Paula Hawkins: The woman behind The Girl on the Train

There are not many authors who can say their lucky break came with the banking collapse of 2008 but Paula Hawkins, author of the record-breaking British thriller The Girl on the Train, is one. As a personal finance journalist working at the Times, in 2007 she brought out a book called The Money Goddess aimed at women who needed to get in touch with their pensions. When disaster struck a year later, it was Hawkins her agent called with an idea for a crash-themed novel.

She has come far since her debut novel, the romcom Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, written under the pseudonym Amy Silver, hit the shelves. After her fourth Silver romcom bombed in 2013 Hawkins decided to reboot, and the book that emerged with her real name on the cover last year turned her into a phenomenon. The Girl on the Train has spent 13 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and held the top spot in the UK hardback charts for 30 weeks, the longest ever. Next week’s paperback launch coincides with the arrival of a trailer soundtracked by Kanye West for a forthcoming Hollywood film, starring Emily Blunt as the drunken voyeur heroine Rachel Watson.

Hawkins, who is 43 and grew up in Zimbabwe before moving to the UK and doing a degree at Oxford, now says the lighter stuff she was writing before never came naturally, and part of her was always pulling in a deeper and darker direction. But she had no inkling that “drunk girl”, as she dubbed Rachel, would take off in the way she has.

“When I gave 30,000 words to my agent she was like, ‘Oh God yes, this is right, this is fantastic,’ but I don’t think I ever really felt it. She kept saying it was going to be good, but it was one of those things when you’re not sure; it’s like your mum telling you you’re pretty,” she says in the smart hotel where we are drinking tea around the corner from the flat she has just bought in Clerkenwell, central London.

As for comparisons with Gillian Flynn’s 2012 bestseller Gone Girl, with which her novel is often bracketed, Hawkins feels they are a bit flimsy: “I think people draw parallels because you’ve got an unlikable or difficult female protagonist, the breakdown of a marriage and a missing woman, and also the unreliable narrator,” she says. But “I actually don’t think Rachel is that unlikable. She’s let herself spin out of control, but many of us walk a bit close to that line without crossing it. You could imagine if something dramatic happened like a failed marriage or lost job then we might, so that’s how I see Rachel. I’m very sympathetic to her.”

Others take a harsher view, with feminist literary scholar Jacqueline Rose arguing in the London Review of Books that Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train turn abuse of women “into a treat”, and are examples of a misogynist upsurge “nastier” than previous backlashes against feminism. For Rose, Rachel’s redemption as a sleuth is more than cancelled out by her humiliation, and she ends her essay with a warning: “If women can take pleasure in what they have most to fear, then so can everybody else.”

But love it, hate it, or anything in between, there is no question that The Girl on the Train has grabbed the zeitgeist. Crime fiction is booming, to the dismay of those writers and readers who feel that, for the moment, murder plots have usurped style, character and everything else. For those who haven’t read it, The Girl on the Train is less political and perverse than Stieg Larsson, the Swedish writer whose The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo kicked off the vogue for crime fiction with “girl” in the title; it is more prosaic than Gone Girl – with its sensational false accusations and shocking twist – and less literary than Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard, another British hit, which is currently being filmed for the BBC.

Hawkins has a sharp turn of phrase, a solid feel for her lead character and the trials of middle-class female thirtysomethings in general (with fertility, or lack of it, high up the list of preoccupations), and a sense of humour evidenced by Rachel’s choice of murder weapon. But the book’s commercial success rests on the decision to turn the suburban dream into a nightmare filled with vicarious possibility for those reading this thriller about commuting on their own early morning commute.

Having decided years ago that she didn’t want children, Hawkins says she got fed up with the romantic subject matter expected of her alter ego Amy Silver: “I tried to write about people who were ambivalent about marriage and children, and to avoid writing as though a man and a baby is enough to make you happy. I think pinning all your hopes on a relationship is probably a very bad idea.” Rachel is the antithesis of such domestically gratified figures: she has thrown away her perfect man and ideal home thanks to failed fertility treatment and alcoholism, and now lodges with a well-meaning friend who she can’t bear to tell that she’s been fired from her job in London. So she catches the same train she used to, from Witney (a fictional town in Buckinghamshire and no relation to the prime minister’s Oxfordshire constituency) each day. Since the railway line runs at the foot of the gardens of the Victorian houses on her old street, Blenheim Road, she spends the journey in a masochistic frenzy of peering at her former home, now with a pink nursery done up for her ex’s baby with his new and unbearably smug wife Anna.

