Julia Gillard and Paula Hawkins live at Hay Festival Winter Weekend
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Complete isolation and being somewhere beautiful and quiet is extremely appealing to me. And I do think it would be very conducive to work for some of the time. But then as there is this whole push and pull in the novel, there's that isolation is wonderful, but how much do you also need to be in a community to get inspiration? ♪

Today's episode is a conversation between Julia Gillard and author Paula Hawkins, recorded live at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend in Wales. Thank you very much. A big hello to everyone. My name's Julia Gillard. As you can probably tell from this accent, I'm Australian. In fact, was Prime Minister of Australia a while back, but I'm here in my capacity as a book lover and here to interview Paula Hawkins about her latest book,

the Blue Hour. But before we get into that conversation, I need to acknowledge that this event is sponsored by Visit Seattle. You just saw that on the screen. Visit Seattle is the official destination marketing organisation for Seattle, a year-round destination and UNESCO City of Literature.

So think about Seattle. But right now we're thinking about, hey, Paula, thank you for joining me. And I'd like to start at the very beginning because it seems like a good place to start. You grew up in Zimbabwe. Were you a book-loving child? I was. I wasn't a particularly highbrow reader as a child. I wasn't one of those children who read all the classics by the time they were 10. I was more Enid Blyton and Narnia.

and a bit of Adrian Mole and that kind of thing. So, um, but yeah, I was always, I was always a reader. We didn't, there weren't a lot of bookshops in Harare, but the library, we went to the library every week. Got my, I got my two books every week, which was, yeah, I loved it. And when you moved to the UK, uh,

what were you thinking you'd like to do with your life? Were you thinking you wanted to be an author or at that stage was the pathway, your original pathway, you want to be a journalist, bringing everybody the news? Yeah, I wanted to be a journalist. So my dad is an academic, but he wrote for some of the papers. He wrote for the FT for a while as well and The Economist. And when I was a kid, we had

There were always journalists coming to stay at the house in Harare. And they were the kind of journalists who'd, you know, covered wars and revolutions. And they were, you know, they had exciting stories to tell. So I thought they were very cool. And a lot of them were women, actually. So they were the first sort of role models as career women I saw. So that was the dream was to be the foreign correspondent. That never happened. I was, I'm very, very ill-suited to be a foreign correspondent. I don't have that.

I don't have that bravery, I think, apart from anything else, or that insatiable lust to get the story out of people. So I became a financial journalist, which was not the dream. But it was fine. I did it for a while. It was more fun than it sounds. I actually did a lot of traveling in the early years to Eastern Europe and that kind of thing. And it was all good training. But I was always...

writing fiction on the side writing stories that I never showed to anyone I was I did always have that kind of imagination where I wanted to create stories I didn't think of it as a career path though I didn't know any authors I just didn't seem like a very practical way to go and I've always been quite practical.

It seems like a very different skill set in many ways, though. I mean, obviously, high level uses of language to bring us the financial news in ways that we can understand, but inherently fact-based, you know, economical with words, trying to get the key points across, whereas the imaginative world of fiction seems like a very different task.

I mean, how do you think about that if you were in your daytime, here's the news and then clocking on at night to try and write some fiction? Is it a different bit of your brain, different process? I think it is a different bit of your brain. But having said that, I think you do learn things as a journalist which are really useful. And there is that kind of getting to the heart of the story and stripping out what's not necessary, that kind of zoning in. You might not necessarily go straight to it in fiction, but knowing that you need to get there.

knowing that that's what the reader is going to be looking for. And there is, you learn to edit yourself. You learn to listen to people and to observe and listen to what people are telling you, listen to know what they're not telling you, which I think is always interesting. Because as a journalist, you're always kind of trying to figure out what they're trying to hide, what they're, you know, you're trying to read between the lines. And I think that's really important.

when it comes to writing fiction, when you come to writing dialogue, particularly as a crime novelist, when you're thinking about the ways people try and hide things from each other, all that stuff comes in useful later on. So the things that people don't say. The things that people don't say, the gaps they leave, the way they kind of...

sort of meander around the truth. The first we heard of your fictional writing capability was, of course, The Girl on the Train, 2015, runaway bestseller. I think it's 23 million copies sold. Gave birth to a blockbuster Hollywood movie with Emily Blunt in the lead role.

Was that the first novel you had completed or had you written other things that you thought these aren't, this isn't what I want to take out into the world, I'm going to keep going and I'm going to keep trying to experiment with something else? Well, I actually wrote four novels under a pseudonym. They were slightly strange titles.

I was approached by an editor who wanted someone to write a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the financial, of the recession. So they wanted a story about a young woman who works in the city, who loses her job, falls on hard times, japes ensue kind of thing. And I was asked to write this in eight weeks, which I did. And it, it did all right. And then they asked me to do something else. And so I wrote four, four of these romantic comedies. I'm very like,

air quoting because I'm not a romantic and I'm not that funny. So I wasn't really the right kind of fit for that sort of thing. And I did not feel comfortable writing them and they kept getting darker and darker and more and more terrible things kept happening to all the characters. And by the time that I wrote the fourth one, which sank without trace, it was clear this was not working. And this

I couldn't do that. And it was time that I actually started writing what I really wanted to write. Unfortunately, by that point, I had sort of lost quite a lot of confidence. So it was a really difficult time for me. However, all that time

The unhappiness that I felt at the time, I think, just went into the character of Rachel from The Girl on the Train. And it was actually, you know, it was fuel to the fire, as so many things are, that you take from your life. I've got this image now that in the fourth of those romantic comedy novels, you practice by killing everybody off in different ways, different and mysterious ways. I wish I had done that.

