← A Podcast of One's Own with Julia Gillard
A Podcast of One's Own with Julia Gillard
Julia Gillard and Paula Hawkins live at Hay Festival Winter Weekend
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- [00:02]
Paula Hawkins
ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend hey.
- [00:10]
Robert Mays
Everyone, I'm Robert Mays, host of the Athletic Football show and I'm excited to welcome you to the 2025 season and everything new we've got going at Tafs. First and foremost, get ready for a whole new look. We're coming to you from the Athletic Football show studio in Chicago. Get the full experience by checking us out on our YouTube channel. Second, whether you watch on YouTube or listen to us on your podcast platform of choice, you'll hear a new voice. Dave Hellman joins Derek Klassen and myself as the third host on the show, bringing a different perspective to the conversation. Finally, Dane Brugler is back with year round NFL draft coverage with Building the Beast. No matter what type of NFL fan you are, there's something for you on the Athletic Football Show. Join us Monday Through Friday on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:57]
Paula Hawkins
ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com 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?
- [01:37]
Narrator
Today's episode is a conversation between Julia Gillard and author Paula Hawkins, recorded live at the Hay Festival Winter weekend in Wales.
- [01:53]
Julia Gillard
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 organization 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 cause it seems like a good place to start. You grew up in Zimbabwe. Were you a book loving child?
- [02:48]
Paula Hawkins
I was. I wasn't a particularly highbrow reader as a child. I wasn't one of those children who'd 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. 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. I got my two books every week, which was. Yeah, I loved it.
- [03:12]
Julia Gillard
And when you moved to the uk, 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?
- [03:26]
Paula Hawkins
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 there were always journalists coming to stay at the house in Harare and they were the kind of journalists who'd covered wars and revolutions and 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. And 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 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.
- [04:51]
Julia Gillard
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?
- [05:25]
Paula Hawkins
Did it process? I mean it. 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's 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 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 useful 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, comes in useful later on.
- [06:16]
Julia Gillard
So the things that people don't say.
- [06:17]
Paula Hawkins
The things that people don't say, the gaps they leave, the way they kind of sort of meander around the truth.
- [06:24]
Julia Gillard
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.
- [06:57]
Paula Hawkins
Well, I actually wrote four novels under a pseudonym. There was slightly strange. 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 did all right. And then they asked me to do something else. And so I wrote 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 I wrote the fourth one, which sank without trace, it was clear this was not working. And this, you know, I couldn't. I couldn't do that. And it was time that I actually started writing what I, you know, what I really wanted to write. Unfortunately, by that point, I had sort of lost quite a lot of confidence. So it was a. It was a really difficult time for me. However, all that. All that, the unhappiness that I felt at the time, I think just went into the character of Rachel and 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.
- [08:23]
Julia Gillard
I've got this image now that in the fourth of those romantic comedy novels you practise by killing everybody off in different ways, different and mysterious ways.
- [08:32]
Paula Hawkins
I wish I had done. No. People died, like, miserably. But it wasn't mysterious.
- [08:38]
Julia Gillard
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 how your imagination led you to that plot line and your writing process? I mean, you up at 4 in the morning hammering the keyboard, or are you wandering around at midnight swilling Scotch and hoping for inspiration? How does it work?
- [09:08]
Paula Hawkins
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, you know, eight in the morning like a normal person and writing the Girl on the Train. 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 wander about. I'd read, I think it was originally 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 that. 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 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 originally I thought she would see an act of violence, you know, very Rear Window. But then I decided that it didn't need to be an act of violence. It 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. It ended up a kiss and then it's this kiss that she builds into something and drags her into. Into the mystery. But so it was having to put the character together with something else to get the plot moving.
- [10:56]
Julia Gillard
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 was it. Did you take it to the same publisher and who had been publishing the. The four novels under the pseudonym?
- [11:13]
Paula Hawkins
I did, but they passed. Oh, no, I took. And then we took it to my agent, sent it to a few people and some other people picked it up.
- [11:25]
Julia Gillard
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?
