The Girl On The Train

Rachel’s alcohol use disorder and Megan’s trauma cause issues with each woman’s memories and cognition. Tom takes advantage of the blackouts Rachel experiences when she drinks too much alcohol. Rachel describes being blackout drunk as “Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved” (67). This state of inebriation allows Tom to fill in the missing time with the lies of his choosing. Hawkins dedicates much of Rachel’s narrative to retrieving her memories. Rachel describes the process of trying to remember:

I wait for the memory to come. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it’s there in front of my eyes in seconds. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all (38).

This process defines much of Rachel’s character arc—Megan’s disappearance motivates her to try to remember rather than simply accept Tom’s lies.

Rachel’s opinions of herself and Tom change as memories come back to her. The process is multifaceted: Rachel combines many tactics, such as freewriting, visiting locations, therapy, and finally talking to someone who witnessed her actions while drunk besides Tom. One important factor in Rachel’s memory recovery is becoming addiction-free. At first, it is hard for her to go even a single day without drinking, but eventually she begins to go multiple days and—at the end of the novel—weeks without drinking. The combination of these elements helps Rachel realize the extent of Tom’s gaslighting. She thinks, “I didn’t imagine him hitting me. I remember it [...] Just like I remember the fear when I found myself on the floor next to that golf club—and I know now, I know for sure that I wasn’t the one swinging it” (271). Tom characterized Rachel as violent, but when she regains her memory, she learns that these lies were to cover up Tom’s own abuse.

While Rachel gains a stronger sense of her true self, rather than the version that Tom lied into existence, Megan learns to forgive herself. Megan endured extensive trauma and shared some of the details with the people in her life. For instance, she told Scott about the death of her brother, Ben, when she was just a teenager. However, she does not reveal the death of her child to anyone but Kamal. Megan says:

I need to tell someone, just once. Say the words out loud. If it doesn’t come out of me, it’ll eat me up. The hole inside me, the one they left, it’ll just get bigger and bigger until it consumes me (163).

Megan does not have holes in her memory like Rachel, but her traumatic losses have caused her to try to repress her feelings. It is the desire to repress the memories that causes Megan to have an affair with Tom. He feels, or lies about feeling, empty, and Megan thinks: “Hollowness: that I understand” (94). Once she talks to someone about the trauma of losing her infant by falling asleep with her in a bathtub, Megan feels more like herself—someone with a strong capacity for change. Her self-forgiveness is tied in with wanting to keep Tom’s child, even raising it alone if necessary. Her insistence on keeping the child, to keep changing, is what causes Tom to kill her.