No, people died miserably, but it wasn't mysterious. Right, okay. And the idea for Girl on the Train, you know, the character of Rachel reflecting some of the difficulties you might have been feeling at that time, but can you talk to us about that?

how your imagination led you to that plot line and your writing process. I mean, you up at four in the morning, hammering the keyboard, or are you wandering around at midnight, swilling scotch and hoping for inspiration? How does it work? No, I'm really boring. I just, you know, it's because I freelanced for a long time. I'm just used to sitting down at my desk at eight in the morning, like a normal person and writing. The Girl on the Train, I'd

I'd lived with the idea of this character, this woman who, the bit about it that intrigued me really was the not remembering what you've done, the not,

having that kind of very direct connection to your own actions. I thought that was really intriguing, the idea of people who wonder about... I'd read, I think it was originally in an Oliver Sacks story about somebody who had done something terrible when they were blacked out. And then I read a number of these kinds of stories and it's extraordinary the kind of things people can do, get in their car, drive to another city, whatever, all blacked out. And

And that was the thing that interested me. So because it completely warped her sense of guilt and responsibility, it warped her whole sense of self. So that was the thing that I sort of built the character around. But obviously, that's just a character. That's not a story. It took me ages to find the

the story that she would fit into the one that would actually get her moving and then that was that was that idea that very rear windowish idea which I've been sort of playing around with that she would see something on her commute and I originally I thought she would see an act of violence you know very rear window but then I decided that she she didn't need it didn't need to be an act of violence could be anything because of who she was because of this

slightly deranged imagination that she had and because of her unreliability, it could, you know, so it ended up a kiss and then it's this kiss that she builds into something and drags her into...

into the mystery. So it was having to put the character together with something else to get the plot moving. And so it's the first novel that you've, you know, written in the voice that you want to, how you want to, and presumably did you take it to the same publisher who had been publishing the four novels under the pseudonym? I did, but they passed. Oh, yes.

No, and then we took it to my agent, sent it to a few people and some other people picked it up. I bet that's a story that gets told grimly over drinks at that publisher. We passed on a novel that sold more than 20 million copies. It then makes its way out into the world and it's a runaway success, not a runaway train, but a runaway success. How did that...

change your world were you ready for that no I don't think anyone's ready for it it was um people were excited about it there was a lot of build-up to it the publishers were excited my agent was excited but you don't actually know until it's out there how it's going to do and nobody anticipated it get you know going as crazy as it as it did and

Which was wonderful. It was. It was an extraordinary experience. I didn't have a sort of, there's no like one moment where I thought, aha, I have made it. You know, it's a lot of small moments and small things just accumulating. And it was, it's also quite overwhelming to have that happen to you, particularly if you're a

person who's used to just sitting there tapping away, quiet and quite introverted. And then suddenly you're out there and you're having to talk to journalists and do events and all that kind of thing. So it wasn't an entirely comfortable experience, but it was, I'm not going to knock it. It was great. And it got me out of a financial hole. And it opens so many doors to you when you have a success like that, which is, it's a wonderful thing as a writer. You feel like you're being

you know, embraced into this world of books that you've kind of been looking at from the outside. So it is a great experience. And then Hollywood came calling. Can you explain that to us? Well, yeah, the rights to the movie were sold, sorry, the rights to the book were sold before

it was even published. It was my agent, you know, as they do agents put things out there and DreamWorks offered and wanted an immediate response. So I just had to say yay or nay on the spot kind of thing. So I said, yes, fine. Off you go. And again,

I wasn't sure that it would actually happen because, as I'm sure everybody knows, lots of things get optioned. It doesn't mean they get made. But this was made very fast. By the year after it was published, you know, the film was in the cinema. So...

But I had nothing to do with it. I just, I didn't, I went to the set and met the actors. I went to the premieres. I did all the fun things and none of the work. So it was, that was a nice experience for me. It was great, yeah. Was there any part of that experience where you're looking at the film and thinking, that is not how I saw that character in my mind's eye? Was there something jarring about it or you just...

except it's a different medium, it's a different form, it's telling the story, but it's inherently going to have to do it differently. It looked very different. Obviously, the big change was moving it to the US so that everything...

You know, the houses are all much nicer. Everyone's richer. Everyone's more beautiful. You kind of expect that to some degree. It was this, I did think that upstate landscape that they moved it to was very cinematic and very beautiful. So I didn't hate it.

It's a weird experience to see something translated to screen because it is completely different from what you imagined. But it's also, that can be really interesting. I remember going to the set, watching them filming the scene where Rachel takes the baby. She takes Anna's baby.

