Auckland corporate lawyer turned author Rachel Paris scored a two-book deal and interest from Hollywood with her debut thriller "See How They Fall". Photo / Jason Dorday
Why leave a 20-year law career to become a fiction writer? Auckland-based debut author Rachel Paris talks to Kim Knight about how to survive a midlife career change – and the corporate bad behaviour that influenced her new novel.
There is always a reason not to write your novel, says Rachel Paris.
“I’ve got to do the laundry, I’ve got to get food, Sam needs his mouth guard dropped off – there’s always an interruption, there’s always an excuse, you’re never on top of things.
“When I was in the law firm, I’d be out the door. Somehow you still have clean clothes and you still eat. But now, you know, I’ve got to walk the dogs . . . ”
Once, Paris was a seven-day-a-week corporate lawyer.
Her Master of Laws is from Harvard Law School. She spent five years practising in London, was a banking and finance partner at Bell Gully when only 8% of its partners were women and, quite recently, founded a fintech consultancy specialising in blockchain and early AI.
“And then the pandemic happened and I think, like everybody, I kind of just took a moment to go: Hmmmm.”
There is always, eventually, a reason to write your novel.
“My younger sister got diagnosed with really aggressive breast cancer towards the end of Covid. It was a hell of a shock. She had three little kids, it came out of nowhere.”
Chemotherapy, surgery, radiation and, ultimately, a happy ending.
“She’s fought it . . . and I think all of us just took a moment to go ‘shit, life is precious and you don’t know what’s around the corner’.
“All of that coalesced into me thinking, you know what – I’ve always wanted to write. I’m not getting any younger. If I don’t actually do something about this, 10 more years will go by and it’s just not going to get any easier.”
See How They Fall started life as an application for a place on Auckland University’s Master of Creative Writing programme.
This week it hit the world fully formed, appropriately typefaced and definitively taglined: Perfect family. Perfect weekend. Perfect crime.
It was a dream debut for a first-time novelist.
The thriller that publishers are touting as “Big Little Lies meets Succession” and “one for the fans of White Lotus” has earned Paris a two-book deal with New Zealand’s Moa Press and Hachette Australia. It will be released in the United States by Penzler Publishers, and a Hollywood production company has optioned the screen rights.
“It was optioned really early on – they actually got in touch with me last week and they are actively developing it. Having said that, I worked in film and TV finance in the UK. So I know there are so many gates to go through and so many stars that have to align. I’m not, in any way, counting my chickens, but it’s pretty exciting.”
The biggest shift for this 48-year-old fintech lawyer turned author? Trying to treat writing like a “proper” job.
“I felt like a dick. When it’s your first, you can’t just say to people, ‘oh, I can’t meet you for coffee, I’m writing my book’. They look at you, like, ‘what?’ I definitely felt like a tosser.”
Paris remembers telling her family she was going back to university.
“The kids thought I was nuts, but Jase was incredibly supportive. He has only ever wanted me to be happy.”
“Jase” is Jason Paris – chief executive of One NZ (formerly known as Vodafone). The couple met 25 years ago. Random strangers in a bar in Queenstown on the cusp of the rest of their lives.
“I’d just finished uni and was away with some girlfriends for the millennium New Year’s Eve and he was camping with old school mates in Arrowtown. We were pretty much inseparable from that first meeting. Jase was living in Wellington and working at Tesla-Saturn in sales and I was about to start my first job at Bell Gully.”
The day before the official launch of her book, Rachel Paris sits barefoot at a sleek black dining table in a stylishly white room in her Auckland home. The wall art includes Don Binney’s Swoop of the Kotare and the iridescent hot pink and ultra modern glam of a large work by Jonny Niesche.
The author wears taupe linen pants and a charcoal silk singlet. Large doors open to a swimming pool that looks almost exactly like the one on the cover of her new book.
Write what you know?
“I mean, I love the cover – but it was just such a pure coincidence! Right down to the hedging! I was like, no way, that’s ridiculous.”
See How They Fall unfolds through two, alternating, viewpoints. Skye is the woman who has married into the powerful Turner family dynasty; Mei is the detective investigating a weekend in paradise gone terribly wrong.
