The British author’s third thriller, The Model Patient, explores the fraught dynamic between a young wife and her therapist in 1960s London.
Part of the novel hinges on the launch of the birth control pill. How did it feel to look back at that innovation from the vantage point of the 21st century?
I feel saddened that we’re forgetting about how revolutionary this was for women and their ability to have freedom in their lives. If we take away something that gives women the ability to control their own bodies, we’re going back in time. When Evelyn’s husband says she shouldn’t be taking the pill, it imposes on her sense of who she is as an individual.
The book is set in the 1960s, a much more recent time period than your first two novels. How did the research process differ?
This time, I could ask questions of people who were coming of age in that era, including my parents. The “swinging sixties” was not everyone’s life. The transition from the conservatism of the 1950s to the changes of the 1960s was quite slow. Many women were very much still in the home, coming out of the rationing of the Second World War, focusing on getting married and maybe starting a career before they left it to have children.
In your author’s note, you call the book “both a love letter to psychotherapy and a criticism of its fragile ethics.” What do you most admire about therapy, and what do you see as its potential hazards?
There’s something very satisfying about the ability to go into our dream life to explore parts of ourselves that we probably don’t like very much. I think that has made me a better writer. But there’s a huge vulnerability as a therapy patient. There’s a risk of retraumatization from therapy that’s too intense straight away. I struggled to cope with the way my therapist used the dynamic between us to uncover unresolved, difficult feelings from my past. I couldn’t understand whether I was failing at therapy, or whether my therapist was manipulating me. The more I asked, “What’s happening here? What is your method?” the less he would tell me, and I felt completely lost.
Do you see the ending as hopeful?
Yes! Evelyn’s path has been traumatic. Her whole sense of whether she can trust herself gets shaken to its core. When I was planning this novel, the ending I was considering wasn’t very satisfying. My agent said, “Try and imagine yourself forward: Where do you want Evelyn to be?” I felt the question was also, Where do I want myself to be? Despite everything that happens to her, Evelyn does ultimately learn to trust herself by the end.