And in the book, it's quite a frightening scene. When I watched Emily Blunt do that, it was actually quite tender because she was picking up a real child and she was a mother and actually pregnant at the time. And it was quite a tender moment and it slightly changed how I saw it. So there are things like that that I think it actually enriched the way you can look back on your book and see it in a different way. So I know for readers, it's always really jarring. I'm the same when I've loved a book and then I go and see it and I'm like, oh,

Because, you know, it does mess with what you saw in your head. Yeah, I think...

I'm like that. You know, if I've read a book and then I see it in a film, I'm often like, no. But I actually thought it worked. It did. It worked. Yeah, they got lots of things right. Right, yes, they did. And then before we get to your new book, which we must get to, of course you've written two other books in the time in between, Into the Water and Slow Fire Burning. Just briefly on Into the Water, you know,

Women characters, Rachel and other women, Megan, Anna, were very at the centre of the girl on the train. But Into the Water is, I think, very sharply feminist with the underlying, the meta-narrative that this is a village where there is a pool that troublesome women end up losing their lives in. Were you conscious, you deliberately wanted to make that

step up around how you were writing the female characters or writing about the female characters? I think everything I write, the novels always come out of the character. So it would have been from the characters I was thinking about.

at the time and I was thinking oh god it's a long time since I thought about this book but now um the art the photographer in it and her sister Jules I mean it came out of their kind of fractured relationship but they were both very independent women both very strong women both troublesome in their way and it was all about there's that thing of women who don't do what they're told which comes up crops up in the books all the time actually all of them have that kind of uh

something of that in them. They're always about women who aren't somehow measuring up to what society expects of them and whether that's a deliberate pushing back against it or whether they've just failed to live up to what's expected of them. So, but there was, as you say, definitely a whole thread running through that when I decided I would make it this

this place where witches had been drowned in the past, then I could immediately see a connection between those things, between women who were in some way transgressive, who were punished for that in the past, and then that recurring through history, how that happens all the time. Yeah.

And your next book, Slow Fire Burning, has elements that I think come out in your earlier books. The elderly woman who with her, you know, she's not done a full descent into dementia, but her memory is not reliable the way it was. So she's not always confident of whether her perceptions are right.

a younger woman who's suffered a traumatic head injury earlier in her life and has got poor impulse control as a result. So it's got some of that unreliable narration aspect to it, but it's a bit different to your earlier novels in the sense that it actually clearly starts with a murder. Yeah.

You know, instead of us as readers like who's died, someone died, how have they died, when did they die, someone responsible for them dying, you do just plainly start with dead body on the floor, the forensics people are doing what they're doing. Can you talk about that choice? So it's much more whilst it's got your continuing themes, it seemed to me much more...

in the murder mystery genre directly than the earlier two books. Yeah, it does feel much more like that. And again, I don't think it really, that I necessarily, that wasn't necessarily the conscious choice, but it just seemed like the right way to tell the story that this body is found on the boat. And I think it was,

One of the places that the story started, that was me just walking on up and down Regent's Canal that I did for a while. I used to go for walks there in the morning and was seeing all these houseboats all along there. And most of them are quite she-she now. It's been very gentrified down there. But every now and again, you would see one that was kind of like sinking into the water and was, you know, semi-dry.

I suppose. And I did think like, that would be such a, you know, you could put something in there and nobody would, you know, you can put a body in there. No one would discover it for ages. So that's, you know, I did. Those thoughts occurred. Um,

I had this idea of something rotting in there. And so there I was going to open a body on a boat. So it's not exactly the way I first imagined it, but that's what I decided I would open the novel with. And then I had to think of how everything else tied into that.

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So let's come to your current book, The Blue Hour, and let me just start, frankly, with the central flaw in this book, which is that it's not set in Australia. You obviously wanted a remote location and you've gone past the obvious place to put it. And instead you've created

created a fictional island, the island of Eris, which is off Scotland and is only able to be driven to at certain times of day. When the tide is up, it's impassable and the island is isolated. And, you know, the island, it felt to me, is almost...

a character in this book. You know, there are very evocative descriptions of its landscape and its sense of mystery in different weather. And that's just a very emotionally powerful backdrop to what plays out on the island. Can you talk about the inspiration around that, around place in that way?

Yeah, the island, again, I'd lived with for a long time because I actually went on holiday to France, to Brittany in 2017. And I was on the, there's a little bit of coast there that has a lot of tiny islands, tidal islands. So when the tide is out, you can walk on the sands, you can walk right out to them. And I remember walking there and seeing one of the islands, a tiny island had just a single house on it.

And I felt all the hair on the back of my neck stand up because I just loved the idea of setting something there. I thought, what a brilliant location. It's beautiful and it's remote and you can get trapped there. You know, it has all these locked room possibilities. But I knew that I wouldn't want to write something in France, not got anything against French, but, you know, if you don't live somewhere, I think it's difficult. Same excuse for Australia. Nothing along the zip wouldn't fit. Yeah.

