Pregnancy helped Katherine Faulkner finish first book, Greenwich Park

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Greenwich Park

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katherine faulkner

Gallery Books

Katherine Faulkner is basking in success these days. The British journalist’s debut novel, a cunningly crafted psychological thriller called Greenwich Park, triggered glowing reviews in the UK where it first appeared and swiftly moved onto the best-seller lists.

Yet even now, with the book arriving in North America, she’s still marveling at the circumstances that nurtured its genesis. Would it have ever happened had she not become pregnant and started attending a prenatal clinic?

“I recently sold the film and TV rights,” the 32-year-old author says, sounding somewhat incredulous. However, she’s determined to maintain perspective, remembering her earlier unfinished attempts at fiction and the pride she felt the day she managed to complete this novel about a toxic friendship that goes disastrously wrong.

“I didn’t have too much expectation,” she says from her home in London. “But I really wanted to finish the manuscript of this story, and I’d never managed that before, so I felt it was a big achievement when I did finish it.”

And yes, in a very real sense she owes this book to her pregnancy because it provided the unexpected release mechanism for an idea that had been floating in her mind for some time.

How does one deal with the problem of starting a friendship and then needing to end it? She herself once experienced such a dilemma — although she stresses it did n’t end up the way her novel de ella does. “It was someone who wanted to be friends and it was a strange thing. I didn’t feel there was anything that was a strong connection or contained much in common.”

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Faulkner saw a “really interesting dynamic here” but wasn’t sure what to do with it fictionally. She notes that it’s easy to say “let’s go out for coffee” and then find it can be misconstructed as the beginning of a friendship. “Yet you can’t take it back once you’ve made ‘friends’ with somebody. I was kind of playing around with that idea — and then I got pregnant.”

Her prenatal classes showed the way. “I’m in a room with all these people who I knew nothing about and suddenly we’re all expected to be friends and share these intimate things and support each other at this vulnerable strange time.”

Then a “light bulb” moment. “I thought this is my setting. This is the place where you will encounter someone who wants to be your friend from her and you’ll be unable to get rid of her.

Greenwich Park introduces the reader to Helen, insecure, lacking in self-esteem and uncomfortable in the circle of Cambridge University types favored by her architect husband. Having previously miscarried, she’s now enduring a high-risk pregnancy, exacerbated by loneliness and the lack of a meaningful support system during these crucial months. So she’s vulnerable to the arrival of someone like Rachel, another expectant mother, who is a lot of things — erratic, rule-breaking, clinging, needy, forceful and ultimately sinister as she begins insinuating her way into Helen’s troubled life as well as the lives of others

There is a growing sense of something terribly wrong — compounded when Rachel manipulates her way into Helen’s home as an unwanted guest. And as the tension grows, appalling events from the past gradually begin to haunt the present.

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In discussing her novel, Faulkner is anxious not to give its plot twists away, so she’s guarded when it comes to Rachel, a character who is irritatingly—and ultimately terrifyingly—alive.

“This is a character who’s fighting for her space in these people’s lives,” she says carefully. “She does not have any status, she does not have any space. Ella it’s very uncomfortable even when she’s just demanding a seat at the table — and then they find out what she really wants from them… “

Faulkner, a longtime Times of London editor, will be happy if readers see Greenwich Park as more than a psychological thriller. “It’s also about relationships — for sure. Female friendship and its complexities have always interested me… the way women relate to each other, how complicated these relationships are and how intense they can sometimes be… and how sometimes this can lead to a wrong relationship or a toxic one.”

The novel also benefits from an atmospheric setting in the choice of Greenwich, apart from Greater London that asserts its own mysteriously separate identity. “It feels like an island on its own. It’s unique — you feel its ghosts as you walk around.”

Faulkner, now the mother of two preschool daughters, believes her own pregnancy made a vital contribution to the book—for example in the immediacy with which Helen’s own journey to childbirth is chronicled.

“The experience of pregnancy I found very strange, particularly late pregnancy where it almost feels that the baby has taken over your body,” Faulkner says. She was sensitive to the way others in her world were now relating to her. “You find yourself patronized — even if you’re a professional woman. You have to be prepared to be told what you should and shouldn’t be doing, and that has unintended consequences for your relationships and friends.”

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It’s almost as though Faulkner is now examining herself at a distance with a journalist’s eye. “You might even be a hurtful presence to someone who wants to have a baby, but can’t,” she muses. “All that can be difficult to manage psychologically. You can feel your whole life is gone — you can’t do the things you enjoy and you’re hampered by all these rules. You’re in a kind of lonely place…”

And it can be a dangerous place if someone like Helen meets someone like Rachel.

Hardwick kept surprising herself as the novel progressed. That’s because it hadn’t been planned out to the final stunning revelation.

“I’m not a spreadsheet person, she says cheerfully. “To me there would be no closure if I set down a grid and listed every single thing that was going to happen in every single chapter.” For her, not always knowing what will happen is part of the fun of writing fiction. “If you’re not having fun, there’s not a lot of point to what you’re doing. “I’d be struggling to keep motivated.”

–Jamie Portman