FYI Book Club: ‘The Girl on the Train’

Rachel Watson takes the train into the city every day, pretending to go to a job she lost.

She obsesses about her cheating husband — ex-husband — and his blissful new life. He’s a big reason she’s an over-imbibing commuter, wine from small bottles, pre-mixed cans of gin and tonic.

Pathetic, she knows, and in Paula Hawkins’ novel, “The Girl on the Train,” the title character willingly soaks up the blame for her personal collapse. The psychological thriller by the British author is the current selection of the FYI Book Club.

A saving distraction for Rachel during the useless rides into London: her Hitchcockian penchant to spy on a lovely young couple as the train rolls past their house and backyard.

They clearly have everything she and her former husband once had. They’re storybook perfect.

Until, and it’s all over the news, the stylish young wife disappears. As a regular voyeur, Rachel may know something. But she also plays loosely with the truth, and through the train window and the fog of alcohol, how much can she know?

Hawkins provides two other narrators, but their accounts — colored, too, by perception, by love, by hurt — might be nearly as suspect as Rachel’s.

We reached Hawkins at London’s Euston train station, which happens to be Rachel’s destination each morning. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.

Q. What was the idea that sparked your story?

A. I’ve done commutes similar to the one Rachel is doing on the train, the above-ground subway. I loved doing that thing of staring out into people’s houses, and there are times you go very close. You can see right into their living rooms.

I wondered what I would do if I saw something shocking or surprising or an act of violence, that “Rear Window” idea. Much later I was thinking about this character, this unreliable, alcoholic character. I put her on the train, and the story developed.

This is usually a harmless game, like watching people from a park bench and making up stories about them.

Absolutely. I think it can be tempting as a commuter. You see a lot of the same houses and you might see the same people, and you might get the feeling you’ve gotten to the know them. You don’t really know them, of course, but you have that feeling of familiarity.

Have you always been a fan of the thriller?

Yes, not necessarily police procedurals or stories of serial killers, but more low-key domestic situations, where everything looks normal on the surface but underneath there’s this tension, suspense and darkness.

Rachel could have been a well-adjusted, normal commuter on the train. Why did you decide otherwise?

I’m a sucker for an unreliable narrator, and she is basically the ultimate unreliable narrator. She’s not reliable even to herself. She can’t trust her own judgment and her own memories.

I think unreliable narrators pull the reader in. The reader can’t trust the person telling the story, so they have to fill in the gaps and try to figure things out for themselves. And I’m drawn to flawed protagonists. The flaws make them compelling.

Rachel had hit rock bottom, and she’s behaving very badly. But the person she once was is still in there, fighting to come back.

Despite everything she is, I felt sympathetic toward her. How did you do that?

She knows better than anyone how bad she is. She’s self-loathing. From that point of view, you can pity her, but you also want to give her a slap in the face. “Just put down the bottle and you’ll be all right.” Enough of us have known someone with an addiction, or experienced it ourselves, to realize how it’s something that touches a lot of lives.

Have you been close to people dealing with alcoholism?

I know people who have struggled with it, of course. We live in a quite a booze-soaked culture in the U.K. I also think that everyone can recognize someone who is walking quite a fine line, the person who often has one too many, and you can see that it wouldn’t take much in their lives to tip them over the edge. A job loss. A breakup of a relationship. And that’s exactly what happened to Rachel.

Rachel experiences alcoholic blackouts. How did you get interested in that?

I know someone who suffered from them, and it’s a really strange thing. Not everyone who drinks heavily gets them, and not everyone who has them gets them every time they drink. Some people can’t remember getting into a taxi, say. Some lose a couple of hours, or they do extraordinary things and wake up the next morning and have absolutely no idea.

Of course, other things can affect your memory. Rachel also has a head injury, and she can’t remember how it happened. She has a traumatic experience. All of those things can affect memory.

And it’s a useful device for a thriller.

Yes, it’s a commonly used thing in crime thrillers, people losing their memory. For one reason or another, people don’t have a good recall of what’s happened.

Another device here is the use of multiple narrators, three in all: Rachel, Megan (the missing woman) and Anna (the wife of Rachel’s ex-husband). How did you decide that?

Actually I had thought I would write the whole thing from Rachel’s point of view. But we needed to hear Megan’s story, and she’s the only one who knew it.

Later still I thought it would be really interesting to bring Anna in as well, to have all three women looking at each other — a triangulation of viewpoints, each jumping to conclusions about each other’s actions. Plus we get to see events from different perspectives.

But doesn’t it complicate the writing process?

Yes, it’s tricky, especially here. These are all women of a similar age, similar experiences, so to differentiate their voices was quite difficult. And it’s not just the narration that jumps around, it’s also the timeline. That takes a lot of careful plotting.

You want to keep readers on edge in a thriller. Does shifting narrators help with that?

I think it does. Readers think they know a situation but then they get a different viewpoint and have to reassess their own views and expectations, which increases the tension.

One of the disturbing themes here is the question of how well we know the people closest to us.

That’s part of it. A lot of people in relationships at some point wonder how much they really know the person closest to them. We hear of people living double lives or duplicitous lives, and it must cross everyone’s mind. What if this person is not who I think they are?

The book is also all about perception, our perception of others, and the layers you have to get through before you really know somebody. There are so many factors that can influence that. Drinking can blind you to things. Being very much in love can blind you to things.

And perhaps an even more disturbing consideration, how little we know ourselves.

For Rachel, she casts herself in an even worse light than she really should be, whereas Megan refuses to look at herself properly. Megan likes to be seen through others’ eyes rather than spend any time looking at herself. That way she doesn’t have to examine the horrible things that have happened to her.

Memory plays a part, and that’s something I want to explore further. We tell stories about ourselves based on how we remember things. When you meet someone, you tell about your upbringing, your family, and these stories become our truths. But they aren’t completely true. We embellish, we leave things out. But they become our new memory.

People often have vivid memories of things that happened to them in childhood, until someone tells them, No, you weren’t actually there. Or, you weren’t even born yet.

And so we’re left to think, What else am I misremembering?

This story was originally published March 13, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "FYI Book Club: ‘The Girl on the Train’."