But for ages, I thought about this island. And what really I think I was intrigued about was the kind of person who would decide to go and live on an island, who would choose to live in a house where you're cut off every time the tide comes in. So twice a day, every day, at different times, because obviously the tide moves, you would have to be a particular sort of person. And I thought for ages about who I wanted to put in the house on the island. And eventually I came to the idea that it would be an artist, that it would be...

who would be drawn by the beautiful landscape and who'd be inspired by that. But also then I thought someone who's trying to get away from something, somebody who wants to be cut off, somebody who relishes the idea of this complete...

sealing off from the world the freedom that she would have to live exactly as she wants on her island. So that was, again, it was sort of a combination of two things. It was the character and the setting. And once I put them together, I started to see what I could make of it. And the artist is Vanessa Walsh.

We get to know her in part through snippets of her diary. By the time the novel opens, Vanessa has died. She's had a profound cancer and she's been a reclusive artist for a period of time. Her husband had disappeared a number of years before in mysterious circumstances and was presumed dead but a body never found.

And she was originally known as a painter, but she'd moved into sculptures and installations. And the novel starts with a piece of human bone being identified as part of one of her artworks, which is going on display. And along with the island, her art, her process, her thoughts about what to paint,

how to bring objects on the island together into pieces of artwork is a big driving theme. How did you prepare yourself for that? I mean, you're an artist in one medium, but, you know, were these other mediums familiar to you? No, not really, but I like art. I like visual art and I go, you know, I spend a lot of time going to galleries and museums and that kind of thing. And I read...

quite a bit in preparation. There's a really fantastic biography of Barbara Hepworth that was out a few years ago called Art and Life. I read that. I read there's a wonderful memoir by Celia Paul, who's a British painter, which I read. And I sort of she she writes about painting the sea a lot. And I read about a Scottish artist called Joan Eardley, who is

from whom I borrowed like tiny bits of her life. And she was somebody who lived actually on the East Coast, but in a tiny little fishing village and lived alone and liked to paint the sea and landscapes. And I borrowed some of her techniques and some of the descriptions. If people know Eardley, they'll recognize them. So I spent a long time kind of immersing myself in the world of art. And I went to Potter Studios as well because she also makes ceramics. So I went and watched people making things and

to get the rhythm of that and the feel of it and how it smells. Although what really struck me about a Potter studio is how many like nasty little implements there are in there that you could do someone damage with. Little knives and wires and all sorts of like, anyway. So I did really immerse myself and that was one of the great joys of writing this novel, which I loved writing, but was really just,

imagining myself into the world, into the life of a visual artist. I have no visual artistic, you know, prowess myself, but I would love to have. And it's a book about so many different layers of power dynamics. Vanessa has, the last few years of her life, she's had a woman living with her on the island, Grace, a retired doctor, and it's...

the nature of their relationship is intriguing. At first glance, you would go, Vanessa, talented, beautiful, world-famous artist. Grace is described as ugly. She obviously has a personality that puts people off. She's had many incidents in her life where she's overestimated her degree of connection with people and it's ended badly. And yet that

dynamic is much more complex than the dominant famous partner and the sort of, you know, carer subordinate, much more complex partner.

And there's, you know, the power in the art world too. Vanessa has had a major bust-up with an art agent who was going to put on a very big exhibition of hers. She pulls out at the last moment but surprisingly leaves all of her artworks to that agent after her death. He, in the meantime, has been...has lost his life himself.

And then there's the sort of art historian, James, who is such a central character. And he is, you know, delighted to be able to talk to Grace and to learn about the artworks. And he's hoping to see all of the papers and get inside Vanessa's process of

But he too is a man whose life is filled with curious power dynamics. He can only do his job because he's viewed with favour by a posh benefactor and he's not posh. And to add to the problems, he's effectively married to the former fiancé of the posh man who is his benefactor. So it's very complicated.

Yeah, not designed to endear him nor give him a sense of security in his relationship. So there's power dynamics every which way and they're rubbing up against each other. I mean, this is not a, I mean, people hearing about the island and hearing that it's separated from the mainland for a few hours a day, you might be thinking to yourself, oh, I know where this is going because we've all read a lot of those

locked box, locked location kind of mysteries, you know, the island, the snowed-in resort where things happen and it's got to be someone who's in the room because outsiders can't get in. This is much more layered and different than that and these power dynamics weave through it. In thinking about art, power, these women, life, death, what was the process? It's a very layered novel. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, again, I think it all comes out of character. And the central relationship of the book is Vanessa and Grace. And so Vanessa runs off to this island. And not long after she gets there, she falls and breaks her wrist. And that's how she meets Grace, who is a doctor at the time. And they form this strange friendship. It's a very intense friendship at times. They're friends for 20 years. And I was really impressed.

interested in the friendship itself because I think we write about love affairs and marriages and familial relationships all the time in novels and they're always seen as nuanced and complicated and complex but friendship is often just seen as like a nice thing it's good you're just a friend and actually a lot of friendships can be really

difficult and intense but and they last such a long time and for many of us friendships will be platonic friendships will be the longest relationships of our lives for some people so I really wanted to dig into how the power power in a friendship can shift over time and this is not like a friendship you would aspire to have it is it is very thorny at times but they trust each other at

in different ways at different times. They rely on each other in different ways. They need each other in different ways. And so it was unpicking all of those things that sort of started it. Obviously, there is the mystery of this bone. Why is there a human bone in her sculpture? Did she know what it was when she was actually making it? Or was it just a mistake that she picked something up and put it in there? Is it the lost husband? Yeah, her husband's body was never found, so...

