Alex Michaelides: “What I know when I meet people is that they are screwed up and complicated, and that's my interest”

That it is a good debut, no one doubts it. Which is complex, labyrinthine and where the only certainty is the cruelty with which someone was killed, either. The fact that the novel } silent is already in bookstores in the region gives the readers of these geographies the certainty that just by leaving home, walking to the friendly bookstore and placing the index on the first page gives the assurance of being able to enter the darkness that occurs in the psychiatric hospital The Grove in London, and its surroundings. The first novel by Alex Michaelides, a writer born in 1977 in Cyprus, is a huge bestseller, with more than five million copies sold since its British release in 2019, and finally arrives in Argentina. Michaelides has already published Las maidens, his second work, and he is excited to know what reception his creation will have on these shores, since Buenos Aires, it is known, is psychoanalyzed as Freud would have wanted.

This is a psychological thriller that combines the crime for which Alicia Berenson, a plastic artist, had been found guilty of murdering her husband Gabriel of several gunshot wounds fired directly in his face. Alicia, condemned to spend her days in a psychiatric clinic due to the disorders that would have triggered the homicide, remained in permanent silence. That is to say: silence of remaining silent when dumbness had not previously been its characteristic. An exasperated silence. Theo Farber, a psychotherapist who works in a prestigious institution, becomes obsessed with Alicia's crime and dumbness and decides to apply to work at The Grove, where the convicted woman spends her days with other women criminals with different mental illnesses. Farber's goal upon entering the psychiatric hospital is to become Alicia's therapist and get her to talk.

The plot is complexed by the entry on the scene of dark psychiatrists, lawyers not to trust, the mysterious gallery owner of Alicia or the very messy life of Theo Farber. The reader will be urged to recall the Greek tragedy of Euripides, Alcestis, whose female protagonist will be sacrificed by her husband in order to preserve her own existence, but whom the gods allow her to return to life. Upon her return, she chooses dumbness. Euripides wonders (and Michaelides uses as the epigraph of the novel): “But why doesn't he say anything?” And the gripping plot begins to roll.

Infobae Cultura talked with Michaelides about his debut novel, which reaches bookstores in Argentina and the region a few months before the film adaptation of a book whose rhythm and intrigue would be to become the object of desire of any film director (a assumption confirmed when the film rights were purchased by Plan B, the production company of Brad Pitt). And on many other topics.

—Michaelides, his literary debut is quite a success. Do you know how many copies were sold?

“It's hard to say exactly, but it is estimated that about five million books.

“Few first books are this successful. In addition, the plot that combines crime, a psychotherapist like the “detective” and a fast-paced intrigue was not written in his early youth. How was that process?

“No, I wrote it close past the middle of my third decade. I think I always had a look, a talent or an ease about plots. I was a screenwriter for a while and I loved having stories and ideas. But I think what held me back a little is that it ended up being a little shallow. And, you know, it took me quite a while to grow up as a person, and decide to study psychotherapy and get to work in a psychiatric unit. So I kept learning as a reader until, when I reached the age of 35 or 36, I could understand that I could write something deeper. Then the question of genres arose, which I think I combined two or three in my novel, because I always wanted to write a detective story, all my life. And when I started writing The Silent Patient, I realized that I didn't know anything about detectives or the work of the police and that going down that road could be bad. Then I wondered about what I did know and the answer was: psychotherapy. I said to myself: “I'm going to build a hero who is a psychotherapist, so he can investigate a murder with psychological elements and then combine everything from there and that's when it all came together in my head.”

— So you studied psychotherapy as part of the research of your literary project?

“No. Maybe I studied psychotherapy because, first of all, I was a therapeutic patient for a long time, about ten years, and I liked it very much. My sister is a psychiatrist and she suggested that maybe I should study this discipline and I started studying part-time. Then I started working in a safe unit for teenagers, a psychiatric unit for teenagers, which was an incredible experience. And I just fell very much in love with the whole concept of therapy. What happened was that I realized that I was a writer, not a therapist. So, after a few years of studying, I quit because I was starting to see patients at the time, and I thought, I can't do this full-time because really, in my heart, I'm a writer. On top of that, I was making a movie at the same time, so I quit therapy. And the movie was a bad experience, like every movie I ever made that has been a disaster. I thought, “Well, what do I do now? I try to be a therapist or writer”, and I thought that before I stopped writing I would try to write a novel. Because all my life I wanted to write a novel and I always postponed it because I thought it was too difficult. And then I finally decided to sit down and write it down. I asked myself: what are my life experiences so far? I realized I could establish a fact in a psychiatric unit. I could the Greek tragedy and politics, which are great interests for me. Crime novels, psychotherapy and everything came together in unison. So, no, it wasn't premeditated for many years. It just happened like that, organically.

