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Paula Hawkins: ‘The Girl on the Train was my last throw of the dice’
![Bestselling author Paula Hawkins](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2016/09/27/021016STEPaulaH01_1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq5wQeqqcBC_2xV8eI0i-GFoYDk_ybmk_UM_q6VUpEkuI.jpg?imwidth=680)
Broke and having borrowed money from her family, author Paula Hawkins wrote the 15 million-selling smash-hit novel, The Girl on the Train. It’s now a movie and she’s a multimillionaire, but that’s no preparation for trial by red carpet…
Hours before the UK premiere of The Girl on the Train, the multimillion-pound adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel, starring Emily Blunt, the author is sitting in a London hotel room, showing little to no enthusiasm for the event.
‘Pffffftt…’ she exhales at the prospect of walking the red carpet. ‘I don’t feel good about it, because…’ There’s a pause. She considers her options. ‘If one is not skinny and glamorous – which one is not – it’s really hard to dress for these things.
'I’ll do my best but being looked at is not my favourite part of the process. I was looking at the Emmys coverage recently and there are always best- and worst-dressed lists. You look at these people and think, “Oh my God, they look amazing,” and then they’re being pulled apart.’
A gripping psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train was a runaway bestseller around the world last year, but Paula is a reluctant star.
Dressed today in a navy-blue Diane von Furstenberg blouse, black Whistles trousers and black strappy heels (‘they’re quite old, but I can walk in them’), she nervously twiddles her fingers and picks at her nails, obviously ill at ease in the limelight.
If the 44-year-old wears her fame awkwardly, it is because it is a new appendage. Her previous book (her fourth), The Reunion, published in 2013 under a pseudonym, barely sold 1,000 copies, placing her firmly on her uppers, having already borrowed money from her family.
She has called what happened next ‘the last roll of the dice for me as a fiction writer’. The Girl on the Train turned out to be a double six.
Published in January last year, it has since been translated into more than 40 languages, published in 50 countries and sold more than 15 million copies.
The film rights were bought by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks production company in 2014, before it had even been published; Stephen King tweeted that it had kept him up all night; and Reese Witherspoon Instagrammed herself reading a copy – an act some have since claimed was an early play for the film’s lead role.
Forbes magazine has estimated that Paula earned as much as $10 million (£7.5 million) last year, a figure that places her in ninth position behind the likes of JK Rowling (£14.5 million) as one of the highest-earning authors in the world.
Her rise has been so swift that even Paula seems to have lost track of her accumulating wealth. ‘[Forbes] do those things on the back of an envelope, I think, because they certainly didn’t get that from me. I don’t know if that’s correct. It’s a lot of money.’
![On the red carpet with Emily Blunt at the London premiere of The Girl on the Train](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2016/09/27/021016STEPaulaH02_2_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqPm8GzavpElM-BVZN3hoePzRSTdePc2GzyNpWnMUF7Xk.jpg?imwidth=350)
Her most extravagant purchases have been flights for her parents to visit her during a book tour of Australia, a ‘stupidly luxurious’ holiday to Courchevel with friends in March and an embellished Erdem cape for £1,650 to wear to the premiere.
Other than that, and upgrading from a Brixton flat to a house in Clerkenwell a few months ago, Paula has been remarkably restrained for a multimillionaire.
She has a lawyer boyfriend, ‘but that’s all I’m saying’, and doesn’t have children or plans for any, saying she’s ‘one of those people who always knew’ she wouldn’t.
She was, she says, a shy, diligent child with an overactive imagination. Brought up in Zimbabwe, hers was a comfortable if unconventional upbringing. Her father was an economics professor and financial journalist and the family moved to London in 1989 when she was 17.
She went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University before moving into financial journalism for 15 years.
Her first book was a financial advice volume entitled The Money Goddess; a romcom followed, but ‘sunny’ fiction never sat well with Paula, who says she tends towards darker subject matter.
It was her daily commute, gazing into flats and houses and wondering what secrets they held, and watching Alfred Hitchcock’s voyeuristic Rear Window, a favourite film, that proved to be the critical inspiration she needed.
On the day of our interview, 20 months after the book’s release, The Girl on the Train remains at number one in both the WH Smith and Amazon fiction charts. Paula looks sheepish.