I mean, that's what they're all worried about. And so all of these things are going around it. And James Becker, the curator, this is kind of the thing he has to play detective because his foundation now owns this artwork. They can't just go displaying human remains willy-nilly. They need to find out where this came from and what the circumstances are. This is sort of his way into her life.

into her personal life, into the home that she used to live in so he can go digging around and find out where the bodies are buried, so to speak. But he has to form this relationship with Grace now because she inherited the house. So she has the personal estate and he has the artistic estate and they've got to muddle through. And they're not, they don't always see eye to eye. So there are all these different players and there are always, you know, there are power dynamics shifting all the way through. Mm.

And as these power dynamics shift in this, you know, evocative landscape, we are, you know, you as the reader are definitely trying to get to the bottom of it to work out what's gone on and you feel like you've sometimes caught it in your hands and then you turn the page and you realise you haven't. But in all of your novels, including this one, you...

must think about the narrative arc around justice and what happens to people who have done wrong. And because your novels are so much more layered and complex than, you know, the standard

murder mystery, wrap it up with a bow, you know, from page one that Detective X is definitely going to solve the murder because Detective X always solves the murder. And therefore, really, the intrigue in those novels is the how questions, you know, how the murder happened and the intrigue in those novels is the personality of the detective. So the detective is always, you know, flawed or eccentric in different ways.

Your novels take a very different approach to that and consequently it's not as simple as from page one saying to yourself this will be a narrative arc where wrongdoers are held to account.

How do you think about justice in your books, the complexity of justice in the world? Do you think about and write about things that way because we live in a messy reality where things often aren't tied up with a bow at the end? Yeah, I think there's an expectation when you're writing a crime novel that the murder will be solved and that maybe some measure of justice will be done. But I think we all...

I don't like things to be too neat, too neat. And I do kind of one of the big questions I keep I'm always asking is like, what do these people really deserve? How you know who gets what they deserve in this situation and how does that work?

And I don't tend to, I mean, the police in my novels are always useless. So I tend to write around them a bit, but mostly not because I think the police are useless, but because I'm not that interested in procedure. Because what I'm always interested in is the why of it all. It's the how somebody got to the point where they're doing these terrible things. It's how ordinary people, because I do write about ordinary people, not

career criminals or serial killers, ordinary people whose lives have taken some sort of odd turn or who for some unfortunate coincidence of events have brought themselves to a point where they do something terrible.

um, or they are involved in something terrible. And it's all the, the questions of why they have ended up there and what the, how they try to recover from it or don't recover from. And those are the things that I find really chewy and interesting. And those are the things I want to dig into. And I think it is, so I'm not writing about very, very good people or very, very bad people. Usually there's sometimes there's a bit of a bad guy, but it,

I'm not, it's maybe every, when everyone is a shade of gray in that way, then what people deserve is maybe not as clear. Although, you know, I'm not, I'm not asking, I'm not asking the reader to forgive terrible, um,

terrible acts and just because someone doesn't isn't punished for what they do is not me saying I think that's a good thing that's just the way the story turned out for me in my head I don't I'm not one of those people who tries to set the world to write sim fiction that's just not how I look at it

And you're out with this novel now and you'll be signing copies of the book today. What's the process from here? Do you, you know, you're obviously on tour with the book. You come back off that tour. Do you decompress a bit and then get the new idea or have you already got something percolating in your head even as you're on tour and that will be the next thing? And if so, is it set in Australia? LAUGHTER

I mean, it could be. Well, the thing is that I actually finished writing this ages ago because obviously there's a big editing process and what have you that, well, and copy edits and everything that goes, that I go through. So I have, I started working on something new and then I have to

you know, step back from it. And I've been touring for a few months. And so now I have to go back to it and see whether it's a real thing. That often happens to me that I'm, that I've started something and I'll be excited about it for a bit. And then I, when you come back to it, you're not so sure. So I'm at the moment, I'm in this weird kind of

Yeah, the limbo part of it where I don't really know whether I've got hold of an idea yet and I need to get back to my... And there's no way of me knowing until I actually start writing and see how it feels and see how these characters develop to me and whether they connect to each other. So it's a nice...

It's a nice part of writing the novel is that trying things out and seeing who... Well, for me, it's the enjoyable part, one of the enjoyable parts, seeing whether this is a runner. And at this point, everything is available to you, even moving to Australia. You can do anything with it at this point. So, yeah, it's quite fun, this bit, once the touring is over. What's the least fun bit? If that creative starts the best fun? Well, I mean...

In the whole process or of the writing process? In the whole process. And please don't say coming to high. I like doing these events. I genuinely do. Doing endless press interviews is not so fun. But that's, I mean, usually there is a point in writing the novel where I will sit at my desk and weep.

because I cannot figure out how it's going to work. And it's the worst thing that anyone's ever written. And I hate it so much. So that's usually quite a low point. I didn't have that this time. I had a really nice experience with this novel. So fingers crossed. But every novel has been different for me. So yeah, so there's always a bad, there's usually a bad point in the writing. And then some of the interviewing, press interviews becomes...