It’s a thriller with the requisite underbelly. It’s also a delicious, voyeuristic glimpse into a world where people know the Limoges porcelain doesn’t go in the dishwasher and that an Ottolenghi chicken marbella is always the correct response to a crisis. The plan was to set the story in New Zealand, but Sydney quickly became the better option.
“We don’t have this tradition of globally renowned dynastic wealth that you have in Australia.”
The book opens with a quote from French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac: “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.”
It’s intentionally provocative, says Paris.
“Of course, not all wealthy people are criminals, and the wealthiest people I have personally met in New Zealand tend to be extremely generous and down-to-earth. But where there is extreme wealth, there is usually also extreme power – the current US political situation springs to mind! And, as wise heads have observed, power tends to corrupt . . .”
Pots of money plus power and corruption equals plot. And, in 2025, an insatiable audience appetite. Why are we so obsessed with depictions of conspicuous wealth, a la White Lotus and Succession?
“We love to live vicariously through the lives of others – maybe because life is so hard for so many people right now. There’s escapism, but there’s a big dollop of schadenfreude. We like to see people who appear to have everything actually suffer.
“In the old days, people believed in gods that were fickle, and behaved badly, and that was maybe their entertainment. Now that we’re in a secular age and we’ve got social media, we look at the Kardashians and we look at the Murdochs and these big, wealthy families and all of the drama and we, I don’t know, take some pleasure? Or maybe some moral lessons? We like to judge them.”
And, yes, she says, there was a degree of “write what you know”.
“Obviously, I’m not a billionaire and I don’t have private jets. But I did know about being a mum. So, for me, that was the original story – a mother, her child, in danger.”
Plus: “Coming through corporate life in the era that I have – and things have evolved and developed a lot – but I’ve seen bad behaviours. Most people of my generation have. The power imbalances. Whether that’s within a marriage or a workplace or in society . . .”
As Paris wrote, an underlying theme emerged. “My preoccupations are always about the treatment of women.”
She’d recently read Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey’s She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. She also had two decades of her own experiences in corporate corridors.
“I’ve got lots of wonderful men in my life.” But, “I was definitely around in the day – there was a lot of bum pinching and lewd behaviour. Every female lawyer I know, every woman I know that worked in corporate, has got these stories”.
She recalls one Friday meeting room.
“There were 15 men and me. It was the end of the financial year and they all really wanted to do this deal. I got in there and I looked at it and it was just a bad deal.
“And they basically said, ‘oh you stupid bitch, what do you know?’ . . . All these blokes slapping each other’s backs and having beers, and it was just so disgusting.”
Against her advice, funds were advanced to a company that, ultimately, went bust. Years later, Paris got a phone call from the original client and, well, “it’s funny how karma comes around”.
Recently, she caught up with a colleague from her old law firm. She was delighted to learn that women now make up 35% of its partners. Across the corporate world, there has been an evolution.
“[Back then] it was ‘how should you be a woman in this workplace?’ and a lot of the women became like the men, because that was the only way to succeed. It was a really confusing culture. Now it’s so much easier for people just to be themselves,” says Paris.
“You see the young lawyers and they’re all off to yoga and eating macrobiotic pots. We were eating two-minute noodles, being completely unhealthy and so grateful to have these jobs. Now, they’re all ‘oh, and at six I’ve got my breath works class’. It’s so much more nurturing.”
All the same: “There is just no doubt in my mind that as a society, this is still an issue and we have to be vigilant.”
Paris never really set out to become a lawyer. Her dad Jock Carnachan was a longtime GP in Auckland’s Royal Oak (and has only recently, aged 79, retired as a geriatrician). Her mum, Liz, was a dietitian who spent many years working for the Waitākere District Health Board. Paris attended St Cuthbert’s College in Epsom, Auckland, and describes herself as “always reading, always writing, and always wanting to do something with language”.
“My school was very much law, medicine, accounting. I did think about journalism quite carefully. I did debating . . . and so I ended up at law school. Like a lot of humanities students, right? You like language, you hate maths . . . suddenly you’re on your way to this profession and, look, it was a terrific job for a really, really long time.”
