Paula Hawkins on what inspired her bestseller, The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins couldn't have known her mystery novel about a 30-something year old alcoholic British women on a train would garnered worldwide attention, but ten months after its release, The Girl on the Train is still at the top of The New York Times Bestseller list. It has sold more than two million copies in the U.S. 

Paula Hawkins is in town for the Vancouver Writers Festival and she joined On The Coast's Stephen Quinn in studio to talk about complicated female protagonists and why she's drawn to writing suspense novels.

What is it about the protagonist, Rachel, that made you think she was thriller material?

I was interested in this idea of memory loss, actually. It was the first thing I landed on and one of the things that makes you lose your memory is drinking too much. I was interested in the way in which not remembering your actions skews your sense of guilt and responsibility and makes you vulnerable. It makes you easy to manipulate, it destroys your sense of self. There were just all these things, plus it's a useful device in the thriller, to not remember something you've seen. So it just seemed there was all this potential that you could bring up with someone who has those sorts of problems.

How often was Rachel blacking out and not remembering what she had done?

Fairly often, and she's somebody who's hitting rock bottom,who's lost everything good in her life. Drinking and riding the train is basically all she does. And while she does this, she watches other people, obsesses about other people and finds herself drawn into other people's lives.

How did your past work, including three romance novels and your time as a financial journalist,  inform this one?

I think all of that laid the groundwork rather than informed it. Journalism teaches you certain things about writing — it teaches you discipline and how to work to deadlines. I was commissioned to write some romantic fiction and I really liked doing those and they were very instructive in terms of building characters and plots. But it never felt right for me. They were supposed to be light-hearted romantic comedies, and I kept introducing more and more tragedy, and more and more terrible things kept happening to everyone so it was clear that wasn't really my genre.

I'm interested in the domestic, everyday, ordinary and quite sad violence that goes on around us.- Paula Hawkins, author

Thriller stories tap into our own fears and securities — what did you tap into here?

The kind of crimes that happens in very mundane, ordinary, domestic settings, the kind of crime that could happen to all of us, the things that could be happening behind your neighbours' doors — those are the things that I find intriguing and compelling rather than spies and serial killers. I'm interested in the domestic, everyday, ordinary and quite sad violence that goes on around us.

Do you worry that there's much more of it going on than we know?

I think there's an awful lot going on that we don't know about. A lot of the abuse that goes on in this book is emotional. And I think that's' one of the unseen things, is people getting manipulated. Partly because they've allowed themselves to get into these situations. Rachel is, as we've said, an alcoholic. She's allowed herself to become weak. I think that kind of emotional abuse goes on in all sorts of relationships.

What are you working on now?

I'm writing another psychological thriller, I'm about halfway maybe. It focuses on a relationship between sisters, it's very much about women again, their relationship to each other. And of course there's bloody murder but it's about women's place in society again. And again about memory a lot — our memories from childhood and how they shape us and how those memories are quite fluid and may not be quite rooted in reality.

To hear the full interview, click Paula Hawkins on her bestseller, The Girl on the Train.