It's much more difficult, I think, speaking to journalists because you have to be so careful all the time, don't you? Yes, you do. I'm saying this to a politician. What am I thinking? Yes, you do. Paula, would you do us the honour of reading an extract from your book? Yes. And then we'll take a few of your questions. So I'm actually going to read a bit at the end, but it's not a spoilery bit. Right, no spoiler alert.

Vanessa, as Julia said, is dead at the beginning of the book, but that's not a spoiler. So we see her through the eyes of all the other characters, through Grace's eyes and through James Becker's eyes. He's the expert on her work. But we also get these snippets of her diaries and the diaries sort of occur quite randomly because her papers were a mess. She left them. She didn't date things properly.

But they're a way for the reader to get more of a sense directly of her. So I'm going to read a tiny bit of Vanessa's diary. I didn't think to stay so long. I thought it would be a few years, a decade at most. That then, I thought I had all the time in the world. I thought I had a lifetime. I did, I suppose. It just turns out to be rather a short one. The Glasgow doctor had nothing good to say.

"'In the car on the way back, I thought about the first time I ever crossed over. "'The first time I saw the house, the house I'd bought sight unseen. "'I was so brave then, and so young. "'For the first time in forever, I thought about that clipping that arrived, "'the one I was sure had been sent by a friend, but which no one ever owned up to. "'It suddenly came to me. Julian! "'Of course it was Julian, trying to get rid of me, giving me a gentle shove. "'He of all people would have known what I'd been unable to resist.'

Poor Julian, he's sealed his own fate. Grace was out somewhere when I got back to the island, so I went up to the studio and cried and raged alone. I feel so cheated. I wanted to burn the place to the ground. I never could, of course. So, a short life. Not always a happy one, but free. I've been free here on my island. I escaped the drudgery of domesticity, the violence of men.

I worked with my hands, loved fiercely with my body. Thank God. Thank God I realised in the nick of time that I didn't want to live the life I was expected to. Thank God I bolted. Thank God I ran. Thank God for my island, for Eris. Now that my hope, once violent, is a small and pitiful thing, I need to be practical. I need to consider what happens after I'm gone. Part of me bridles, what does it matter?

A life is not a collection of things after all. What does it matter what we leave behind since the waves crash on, relentless, oblivious? What does it matter when one day, probably not too long from now, this island will be under the sea and the house too and the rock and all the bones beneath it? Somehow it does. It matters what you leave behind. The art you made or the people, the friends you loved, the good you did, the bad. It matters. Thank you. Thank you very much.

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Thank you. Thank you. We will raise the house lights now and take a few audience questions. Right, so those lights are up a bit, but you're still going to have to be relatively, you know, assertive in your hand waving. I'm not going to see a tiny little hand. So would anybody like to ask a question and a microphone will be brought to you? Hi, thank you. I just wondered if you liked your characters. Yes.

I do. I mean, I get a lot of... I mean, people talk a lot about the unlikability of the characters that I write. And I sometimes slightly take offense at that because I actually... Well, I don't like all of them, but I do like... I can usually see something in them. I can understand them. I mean, obviously, I know them better than most people. But there is always... There has to be some point...

of connection with them so I can understand why they do what they do. I do think it's a bit weird to come to a crime novel expecting likeable characters. That jolly murderer. But, yeah,

So for me, it's not the most important thing, but I do get that the reader has to be compelled by them. You can't find them so insufferable that you don't want to spend any time with them. You have to want to follow them around and you have to want to see what happens to them. I don't think you have to want to be their friend, but you have to see something in them. Still on the theme of characters, how do you choose their names? Oh God, I'm a terrible name. I'm terrible for names. I don't...

It's not like a deep thing for me. Sometimes it just comes to me a lot of the time. I will be sitting there and I work in a study full of books and I'll be a first name from over there and last name from up there. You sometimes see writers names cropping up on my, you know, it'll be a mishmash of somebody Rankin or whatever, you know. Yeah, I'm not a good namer.

Right. That does mean presumably if you want to suggest your name for a character in a future book, the suggestion might be taken up. We've got another one over here. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. I wonder if having had a novel successfully transformed into a movie, if now when you write, you somehow picture your novel once again becoming a movie?

Um, I think when I'm actually writing, I'm not really usually thinking very much about it. You've got so much going on that you don't think about it in those terms. Occasionally, there'll be a scene where I think, oh, this is cinematic, this would look great. And I do love the setting of this novel. I do think it would look great on screen. But you know, that's not what I do. As far as I know, there are no plans to turn this into a film at the moment. So

I mean, you know, if there are film producers here, the rights are available. Some writers actually have a much more visual sense when they're writing. I don't. I'm much more in the words than the visuals at the beginning anyway.

And when you wrote your second novel, I mean, after the runaway success of your first novel and the film, was there, did you feel more pressure then than you felt for your third novel and for this novel? You know, I mean, people do talk about the sort of second novel curse might be going a bit far, but when you've had a breakout success that then you're

Maybe there's a sense in you that you feel, unless what I write now lives up to the first, I will somehow have disappointed whether you internalise any of that or whether you've just got this line in your mind, that was that book, that's a world, that's a whole cast of characters, they live over there and I'm starting with a blank sheet.