- [11:47]
Paula Hawkins
No, I don't think anyone's ready for it. 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 going as crazy as it did, which was wonderful. It was 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. 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, you know, 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's, you know, 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. This world of books that you've kind of been looking at from the outside. So it is a great experience.
- [13:01]
Julia Gillard
And then Hollywood came calling. Can you explain that to us?
- [13:06]
Paula Hawkins
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, the film was in the cinema. But I had nothing to do with it. 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 that was a nice experience for me. It was great.
- [13:57]
Julia Gillard
Was there any part of that experience where your 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 accept it's a different medium, it's a different form, it's telling the story, but it's inherently gonna have to do it differently?
- [14:17]
Paula Hawkins
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, 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 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 in the center, I'm like, ugh. Because, you know, it does mess with what you saw in your head.
- [15:32]
Julia Gillard
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, oh, but I actually thought it worked.
- [15:42]
Paula Hawkins
It did. It worked. Yeah. They got lots of things right, right? Yes, they did.
- [15:46]
Julia Gillard
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?
- [16:35]
Paula Hawkins
I think everything I write or 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, God, it's a long time since I thought about this book. But now 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 that. 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 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. 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, like, 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.
- [17:49]
Julia Gillard
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 novel in the sense that it actually clearly starts with a murder, you know, instead of us as readers. Like, who's died? Someone died. How have they died? Where'd 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.
- [19:03]
Paula Hawkins
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 Regents Canal that I did for a while. I used to go for walks there in the morning and was seeing all these. These houseboats all along there and then most of them are quite chichi 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 sunk, 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 could put a body in there. No one would discover it for ages. So that's, you know, I do those.
- [19:54]
Julia Gillard
Thoughts occurring around you.
- [19:59]
Paula Hawkins
I had this idea that of something rotting in there and so there I was going to open a body on a boat. So it does. It's not exactly the way I first imagined it, but that's that. That's what I decided I would. I would open the novel with. And then I had to think of how everything else tied into that.
- [20:21]
Julia Gillard
Are you ready to get spicy?
- [20:23]
Commercial Announcer
These Doritos Golden Sriracha aren't that spicy.
- [20:26]
Julia Gillard
Maybe it's time to turn up the.
- [20:28]
Paula Hawkins
Heat or turn it down. It's time for something that's not too spicy. Try Doritos Golden Sriracha. Spicy but not too spicy.
- [20:46]
Julia Gillard
So let's come to your current book, the 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 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 isol. 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?
- [21:50]
Paula Hawkins
Yeah. The island, again, I'd lived with for a long time because I actually, I 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's. That it has all these locked room possibilities. But I didn't. I knew that I wouldn't want to write something in France. Not. Not got anything against French. But, you know, if you don't live somewhere, I think it's difficult. Same. Same excuse for Australia. It's difficult. 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 would be an artist, that it would be someone 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, this freedom that she would have to, you know, live exactly as she wants on her island. So that was, again, it was the 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.
- [23:41]
Julia Gillard
And the artist is Vanessa. 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?
- [24:54]
Paula Hawkins
No, not really. But I like art. I like visual art, and I. 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 was 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 writes about painting the sea a lot. And I read about a Scottish artist called Joan Eardley, who, 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 early, 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 just 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.
- [26:28]
Julia Gillard
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, 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, that dynamic is much more complex than the dominant famous partner and the sort of, you know, carer, subordinate, much more complex. 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. 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 fiance of the posh man who is his benefactor. So not, it's very complicated. Yeah, not, 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, 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 gotta 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.
- [29:32]
Paula Hawkins
Yeah. I mean, again, I think it all comes out of character. And the. 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 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, and they last such a long time. 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 to power in a friendship can shift over time. And this is not like a friendship you would aspire to have. It is very thorny at times, but they trust each other 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. When she was actually making it, or was it just a mistake that she picked something up and put it in there?
- [31:03]
Julia Gillard
Is it the lost husband?
- [31:04]
Paula Hawkins
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, is. 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.
