He quit drinking while he was writing the first draft, and meditated three times a day for 30 minutes. With Agatha Christie as his inspiration, Michaelides got to work on “The Silent Patient.” He approached the project casually, so as not to feel undue pressure (“It was just this stack of pages I carried around”). I’ll finally write that novel that I’ve been putting off for 25 years.’” “He went, ‘Wow, having seen that film, I didn’t expect you to be so interesting.’ It was at that moment when I thought, ‘I’m going to give up writing films. “I was at a party in Los Angeles and I was talking to somebody and it turned out he’d actually seen a film that I’d made,” said Michaelides, who grew up in Cyprus and now lives in London.

He declined to name the movies (they are listed on IMDb), but explained that “one was so bad it didn’t get released,” another went straight to DVD and the third had a brief run in theaters. “I made three films and they went from bad to worse.” “It was a pretty checkered career, to be polite,” Michaelides said in a phone interview. This statement appears in a character’s diary, but one can imagine it crossing the author’s mind after his screenwriting ambitions fizzled. “I don’t know why I’m writing this” happens to be the first line of Alex Michaelides’s debut thriller, “The Silent Patient,” which is now in its 46th week on the trade paperback best-seller list.

The silent patient book review