I mean, I think you're just, you're incredibly aware that when you've had a success like that, that was so big, that a lot of people are going to be watching to see what you do next, that it's going to be scrutinized. It's going to be written about. People will talk about it. So that is, that's already like quite daunting. I had, before The Girl on the Train became huge, I sort of started on the next novel and I had the ideas in my head and I knew what I wanted to do and I kept going.

And I kept going with it. I think I was like somewhat overambitious with that book. And it was also a bit rushed and I was constantly distracted. I think I look back on it as bad, but maybe that's, you know, it wasn't well received. Some of the reviews were harsh, but I think they were probably always going to be because of what had happened.

certainly once that was out the way, I did feel a bit better. And now, you know, when I was writing this, I wasn't, I was, it feels like a long time ago for me and everyone, I will always be known and they still stick it on the front of the book, the girl on the train. And I can't escape that. And I shouldn't moan about it because, you know,

I shouldn't moan about it. It doesn't feel like a thing hanging over me anymore. And I think because all of my books have been quite different in some ways, people know they're not getting The Girl on the Train 2 when they come to read them. So I don't really feel, I don't feel encumbered so much by it anymore. I can have a nicer relationship with that novel now.

And how much impact do the critical reviews have on you? Are you, I mean, you know, coming from the world of politics, you need to thicken your skin and be able to read almost anything said about you and just let it brush off you. You can't take it to heart, otherwise you wouldn't get through the day. The more you write, do you get more into that zone of, oh, whatever, but, you know, I'm doing my thing?

I mean, I still find it painful to read bad reviews and I do read my reviews. Not all, I wouldn't like go on Amazon or Goodreads and read every single reader review, but when I, I will read what's in the press and I, yeah. And I still have that thing where I will remember every single piece of bad press and well, the good stuff just goes straight out of my head. But I, you know, I'll lie awake at night thinking of that one mean thing they said, but I,

It's just that, you know, that is part of it. To be honest, most, a lot of writers would kill to get a review in a national newspaper anyway. It's not something that everybody gets. It means you're being noticed. It means your books are out there. It's actually a privilege. And you can't, yeah, I know you can't get to it. But I mean, do you, are you really able to just go, don't care, move past it? It doesn't like... You get to a stage where you...

Third person it. Yeah. So it's sort of this is a critique about Julia Gillard, the politician, not me, the person. I've also got a friend who has slavishly written the name of everybody who's ever been mean to me on a sheet of paper. LAUGHTER

and put each of those slips of paper in a freezer and somehow she's, I think, on her second or third freezer but somehow that's been alleviating for me too. So I'd recommend that to you. Well, maybe that's the way of naming characters. Okay. There we go. We're killing it. Come to Australia, we can show you the freezers. You can start digging through for names. Have we got further questions? Yes.

Okay, when I first read Girl on the Train, it was about the time that various other novels were out, which were all very sort of big on the, wow, amazing plot twist thing. And it seemed to be a bit of a genre at the time. Do you find yourself put under any kind of pressure to always come up with an even bigger and better plot twist thing?

I'm not a fan of the twist for twist's sake, really. I think a lot of books were sold on the, oh, you'll never guess the ending kind of thing, which, fine, I guess I get why people do that. But if you're just inserting like, oh, and then this other thing happened, you know, this extraordinary, you'll have never seen it coming thing.

So without laying the groundwork for that, that doesn't work. A twist has got to be a way of making you like turn around and look back over the rest of the book and go, oh, and suddenly see something in a new light. You know, I'm going to...

I'm going to assume that everyone's read Gone Girl and, you know, that when you get a third of the way into that book and then suddenly you're like, oh, okay, I'm reading a completely different book now. That's clever. And every, you know, she's laid the groundwork for that all the way through. I don't think, I mean, I don't feel great pressure to do it now. I don't think that you, perhaps early on I did, but for me, that's not, that doesn't make a, that's not what makes a good crime novel. You can't just,

you know, have rabbits jumping out of hats. Is that a weird metaphor? Anyway, you have to have laid all the groundwork. If you're surprised at the end, you still need to have had that feeling that actually if you'd been paying really, really careful attention, you could have kind of seen that coming because the groundwork has been laid. That's what makes a brilliant twist. When you look back and you're like, oh my God, she's been telling me this all along and I just wasn't listening. That's clever. And one over here.

Would you work well on an island where you're the only inhabitant? I like to think, well, I mean, this is kind of, it is sort of a, this was kind of me fantasizing about running away to an island and working there and living there and cutting myself off from the world and not having to talk to anyone. Yeah.

Actually, I know it's ludicrous fancy because I would, if I was alone on an island, I would never sleep. I would lie in bed awake listening to the creek on the stair, you know, imagining the person with the axe. I would be terrified. So I'd be a terrible person for that. But I love the idea of being cut off and somewhere silent and somewhere where you don't have phone reception. I am aware that I could have just turned my phone off. But that idea of...