- [32:05]
Julia Gillard
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 realize 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 then, 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. Do you. How do you think about, you know, 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?
- [33:53]
Paula Hawkins
Yeah, I think there's an expectation when you're writing a crime novel that, you know, that the murder. 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 they. I tend to write them right around them a bit. But mostly not because I think the police are necessarily 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. 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. Not career criminals or, you know, 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 or they are involved in something terrible. And it's all the. The questions of why they have ended up there and what that. 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's. I'm not. It's. 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, terrible acts. And just because someone 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'm not one of those people who tries to set the world to write sin fiction. That's just not how I look at it.
- [35:55]
Julia Gillard
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'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?
- [36:26]
Paula Hawkins
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 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, you know, whether this is a runner and at this point, everything is available to you, even moving to Australia, you know, you can do anything with it at this point. So, yeah, it's quite fun, this bit. Once the touring is over.
- [37:41]
Julia Gillard
What's the least fun bit if that creative starts the best fun?
- [37:47]
Paula Hawkins
Well, I mean, in the whole process or of the writing process?
- [37:52]
Julia Gillard
In the whole process. And please don't say coming to Hay.
- [37:55]
Paula Hawkins
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 I'm, you know, 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?
- [38:43]
Julia Gillard
Yes, you do.
- [38:45]
Paula Hawkins
I'm saying this to a politician. What am I saying?
- [38:48]
Julia Gillard
Yes, you do. Paula, would you do us the honour of reading an extract from your book? And then we'll take a few of your questions.
- [38:55]
Paula Hawkins
So I'm actually going to read a bit at the end, but it's not a spoilery bit. Right, no. Spoiler alert. So 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 diary of 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. Back 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 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 realized 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 oblivion? 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.
- [41:56]
Julia Gillard
Thank you. Thank you very much.
- [42:01]
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- [42:39]
Julia Gillard
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.
- [43:03]
Paula Hawkins
Hi.
- [43:03]
Tony or Ryan
Thank you.
- [43:03]
Julia Gillard
I just wondered if you liked your characters.
- [43:08]
Paula Hawkins
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, so. 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 likable characters.
- [43:49]
Julia Gillard
That jolly murderer.
- [43:52]
Paula Hawkins
But. 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. What happens to them. I don't think you have to want to be their friend, but you have to see something in them. Yeah.
- [44:13]
Julia Gillard
Still, on the theme of characters, how do you choose their names?
- [44:17]
Paula Hawkins
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 there'll be a first name from over there and last name from over there. So 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.
- [44:52]
Julia Gillard
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.
- [45:02]
Paula Hawkins
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. 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, but 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.
- [45:58]
Julia Gillard
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's. That you feel, unless I, 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.
- [46:44]
Paula Hawkins
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, so 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. And I. And I kept going with it. I think I was like somewhat over ambitious 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. 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. 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 too, when they come. 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.
- [48:08]
Julia Gillard
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. And the more you write, do you get more into that zone of, oh, whatever, but, you know, I'm doing my thing.
- [48:37]
Paula Hawkins
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 will read what's in the press and. 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. 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. Yeah, you.
- [49:34]
Julia Gillard
You get to a stage where you. Third person, it. So it's sort of. This is a critique about Julia Gillard the politician. Not. 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 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 recommend that to you.
- [50:07]
Paula Hawkins
Well, maybe that's the way of naming characters. Okay, there we go. We're killing the.
- [50:13]
Julia Gillard
Come to Australia, we can show you the freezers. You can start digging through for names. Have we got further questions? Okay. When I first read Girl on the.
- [50:25]
Paula Hawkins
Train, it was about the time that.
- [50:27]
Julia Gillard
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.
- [50:33]
Paula Hawkins
Of a genre at the time.
- [50:35]
Julia Gillard
Do you find yourself put under any kind of pressure to always come up with an even bigger and better plot twist?
- [50:41]
Paula Hawkins
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 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 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 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. You have to have laid all the groundwork. If, 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 that the. 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.
