But the comparisons should really end there. I’ll take care next time not to have girl in the title.” And, she says, she knows the main character, thirtysomething Rachel, is “not a girl, but I do call people girls all the time – I refer to myself as a girl and I’m in my 40s”.īoth books share the same sense of doom, the same killer details that make the reader feel as if the ground is shifting beneath them, and both of their unreliable narrators are flawed, unlikable women with disastrous relationships. “The Woman on the Train just didn’t sound as good. You can see why the comparison is made and it isn’t just the “girl” in the title – not something that was dreamed up by her publisher, insists Hawkins it was the working title of the book, long before she read Gone Girl. Even successful writers are afforded anonymity, she points out, and nobody looks at us when we meet in a cafe near her home in south London, our conversation drowned out by the occasional passing police car. I may move and get myself a bigger place, but I haven’t gone crazy.” Otherwise, nothing much has changed. “I’m going to have some things done to my house which have been desperately needed. Has it changed her? “My life is exactly the same as it was before, although I’m aware that I’m more solvent,” she says. She must now be making an astonishing amount of money – more, she admits, than she ever thought she could make from writing. The US market has taken to it especially – the book has been at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks, and the film rights have been bought by DreamWorks. It has sold more than 120,000 copies in hardback since January, and sales of ebooks and copies in other countries are at around 2m. Or at least the sales are (in fact, it is outpacing Gillian Flynn’s mega-seller). The Girl on the Train has had a dizzying rise, and among all the so-called domestic noir books that are now excitedly talked about as the new Gone Girls, it may be the closest thing.
You really don’t need your children borrowing from you at that point in life.” A small laugh. “It was really terrible, I felt really awful about it.
For the six months I was writing it, I didn’t really do anything else.” In order to survive, she’d had to borrow money from her father. It really concentrates the mind, that kind of thing. I don’t have a partner so I take care of the mortgage by myself and I was thinking, ‘Oh God, I’m going to have to sell the house, or find a new career.’ I was not in a good place but it was a real spur to get The Girl on the Train right.
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