Complete isolation and being somewhere beautiful and quiet is extremely appealing to me. And I do think it would be very conducive to work for some of the time. But then as there is this whole push and pull in the novel, there's that isolation is wonderful. But how much do you also need to be in a community to get inspiration and inspiration?

feedback and you know to feel your you know to get your creative juices flowing maybe just being somewhere beautiful and remote isn't enough for that slightly we've got time to take another question if there is one just here when you've invested in in a character throughout the novel that that is probably going to be the character that that people uh identify with

How difficult is it to dispense with that character? Yeah, I think it is difficult. I think it's difficult to do harm to characters that you've grown attached to, even if they aren't good people. It's still... I admire people who can just dispatch characters willy-nilly. You know, Mick Herron does it, and George R. R. Martin famously. But it's...

I think it should be difficult. That's the thing. If it were easy, then it's cheap, isn't it? If it's easy to get rid of someone. I think it should be hard to get rid of people. You're not just killing the bad people or the easy people to kill or the monsters. I think that's part of what's writing something that is nuanced is, is that that's not how it turns out. And it is sometimes good things don't come to the good people. Yeah.

And in terms of your own personal reading, so can you – so if you're writing all day, in an evening would you read someone else's novel or when you're writing, to decompress you've got to kind of get words out of your head so you do something else entirely rather than read? I mean, I watch quite a lot of Crap Telly but I do read while I'm –

writing as well um I don't necessarily read a lot of crime novels uh I don't really want to have too much crime in my head so um sometimes you're reading you know for research or the art books I was talking about but otherwise I'll just read you know books that I like to read there I tend to sort of go from literary fiction with this it's usually sort of um

adjacent, I guess. Or there's usually something terrible that happens. I do tend to turn to the darker stories, but...

you know, I, it's people like Pat Barker or Kate Atkinson or, you know, a really good writing that Kate Atkinson obviously does write some crime, but she writes other things as well. But I feel that like feeds my imagination anyways, reading really, really good writing. You want to read things that, that inspire you and make you want to get better. So I don't, I don't,

throw the books to one side. Though I do think there's a moment where you need to decompress and, as I say, just, yeah, watch some TV or go for a walk, whatever, to completely clear your head of the words. Otherwise, it can get a bit much. I can understand that. And in terms of, you know, we're obviously moving into the Christmas cycle. We've got lights everywhere. Obviously, great, great Christmas gift. Let me just.

a great Christmas gift for people in your family who love to read. But as we come towards the end of this year, would you have a book that you'd recommend as the one that this year you like so much you'd be recommending it to people? Oh, yeah, there's quite a few. And I mean, well, I've...

I was going to say, I mean, Samantha Harvey, um, orbital, but obviously everyone's going to buy that anyway, because it won the book. Um, Charlotte Woods, um, I'm pointing at you. Um, it's only 24 million of us. We all know each other. It's fine. Um, I love Charlotte Woods writing. I've loved all of her books. Stoneyard devotional, which was out this year is wonderful. Um,

I really loved, I mean, this is not that new. It's in paperback, I think. It's a ghost by Isabella Hamad, which is about a group of people putting on a production of Hamlet on the West Bank. It's a gorgeous novel. So there's a few. Those are a few good ones.

Christmas tips. Absolutely. And if I can add one, mine would be an Australian author, a woman called Fiona McFarlane. And my home state is South Australia and it's set in a fictional town

township in country South Australia in the sort of colonial era. It's called The Sun, as in the sun in the sky. The sun walks down and a boy goes missing in the bush. And so there's a propulsive narrative. Are they going to find the boy? What's happened to the boy? Is the boy okay? But

It uses that to tell the perspectives of everybody in the township and therefore lays bare a lot about society. So everyone from the Aboriginal tracker who is trying to find the boy to the sort of squatocracy who have taken the land to the Afghan cameleer to the town prostitute, you hear all of these voices. And so it's a great book.

But our purpose here is to point you to this book that Paula will be signing in the bookshop. I will also be with Paula. I'm not forging Paula's signature on Paula's book. I will be signing Not Now, Not Ever, which is a collection of essays on misogyny I curated, which was to mark the 10-year anniversary of the misogyny speech.

And that is a, thank you, that is a project that supports the work of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership. But can you join me now in thanking Paula Hawkins for this conversation? And thank you again. Thank you.

A podcast of one's own is created by the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, Canberra, with support from our sister institute at King's College, London. Earnings from the podcast go back into funding for the institute, which was founded by our host, Julia Gillard, and brings together rigorous research, practice and advocacy as a powerful force to advance gender equality and promote fair and equal access to leadership.

Research and production for this podcast is by Becca Shepard, Alice Higgins and Alina Ecott, with editing by Liz Kean from Headline Productions and recording support by Nick Hilton. If you have feedback or ideas, please email us at giwl at anu.edu.au.

To stay up to date with the Institute's work, go to giwl.anu.edu.au and sign up to our updates or follow us on social media at Jewel ANU. You can also find a podcast of one's own on Instagram.

The team at A Podcast of One's Own acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Thanks for listening, and we hope you'll join us next time.

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