- [52:17]
Julia Gillard
And one over here.
- [52:19]
Paula Hawkins
Would you work well on an island where you. The only inhabitant, I like to think, well, I mean, this is kind. 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, 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. I'd be terrified. So I'd be terrible person. I'd be a terrible person for that. But I love the idea of being cut off and somewhere silent and somewhere where you can't. 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 other time. But then as there is this whole push and pull on the novel, is that isolation is wonderful. But how much do you also need to be in a community to get inspiration and 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.
- [53:36]
Julia Gillard
Absolutely. We've got time to take another question, if there is one. Just.
- [53:42]
Paula Hawkins
Yeah. When you've invested in a character throughout the novel that is probably going to be the character that people.
- [53:55]
Narrator
Identify with.
- [53:57]
Paula Hawkins
How difficult is it to dispense with 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 Heron 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 you. Then it's. Then it's cheap, isn't it? If it's easy to get rid of some. I think it should be hard to get rid of people. It shouldn't. You're not just killing the bad people or the easy people to kill or the monsters. I think that's part of what 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.
- [54:53]
Julia Gillard
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, you've to decompress, you've got to kind of get words out of your head so you do something else entirely rather than read.
- [55:12]
Paula Hawkins
I mean, I watch quite a lot of crap telly But I do read while I'm writing as well. I don't necessarily read a lot of crime novels. I don't really want to have too much crime in my head. So 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 for more literary fiction with this. It's usually sort of murder adjacent, I guess, or there's usually something terrible that happens. I do go tend to turn to the like darker stories. But, you know, I, I, it's people like Pat Barker or Kate Atkinson or, you know, 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 completely 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 and, or go for a walk, whatever, to completely clear your head of the words. Otherwise it can get a bit much.
- [56:29]
Julia Gillard
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?
- [56:55]
Paula Hawkins
Oh yeah, there's quite a few. And I mean. Well, I'm, I was gonna say, I mean Samantha Harvey Orbital, but obviously everyone's gonna buy that anyway. Cause it won the booker. Charlotte Woods, I'm pointing at you.
- [57:10]
Julia Gillard
There's only 24 million of us. We all know it, each other. It's fine.
- [57:16]
Paula Hawkins
I love Charlotte Wood's writing. I've loved all of her books. Stone Yard Devotional, which was out this year, is wonderful. I really loved, I mean this is not that new. It's in paperback. I think is Enter Ghost by Isabella Hamad, which is by. About a group of people putting on a production of Hamlet on the West Bank. It's a gorgeous. So there's a few. Those are a few good Christmas tips.
- [57:43]
Julia Gillard
Absolutely. And if I can add one, mine would be an Australian author, a woman called Fiona MacFarlane. And it's. My home state is South Australia. And it's set in a fictional 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 to the sort of squattocracy 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 am 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 Apaula Hawkins for this conversation?
- [59:24]
Paula Hawkins
Thank you.
- [59:33]
Narrator
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 Gibson 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 Shepherd, Alice Higgins and Alina Ecot, with editing by Liz Keen from Headline Productions and recording support by Nick Hilton. If you have feedback or ideas, please email us at giwl. 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 mediaulanu. 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.
- [61:06]
Tony or Ryan
G' Day America. It's Tony and Ryan from the Tony and Ryan Podcast from Down Under.
- [61:10]
Paula Hawkins
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- [61:13]
Tony or Ryan
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- [61:22]
Paula Hawkins
Boost Mobile's unlimited plans start at just $25 a month and will never increase in price.
- [61:27]
Tony or Ryan
The Boost Mobile network, together with their roaming partners, covers 99% of the US population. 5G speeds not available in all areas.
- [61:36]
Paula Hawkins
Visit the nearest Boost Mobile or BoostMobile.com after 30 gigabytes.
- [61:40]
Tony or Ryan
Speeds may slow $25 per month with active Boost Unlimited plan. Cancel with within 30 days for a refund of service fees, activation and phone payments. Not refunded.