The Girl On The Train

As a novel, The Girl on The Train sure has an afterlife. Released in 2015, written by Paula Hawkins, the latest film it spawned was a 2021 Bollywood production (see pic). The amnesia thriller also inspired two other films. I look back on how the original novel became a phenomenon, not merely a runaway best seller, but a marker of the early move in popular fiction towards ‘domestic noir’. My interest lies in the memory loss factor the novel relies on for the telling of its story of ordinary women’s lives gone terribly wrong. The memory loss type? Alcohol induced.