He mentioned the Greek tragedy. You were born in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Sea, on the border between Greece and Turkey, which even occupied a part of the island in 1974. Until what age did you live there?

-Until the age of 18.

“Oh, he was born and raised in Cyprus. Where does your relationship with English come from?

“Well, my mother is English, my father is Greek Cypriot. I spoke English both with my mother and father and some friends and with others in Greek. I think I was very lucky because I have influences from both cultures. My mother used to be an English teacher, and our house was full of amazing books: Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Margaret Atwood and more. It was an incredible education to be able to read all these amazing books. And at the same time in Cyprus there is a great influence of Greek mythology. They teach you about tragedies at school: if in England you can learn Shakespeare, in Greece, on the other hand, they teach you Homer. And when I was about 13 years old, I was introduced to Euripides for the first time at school. I was very captivated by their characters and their tragedies because they are very psychological, and they existed in a time before psychology. However, he has a real genius to describe very accurately extreme states of madness, anger, jealousy, love. All these things that, you know, are still very current today. It shows us that people haven't changed much like in 3000 years. I think I find it very interesting. I think I was able to combine these two different cultural influences in my head, for which I am very grateful.

“It is very interesting to soak up the Greek myths that, as he says, talk about the psychological constitution of the self in people.

“Not only in psychology. What really struck me recently and I've been thinking about it, is that if you think about Oedipus or a lot of Greek tragedies we also have detective stories. You know: there is the hero who always tries to unravel some kind of mystery. Just as he needs to proceed to understand the curse and then understand that he himself is the cause of the curse in a moment of understanding the end. I think there is a common ground between the crime novel, the Greek tragedy and also psychology.

“In an interview I read that he met Alcestis, from Euripides, when he was very young.

“And at that moment it bothered me a lot. It bothered me about the end, you know: she lives again after she dies to save her husband. And then she's brought back to life and she's reunited with her husband, and she won't talk to him. The play ends with her in silence. When I was about 13, we studied it in school for the first time and I felt very upset about the end and confused because I wanted some kind of explanation. And then, over the years, I guess it continued to reverberate in my head.

“In most countries of the world, I could say, children do not study these Greek texts.

“That's what I mean, I was lucky. I don't think I would have been taught this kind of thing in another country.

—Your English mother taught English, what did your father do?

“He was engaged in accounting. Nothing could be further from books.

“Well, there are the accounting books.

- (Laughs) Right. No, my father loved movies, and there were a lot of movies at home. Then, perhaps younger, about 10 years old, was watching Alfred Hitchcock movies. And I keep seeing Alfred Hitchcock all the time trying to learn from him because he's a genius.

— Did you emigrate to England at the age of 18?

“Yes, I went to Cambridge, I studied English. English literature. Then I specialized in Greek tragedy at Cambridge as well. So I had to relearn all these tragedies a bit and it was very useful to me. Then I started as an actor. He wasn't a very good actor. I love being in plays and I love being around people, but I think I always wanted to be a writer, but I don't think I was very mature. And I think that to be a writer you must have some kind of maturity. You know, I'm surprised at people who write amazing novels when they're 20. I was 20 years old and it was a disaster. I couldn't put things together in my own way or have that kind of depth of understanding.

“And how did he get to the movies?

