The Girl on the Train (Movie Tie-In)

Author Essay

Dear Reader,

We’re all voyeurs. Commuters are the same the world over: we sit on our trains every morning and every evening, reading the paper or listening to music, we gaze idly out of the window at the same streets, the same houses, and every now and again we catch a glimpse into the life of a stranger. And we crane our necks to try to get a better look.

I grew up in suburban Harare, in southern Africa, a place where commuting is done by car. People like me—white and affluent—lived in houses set back behind walls and gates and gardens; our lives hidden from passersby. So when I moved to London, at age seventeen, this sort of big-city commute, this cheek-by-jowl living, was utterly new to me, and I found it fascinating.

There’s something irresistible about those snatched glances into the lives of others, frustratingly fleeting and yet so revealing. You’ve never met the people who live in the top-floor apartment of the building next to your second-to-last stop, you’ve never met them, have no idea what they look like, but you know that their son idolizes Ronaldo, that their teenage daughter would rather listen to the Arctic Monkeys than One Direction, that they have a weakness for modern Scandinavian furniture and expressionist art.

You know these people. You like these people. You’re pretty sure they’d like you, too. You could be friends.

Loneliness and isolation can be as much a part of city life as the daily commute, certainly this is the case for Rachel, the protagonist of The Girl on the Train. Her fall from grace has been sudden, she has slipped bewilderingly quickly from happiness to despair. In her desperation to fill the space left by the life she once had, she feels herself to be forming a connection with a couple she sees from her train every day. These strangers have become so familiar to her that she feels as though she knows them, understands them; she constructs a whole narrative around them, she befriends them in her head. In fact, she has no clue about their real lives, so she has no idea what she is stumbling into when, having seen something out of the ordinary, something shocking, she makes the fateful decision to cross a line, from voyeur to active participant in their story.

But once that line is crossed, she finds there’s no going back.

-Paula Hawkins