![Emily Blunt as Rachel Watson, witnessing alarming events from her railway carriage](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2016/09/27/021016STEPaulaH05_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqQHW9rhAULCP41yHBq6R2ztUBUx1tjjUrrnXAEFUw3YI.jpg?imwidth=350)
‘The film publicity will have given it a bump,’ she says. ‘It’s extraordinary – it’s difficult to say why something takes off when other similar, better things don’t.’ She backtracks, jokingly berating herself. ‘Don’t say better, you’re not allowed to say that!’
The plot revolves around Rachel Watson (played by Emily Blunt in the film), an alcoholic, downtrodden divorcée who takes the same commuter train into London every day, despite having being unemployed for months.
What she sees on these gin-fuelled, tear-streaked journeys, as her train winds its way through a London suburb, draws her into the disappearance of one of the residents she regularly watches, an uncomfortable relationship with her ex-husband’s new partner and a grisly murder investigation.
It’s a slow-building, suspense-wrapped plot that takes a peek at the dark reality of suburbia, as told from the point of view of three, at times startlingly unhinged, women.
![Paula Hawkins (left) chats to Emily Blunt on the set of The Girl on the Train](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2016/09/27/021016STEPaulaH10_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf8Z_Eq-Cor_A4ZoSNf2OU7w.jpg?imwidth=350)
Emily Blunt is masterful in the film, a haggard, quivering, chapped-lip wreck of an alcoholic, but fans of the novel were quick to denounce her casting.
‘Lots of people have complained that she is too beautiful and all wrong,’ says Paula, who met Blunt on a set visit. ‘She is obviously more beautiful than I imagined Rachel, who is overweight, but it’s about the way you carry yourself. That is how [Blunt] gets the damage across.’
Unlike author EL James, who locked horns with director Sam Taylor-Johnson over the screenplay for 50 Shades of Grey, Paula had ‘very little’ input in the film-making process. Her instructions to director Tate Taylor (who also made The Help) were simply, ‘Just make it great and make it truthful.’
Inevitably, there are differences between book and film, the biggest being that the latter is set in America and Rachel’s Ashbury-to-Euston commute has been replaced by the Metro-North railway line from Westchester County into Manhattan.
Presumably, the decision was made in order to draw an American audience but it has prompted a ferocious response by fans bemoaning its Americanisation.
‘It is different,’ agrees Paula. ‘It is far more beautiful. Those houses are gorgeous. They’re not the shoddy Victorian semis that I was imagining but it works cinematically.’
Another well-worn charge is that her female characters are unlikeable – Rachel’s judgement swings from appalling to incomprehensible – and that their obsession with babies and the family ideal is bad for feminism.
While Paula isn’t concerned about their likeability, she takes exception at the suggestion the book is anti-women. ‘I don’t agree with that. To me, they felt like very real, flawed, messed-up people. Everyone in it is kind of a nightmare. Everyone is having a bad time and behaving badly not just the women.
![Rebecca Ferguson and Justin Theroux in The Girl on the Train](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2016/09/27/021016STEPaulaH03_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqiCVn5cfCd6DWoSKKHStB2FjCw0WMwiFKArPdgqSP0Rs.jpg?imwidth=350)
'Over the course of the book, the women come out of it better and are the ones we see change and try to at least fight against their demons. I’ve been accused of being anti-man as well, so I’m just a misanthrope, obviously,’ she says dryly.
She is, she says, happy to have struck gold later in life when she was ‘a bit more settled. When you’re in your 20s, you’re still trying to find who you are.’ Even so, she continues to wrestle with her meteoric rise.
‘It’s wonderful in some ways but makes you feel very vulnerable in others. To suddenly become known and to have lots of people reading your slightly odd thoughts is a weird thing. You feel exposed because all these eyes are on you.’
![The Girl On The Train, by Paula Hawkins](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2016/09/27/021016STEPaulaH04_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpg?imwidth=350)
All eyes are now eagerly awaiting the follow-up to The Girl on the Train. A thriller about the relationship between two estranged sisters, set in the north of England, it has, she says, been a slow, tricky process and she is already long overdue on the deadline.
Has it been one of the worst cases of a ‘tricky second album’ imaginable? She half-smiles. ‘There’s obviously a level of expectation I didn’t have before and that makes you nervous. You think about what criticisms you had of the last book and think, “Am I making the same mistakes? Am I doing the same things wrong?”
'I’m told that it gets much better after the second book!’ With that, she’s off to have her hair and make-up done for the red carpet. If the new book is anything like as successful as the last, she’ll have to get used to walking a lot more of them.
‘The Girl on the Train’ is in cinemas from 5 October