because if she doesn’t speak she can communicate that way, we can get inside her head.” So I rewrote the whole book.’
The result has been picked up in 44 countries around the world. His career could hardly be in a better place, but what about Michaelides himself? Has the anxiety finally gone? ‘Maybe I’ll always be a slightly anxious person, but I’m much better than I used to be.’ ‘The Silent Patient’ (Orion, €15) is out now.
‘When I was 12 I was sent a letter by the entire class saying, “We hate you”’