“It was an accident. I was working, on one of the first jobs I ever had, in a film production company. He was something like a cadet. And at the same time, I wrote a script in my spare time and then gave it to the company's producer. And he just really liked it. He said, “Let's get it filmed,” but it was a disaster, very bad. And then he said, “If you want to be a screenwriter, maybe you should study.” So I went to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and was lucky enough to get in there. And I did a Masters in Screenwriting. Which was incredible. I learned a lot about structure in film and how to tell a story and things like that. And then I made two more films, again, even greater disasters. I love being on a film set, it's so much fun. But the problem with cinema is that the writer is always the least important person. The director is the one in charge. Very often I saw on the film set something that I had spent months writing and that changed like this in a second without my participation. And it was horrible. Watching the movie can get worse. And worse and worse, then everything got really depressed and I thought, “Well, the only way out of this is to do something where you have complete creative control. And since I'm not a director, the only way I could do that was by writing a novel. And then, in the novel, I can be the director, the costume designer, the actors, I can do it all in my head. And I write the book for myself without anyone else rewriting my word, changing things.” Because I realized he was a novelist. I think I knew it because I realized that it was much better to write novels and I was writing scripts.

“Your novel is very obscure. The detective is a therapist who investigates a crime in a very complex space, a psychiatric hospital. And somehow the case affects him personally that he gets involved in this way.

“I was never interested when I wanted to write this novel, or any novel, to create a character like Hercules Poirot. I'm not interested in having a detective who doesn't change, who's just a detective. I'd find it very boring. I was much more interested in trying to write a very complicated character that was really screwed up. That was more interesting to me than just a detective.

—He was interested in the black genre before...

“I was very interested in noir. The cinema of the forties was probably my favorite. Hitchcock played with it a bit, but I love the Hollywood noir of the 1940s, so incredible and at the same time so dark.

—Noir and psychotherapy is a good combination.

“I think what interests me, the question I really wanted to examine was whether we can ever recover from our childhood and the things that happened to us when we were children, and that was my real purpose. Because all the characters have a very bad childhood. And the conclusion I came to, you know, both in writing the book and in my own personal therapy, the need to understand. There's a psychoanalyst named Alice Miller whose books meant a lot to me. She said that not only do we have to understand what happened to us as children, but we also have to understand what happened to our parents when they were children. Otherwise, we can never truly forgive and we can never get over things. And by that means what he's really saying is that we need to have a massive awareness. Most people don't see their own childhood clearly, or are too afraid to look at it or to fight and criticize their parents or want to blame their parents. It's all very complicated. So, when I was writing the book, I felt that if you have the opportunity to see your childhood clearly and understand what happened to you, you have a good chance of overcoming it, otherwise you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes as your parents. So that was a big interest to my characters: very deeply flawed who are struggling. I was often told, in the first film I wrote, that the characters were not very nice. And I thought a lot of people also said that about The Silent Patient, but I don't know how to write them any other way. I mean: Julia Roberts is a nice character and I love Julia Roberts. But I wouldn't be able to write that kind of character, I'd get bored. What I know when I meet people is that they're screwed up and complicated, and that's my interest.

—You know that Argentina and Buenos Aires are very steeped in psychoanalysis.

“She's very famous for that. Everyone knows that, yeah.

—Perhaps it is an additional interest for the Argentine reader of his novel. There is a character, Ruth, the main character's therapist, about whom I wondered if I did psychoanalysis or other therapy.

“I would say another therapy. I wouldn't say psychoanalysis. For me the difference between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is that psychoanalysis does not promise to cure you. I think therapy is more of a kind of supportive approach to trying to help you and I don't think psychoanalysis understands that. I've never been to psychoanalysis, but I have many friends who have done it five times a week. Analysis is not about helping you, but about trying to see things. So I think, in my novel, that I actually wrote about therapy as opposed to analysis. I think it's obvious they're related. But I think maybe if you looked closely at her therapist, Ruth, I really liked her, but I think, obviously, something went wrong in that therapy, because she couldn't see clearly. Actually. So I think what probably happened is that she was caught up in her own desire to help. And that maybe stopped her, and maybe she needed some analysis herself, to help her understand what was going on with the therapy sessions. Because you know, and then I have a lot of friends who are therapists, and they read the book, and they told me, they don't think a therapist behaves the way she behaves. And I have to disagree because part of the reason I quit my therapy training is because I met so many therapists who are crazy, really crazy and don't help.

The film will soon come, but it is known that a film and a book are different paths on a similar ground. The novel by Alex Michaelides will have to be read before the dark terrain of psychiatrists, therapists, murderous patients and dark characters comes to life on the screen because it already has it in a paper format that could well drive any reader crazy, of course, in the good sense of the concept.

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