GONE GIRL RIDES AGAIN!
It’s what thriller fans have been waiting for... a sinister mystery with a troubled heroine to rival Gillian Flynn’s monster hit of 2013. Paula Hawkins tells More how her commute inspired The Girl On The Train... and saved her from ruin
Are you violent? Have you ever killed someone? These are impertinent questions to ask when you meet a stranger for a drink, but Paula Hawkins likes them. ‘I’m not violent,’ she says with a halfsmile. ‘I am interested in violence.’
This elegant, enigmatic woman is not a killer, but she sure knows how they think. The 42-year-
old has the look of a younger Gillian Anderson, but is actually the author of The Girl On The
Train, the runaway hit thriller of the year. ‘I have a fascination with the nasty things people do to each other and the way relationships go wrong, and how there can be this very dark underbelly to seemingly normal, mundane domestic life,’ says Hawkins with quiet relish. ‘They’re the stories in the newspapers I always find interesting. That’s not a very nice thing to admit to, is it?’
No, maybe not, but an awful lot of us must share the same dark interests, because when we meet, her gripping debut is the No.1 bestseller in hardback fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Girl On The Train tells the story of Rachel, a gin-soaked, troubled commuter who stares out of her carriage window into the same back gardens every day and becomes obsessed with a couple she sees there. When Rachel hears on the news that the woman has disappeared, she believes she may have seen something vital to the case. But she can’t trust her memory, and trying to find out the truth puts her own life in danger.
‘We’ve sold a lot of books,’ says Hawkins, who has come out of nowhere to be this year’s most popular thriller writer. She can’t really believe it and shakes her head at the thought. ‘Over a million...’
And that is only since the beginning of January, when The Girl On
The Train was published here and in America and was immediately spectacularly successful, beyond her wildest dreams.
‘We were optimistic that it was going to do well, but nothing on this scale. It’s really quite extraordinary.’
The fact is, she needed this. Two years ago she was down on her luck. Hawkins used to be a financial journalist on The Times, then she wrote romantic novels under the name Amy Silver. The books did okay, then sales plummeted. ‘The final one just bombed,’ she admits. ‘I was broke.’
Hawkins had wanted to be a writer since she was a little girl hooked on Agatha Christie, but now the dream had failed. ‘I was a bit of a mess,’ she says, as we drink tea in the café at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, south London, close to where she lives with an ex-boyfriend. ‘My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous.’
So she borrowed money from her father in order to eat and decided to give it one last go, writing the kind of thriller she had always loved to read. ‘It was the final roll of the dice.’
She thought back to long commutes to the office on London’s Tube, and signal delays that allowed her to examine windows, gardens and lives. What if something odd or nasty was visible from the train? What would you do? The Girl On The
Train is set in suburbia but crackles with psychological tension. Critics are calling it ‘domestic noir’.
She wrote in the voice of Rachel, an extremely unreliable narrator who tries to investigate a disappearance and gets into terrible trouble. Two other women also tell their side of the story, which quickly turns nasty.
The murderous moments are not explicit but you will still feel the knife go in, so to speak. ‘ I’m not really interested in the blood and gore because I think an awful lot of violent acts are simple, quick, almost stupid, unthinking impulses,’ she says. ‘ So it’s not about that itself, it’s about everything that builds up to that.
‘I wrote the first half really quickly because I was highly motivated. I just wrote and wrote for three or four months. I didn’t really do anything else. I was quite frantic about it, because I was worried.’
Her need for a deal was so urgent that the manuscript was sent out when only half of it had been written. The response was ‘ extraordinary’, a word she uses time and time again to describe what has happened to her. Agent Lizzy Kremer orchestrated an old-fashioned bidding war
Stephen King gave a quote for the jacket, saying the story kept him up all night
that resulted in a big advance. How much? ‘Six figures, yes. I would be shouted at if I gave any more details.’
Film rights were sold to Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio. Stephen King gave a quote for the jacket, saying the story kept him up all night. The New York Times gave the book a glowing review in January, causing sales to snowball.
Why has this happened? ‘I keep saying, “I don’t know.” You hope part of it is the book.’ An even bigger part is the long, expensive and cleverly orchestrated promotional campaign inspired by Gone Girl.
Gillian Flynn’s novel about a crazed wife who frames her husband for her own murder was the surprise success of 2013 and was turned into a film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Female thriller writers became the rage after that. Hawkins was chosen as the next big thing and could not be more grateful.
‘It’s very hard to be the one who breaks through unless you get a big push, which I happened to get because they could sell it. The book has a good hook – that you see something on your commute – good title, easy to package, easy to sell.’
Does she know a Rachel, knocking back tins of ready-mixed gin and tonic a bit too freely? ‘I think lots of us know that person, who is walking a pretty fine line. You can see that if something happened, like their relationship broke down or they lost a job, they’d slip over the edge.’
Two-thirds of people who read thrillers are women – why is that? ‘I wonder if it’s because women are taught from childhood that they are under threat,’ she says.
‘It’s not actually true if you look at crime statistics, but women are often cast as the victims, aren’t they? So perhaps that’s why we fixate on it rather more and on the ways in which these things happen to people.’
The story also includes a painfully accurate account of what fertility treatment does to a couple, so was any of this written from experience? ‘I’ve not had IVF. I’ve not killed anybody and I’m not an alcoholic,’ she says bluntly and happily. ‘I like a drink, that’s for sure, and I mix in circles with lots of people who like to drink, and I’ve known people who like it rather too much.’
She has an impressively large turquoise oval on her ring finger – is she married? ‘I am single and without children. I’m actually one of those people who’s just never had a great desire to have kids.’
Her ex-boyfriend is a lodger in her house but they split up a long time ago and are like brother and sister. Hawkins is clever, cool and stylish, if a little guarded. She must have been like that before, but now she’s made a name for herself and she’s loaded too. How can she be single? She looks away and mutters: ‘Bad taste in men, I suppose.’
Having come from Zimbabwe to live in this country with her parents at the age of 17, she stayed to read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford; they went back to live in Harare. Wasn’t that dangerous? ‘They were never part of the farming thing – my father was an academic – so they weren’t at the very sharp end of it, but it’s kind of chaotic there.’
Like every great thriller writer, Hawkins looks on the darker side of life. ‘This may be a one-off. I may never have a bestseller again.’
Only time will tell. Nevertheless, instead of having to go back to an office job and a commute she has now retreated to her cottage to write a gothic thriller. She’ll never be the girl on the train again.