Rachel also spies on another couple a few doors along, whom she nicknames Jason and Jess until she learns that their real names are Scott and Megan. When Megan goes missing, the opportunity for a chaotic and drunken bout of amateur crime-fighting presents itself. The book’s best moments are Rachel’s worst, as readers well versed in police rules find their jaws falling open at her appalling judgment and behaviour.

Rachel, though, isn’t really a “girl” at 32, and Hawkins agrees it is hard to imagine a divorced, hard-drinking male protagonist being called a boy. “I colloquially refer to women as girls all the time, and when I was talking to my agent we used to refer to Rachel as “drunk girl” before she had a name. It was a working title that never got changed. I did think about it, I thought she should be the woman on the train but it never sounded as good and I knew it wouldn’t be a popular thing to suggest, so I just went with it. But I won’t do that again. She isn’t a girl.”

But Hawkins defends Rachel against the charge of being so dislikable as to be woman-hating, and sticks up for Flynn too: “I find it odd that thing about the sexual politics of Gone Girl. I know Amy Dunne [the lead character] makes false allegations [including rape] but I don’t think Flynn is suggesting that happens often, she’s writing about an extraordinary, sociopathic character. I was rooting for Amy the whole way through because the husband is so dreadful.” She laughs.

Whether or not she can repeat the success of The Girl on the Train, the writer of The Money Goddess is now rich. Having seen the novel she regarded at the time as her best, The Reunion, sell fewer than 1,000 copies, she is not getting carried away. “It’s very easy for a novel to disappear if you don’t get supermarket promotions or a review in a newspaper,” she says.

If fame leaves her cold, the money is a “huge relief”. She remembers her childhood as idyllic, and it wasn’t until years later that she recognised Zimbabwe’s problems. Though she is now British, her parents still live there and she says she will naturally be drawn to things connected with Africa when it comes to charitable giving: “It’s a huge privilege, but you have a responsibility to spread it around a bit.”

Her father is an economics professor and Hawkins once dreamed of being a foreign correspondent. She now thinks she would have been “terrible – I’m not nearly intrepid enough”. Instead, she has found her vocation in the invention of fictional dangers, and the promise that draws readers to books like hers, to explore “frightening things in a safe environment”.

Her own bugbear in crime fiction is mutilated, faceless, female corpses, which she thinks have a pornographic aspect. She is not a fan of police procedurals, either (two exceptions are Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels and Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley on TV). But she believes “there are ways in which you can write about murder without being titillating. The book I’m writing now has more than one death in it, but it’s to do with how you treat the people you’re writing about.”

The character with a drinking problem so acute it leaves huge gaps in her memory, Hawkins explains, arrived separately from the suburban commuter thriller idea. The Girl on the Train was what happened when she put the two together. She thought: “What if the drunk girl is the girl on the train?” From a psychological point of view, she was interested in how a person with an unreliable memory becomes easy to manipulate, and the book she is working on, expected next year, takes up a similar theme with a story of two sisters and their conflicting recollections of childhood.

She was interested, too, in her characters’ contrasting feelings about motherhood: while Rachel is in mourning (of a deranged sort) for the pregnancy denied her, Megan doesn’t want a baby, and even Anna is starting to notice cracks in her carapace of wifely bliss. Hawkins mimics the “Oh, when are you going to start?” patter familiar to women of child-bearing age, and adds: “I’m sure 99% of that is well meaning but it doesn’t make it less uncomfortable. I did get an awful lot of ‘Oh, you’ll change your mind,’ to which my reaction was, ‘How is it that you know my mind better than I do?’ I’ve been living with it for a long time.”