Paula Hawkins, the lady who smiles at ghosts | EUROtoday

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QSo what’s hiding this red-haired, reserved, Hitchcockian lady behind her Mona Lisa face? She stands very straight, saves her phrases, however there’s a unusual fireplace in her, a style for the morbid and the weird that we guess from the main points: a disturbing portray on her wall, a punk e-book in her library , a smile addressed to ghosts, sensible, biting, virtually ironic.

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No one actually noticed the immense success of The Girl on the Trainher first thriller, printed in 2015, which offered 23 million copies and propelled her right into a euphoric and disconcerting spiral. “Experiencing such media exposure was 90% good times and 10% uncomfortable, because I don’t like exposing myself. But sometimes the discomfort was so strong that it gave me the impression that the proportion was reversed,” confides Paula Hawkins, who’s publishing her fifth thriller, The Blue HourAfter At the underside of the water (2017), The one which burns (2021) and Blind spot (2023).

“I wrote boring articles”

At the slightest sudden phrase, on the smallest smile that’s compelled from her, Paula the introvert blushes. She weighs her phrases, appears fearful. She wears a watch on every wrist. They are each related. “I need to control my body, otherwise I forget myself, I don’t sleep, I don’t exercise enough,” she apologizes, at all times with the identical phrase on her lips: “ It’s ridiculous…”

Notoriety has not reworked her, which is confirmed by Marie Misandeau, her editor at Sonatine: “Despite the phenomenal, global success she has experienced, her authenticity, her originality and her freshness have remained intact. His personality is like that! » The unchanged Paula Hawkins repeats the story of the life that led her to where she is today.

ALSO READ Benjamin Whitmer, the writer who always aims for the heartShe was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1972 to British parents. His father is an economist and financial journalist, his mother does not work. As a child, she assiduously read Agatha Christie novels, which sowed the seeds of mystery and darkness in her. She does not dream of being a writer, but a journalist. She meets a lot of them among her parents and perceives an adventurous vibe in them that seduces her. She imagines herself a shock investigator. She studied politics and finance, specialized in the latter to become a freelance reporter, and it was a cold shower. “I wrote boring articles,” she judges.

Love is sweet, however she prefers demise

She would not even have the comfort of a cushty life. “After the financial crisis of 2008, I was almost forty and I had made very bad choices. I managed my money badly. I was under terrible financial stress. » She then wrote romances to order. “I have had an agent since 2004, with whom I still work. A publisher contacted her, looking for a writer for romantic comedies set in the City of London. I knew the sector well. My agent pushed me. »

ALSO READ “The Winter Warriors”: Olivier Norek ventures into white literatureBetween 2009 and 2013, she printed 4 romantic fictions, Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, All I Want for Christmas, One Minute to Midnight And Meeting.“I was given eight weeks to do the first book, it was ridiculous. My work was OK, but not great. They were happy, not me. »

Paula Hawkins doesn’t have a taste for romance. Love is good, but she prefers death. “I read the news every day. Most of them are so cruel, so crazy, so absurd that we wouldn’t dare invent them in fiction. I need to understand the violence that sometimes passes through the lives of ordinary people. »

A menacing row of knives

This is how Rachel, the heroine of The Girl on the Trainimposed itself on her. “For me, it’s a sad little story about an English alcoholic. I didn’t think she could seduce the whole world. » The novelist is obsessed with the breach, the flaw, the scabby bit of wool that will rot the nest. Its heroine, undermined by the departure of her husband, her sterility, her addiction to drink, observes a happy couple every day through the window of her train.

Until the day the woman disappears and this mystery unfolds its ramifications even in the life of Rachel, who is rendered amnesiac by her alcoholism. “Serial killers don’t interest me. They are so rare, and domestic violence is so widespread! The story of crime is the story of love between people which turns into drama. Houses are the dens of evil. This is where I want to enter,” explains the writer, whose well mannered aspect instantly disappears.

It’s inside the house that every part occurs. To actually know Paula Hawkins, it’s a must to go searching, on the lovely dwelling in central Edinburgh the place she moved together with her companion, a retired lawyer, throughout lockdown, fleeing London. She discovered peace right here and likes to flee to the southwest coast of Scotland, the place she spends her days in a van, removed from the world.

The ornament is sober and heat. Two youngsters’s drawings on the fridge (she would not have any, they’re her companion’s grandchildren), fairly birthday playing cards displayed on a sideboard. On the wall of his American kitchen, a menacing row of knives watches us, straight out of a home thriller. We guess she likes the joys it causes.

But it’s in her workplace that we lastly uncover her. There are photos and reproductions of work in every single place. Edward Hopper. Paula Rego. Sordid illustrations of fairy tales. Damaged birds. Windows, and other people peering by means of them uninvited.


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It is identified to him that, for an excessively modest particular person, the absence of curtains on his immense home windows, which look instantly onto the road, is one thing incongruous. “I may shut the shutters. But I like voyeurs. Maybe part of me desires to be noticed, to be advised a narrative. » Paula Hawkins, the lady who was hiding hoping to be found, blushed at these final phrases. From embarrassment, from pleasure, we do not know.

On the fictional island of Eris, off the coast of Scotland, there lived a painter, Vanessa Chapman. She died, forsaking work, sculptures, newspapers. The Tate Modern Gallery will exhibit one in all his works, depicting a deer bone. Problem: an anthropologist customer identifies a human rib. Which corpse did it come from? To write this novel, Paula Hawkins immersed herself in artwork historical past. She tells us concerning the oppressive entourage of the painter, her fickle husband, her bold curator, her obsessive companion, till she unravels the thriller of a life crossed by love, magnificence and cruelty. A really darkish novel, stuffed with poison and melancholy.
“The Blue Hour”by Paula Hawkins, translated from English (Great Britain) by Corinne Daniellot and Pierre Szczeciner (Sonatine, 384 p., €23).

https://www.lepoint.fr/livres/paula-hawkins-la-femme-qui-sourit-aux-fantomes-26-10-2024-2573742_37.php