Modern Life Jane Thynne
Knight, I Let You Go and I See You by Clare Mackintosh, Fiona Barton’s The
Widow, Rosamund Lupton’s Sister, and Sabine Durrant’s Under Your Skin and Remember Me This Way.
The female protagonists are also a far cry from Rebecca. No more Manderley, these are women from Acacia Avenue and lead messy lives, tarnished with divorce, single parenting, domestic abuse and alcoholism. The latter is especially frequent, leading as it does to memory loss, always useful in a plot. In the case of
The Girl on the Train’s Rachel, heavy drinking has led to mental blackouts and in S J Watson’s bestseller Before I Go To
Sleep the female narrator wakes every morning with total amnesia, entirely unable to remember who she is. Very convenient, as Hercule Poirot might say.
Nor are the inhabitants of Griplit all victims, as young pretty women might have been in previous thriller genres. In
Gone Girl, clever, likeable Amy fakes her own rape. In AS A Harrison’s The Silent
Wife, we know the narrator has murdered her husband from the first chapter. Marriages unravel amid a cauldron of dark realism and family skeletons. Gillian Flynn says her novel is ‘not a particularly flattering portrait of women, but that’s fine by me.’
So what makes women crave these unsympathetic narrators? Perhaps it’s the fact that these novels hold up a mirror to a recognisable cocktail of ageing, parenting, controlling men and toxic suburban marriages. Characters worry about picking up the kids as well as being stalked by a psychotic ex. Dangers lurk in the domestic, and threats come not from serial killers, but those closer to home. The husbands who sob their way through police press conferences. The sociopaths who dole out the kids’ cereal.
In terms of its name alone, Griplit evolved because publishing loves a tag. Think Dadlit, Ladlit and Sicklit. When first grappling for a title, Griplit was dubbed Chick noir – the dark successor to Chicklit, the 1990s phenomenon in which romance prevailed and everything ended happily. Indeed, that must be where Griplit had its roots. No doubt once the denizens of Chicklit got married, settled in the suburbs and enjoyed their passing flirtation with Fifty Shades, the emergence of Griplit’s divorced, alcoholic, world-weary sisterhood was only a matter of time.