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I love that feeling of reaching the end of a book and suddenly realizing you’ve been viewing the whole thing the wrong way up. I think the way Henry James shifts the POV in Portrait of Lady so you realize you’ve been looking at the triangular relationship in the wrong way is very close to what Agatha Christie does in Five Little Pigs or Death on the Nile. It’s fun exploring that.Īnd there’s a great tradition of psychological suspense in British literature. I’ve been doing research about all the horrible things that went on. It’s a little Grand Guignol, a little gruesome.
The silent patient twist series#
It’s about a series of murders at a Cambridge college. My next book also has a lot of Greek tragedy in it. There was something about this woman returning from death and never speaking again. The Alcestis was a play that captivated me since I was a child. I think they’re really close to Tennessee Williams in lots of ways. I’ve always been fascinated with Euripides and the tragic heroines he has. At age 13, you’re being taught The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the plays are always being staged.
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So you grow up with an awareness of the Greek myths.
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How did the myths influence your writing?Ĭyprus, where I grew up, is a very ancient country.
The silent patient twist full#
The Silent Patient is full of references to Greek myths and tragedies, especially the Euripides play Alcestis. That was definitely playing in my mind when I wrote the novel–that ambivalence. So I sort of fell out of love with psychotherapy, even though it had helped me a great deal. Despite meeting some really incredible people–at this unit, particularly–I did also encounter, while I was studying, lots of people who were supposedly very eminent, who were lacking in anything I recognized as empathy. But it was also more complicated than that. I ultimately left because I was reaching a point in my studies where I was about to take on long-term patients, and I felt I was really a writer not a therapist. I didn’t have the idea then for writing a novel about it, but I knew it was a formative, life-changing experience. And then my sister is a psychiatrist and she got me a part-time job at a secure unit for teenagers, which was an incredible experience. I had a lot of individual therapy for a long time, and then I became interested in studying it. In my case it certainly started like that. It’s a bit like Theo, the narrator in the book, says: He was drawn to mental health to heal himself. You did post-graduate work in psychology and worked in a secure psychiatric unit for two years. Here is a great Q&A peak behind the author and the book: This is one I can assure you, that you won't want to miss. Michaelides’s debut is being adapted as a screenplay from Brad Pitt’s production company. And then I still did not understand the hows and whys until he fully explained, in elementary-my-dear detail, the convoluted psychology at play (pg. Would you judge me if I said I did not see the ending of “The Silent Patient” coming? That I read all 323 pages of Alex Michaelides’s best-selling psychological thriller and did not deduce the twist until he wanted me to (page 304). Forensic psychotherapist Theo Faber sets out to unravel the mystery of Alicia’s notorious crime and quickly discovers that nothing about her case is as clear-cut as it seems. The Silent Patient is the gripping tale of Alicia Berenson, a happily married artist who murders her husband and never speaks again.