She’d had three children (Sam, Will and Eliza) when husband Jason was headhunted to the United Kingdom.
“We rented out the house, sold the cars, got to the UK and then Vodafone was like, ‘oh Jason, you’re going back to New Zealand ‘.”
Paris had set up her consultancy, looking for the kind of flexibility workplaces didn’t fully appreciate was possible pre-Covid. But during lockdown (“I’d be on a conference call, the kids would be climbing into the pantry and killing each other”), she started to wonder. Was it time for something completely different?
Suddenly, she was a mature age student enrolled in the master’s programme run by award-winning novelist and editor Paula Morris MNZM (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Whātua, Ngāti Manuhiri).
“It was sort of a total accident I ended up writing this crime thriller,” says Paris. “I don’t even read a lot in that genre. It was just a random story, under pressure, for Paula’s course. It was a uni assignment. It was never, in my wildest dreams, going to be an actual book.”
She wandered the campus quad on her first day. Same, same – but totally different. The office where she once worked parttime selling bus tickets had become a bubble tea shop. “Naively”, she thought weekly workshop sessions, where students critique each other’s work, might be better spent writing. In blissful ignorance, she volunteered to go first.
“You, as the author, cannot talk. You cannot defend your work. And Paula, I think quite rightly – although I didn’t necessarily agree with at the time – is ‘let’s not spend an hour talking about how marvellous it is, everyone’s work can be improved’.
“I obviously thought what I’d written was pretty good! I got in there and just got ripped to shreds. People were not being nasty . . . it was totally candid and accurate, but it’s quite confronting. You walk away going ‘oh my God, what am I doing?‘”
Age turned out to be a superpower. Her skin was thicker; she was completely committed to the process. And, as the book neared completion and she had to write herself out of corners, that didn’t change.
“The great thing about perimenopause is, you know, when you’re awake from one to three in the morning? That’s when I would lie there thinking, ‘okay, I’ve got this problem, how am I going to solve it?’ And then by the morning I would have come up with a solution.”
Ultimately, she submitted 45,000 words and won the University’s inaugural Phoenix Prize, in recognition of a high-quality manuscript with strong commercial potential. And then she had to finish the book.
“So I don’t actually have an office . . . I wrote it everywhere. I wrote a lot of it in the car, I went down to the Epsom library, went up to Mount Eden and sat in [local cafe] Rad and wrote.”
The car?
“Because I spend so much of my life waiting for my children to come out of school! To finish sports practice, or at the orthodontist.”
Her phone rings twice during this interview. She checks, both times, in case it’s the kids. (The first call is from her husband – he’s emailed some potential talking points for this interview. They are a tight team. Last year, when Jason was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame, he called his wife the most influential person in his life and said “she’s the smartest person I know”.)
Paris says her career shift “definitely” required buy-in from her family. Jason was her first reader; her sister has been a “massive” cheerleader.
“The creative process can be up and down. You need people around you who will be patient and supportive and boost you when you’re mired in self-doubt.
“One hundred per cent, I was ‘I suck at writing. I don’t think I can ever finish this damn thing’.”
She was a successful lawyer, used to drafting memos, long contracts and constant deadlines. How hard could a novel be?
“It’s such a mental game. You’re putting yourself out there . . . it’s your soul. It’s like you’re taking your clothes off and dancing around saying ‘look at me’. I mean, it’s really a bizarre thing to do.
“In the end, I kind of figured no one else really cares. I think that comes with age and just realising there’s so much I want to do in my life. I’ve just got to try it and if I fail, well, who cares? I’ll just have to suck it up and move on to the next thing.”
In case you’re wondering, that will be a novel. She’s relinquished her certificate to practise law. Is she a writer now?
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I think. As a writer you’re always a student of writing, you’re always learning. I am a writer in the sense that I’m committed to continuing to try and get better and to keep doing it.”
So, she says, looking slightly surprised: “Yeah.”
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and works in the lifestyle team as a senior journalist.
As more people choose to drink less, here’s what to know about the research on alcohol.