Have you ever felt prouder to be a woman?
I’m writing this the day after the global Women’s March, when a phenomenal 4.8 million people across a whopping 673 cities around the world united to make ourselves heard in the defence of our fundamental rights (particularly, in the US, their reproductive rights) as well as to highlight immigration reform, religious discrimination, LGBTQ rights, and gender and racial inequities. These causes aren’t only relevant in America because of Trump’s inauguration as President, but sadly also closer to home, where our Prime Minister stands by an Immigration Minister who links Lebanese-muslim migrants to terrorism, where gay marriage is still not legalised despite massive popular support, where proposed cutbacks to paid parental leave this year promise to leave Australian new parents as the worst off in the developed world, where the indigenous population is still at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to income, employment and health, and where our policies regarding asylum seekers are considered by the UN to be in contravention of our international human rights and humanitarian obligations. It was a powerful day that will go down in history, one that has the potential to forever change who we are and how we come together to take a stand for what we believe in and know to be right.
It’s fitting, then, that we have such a strong woman on the cover. Reese Witherspoon joins Zoë Kravitz, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley – all different but equally determined and resilient women – in the new HBO series Big Little Lies, which is based on the book that’s all about women finding their strength, written by another of my favourite strong women, Liane Moriarty.
I became obsessed with Liane a few years back after reading her book What Alice Forgot. I’m not big into chick lit, but this book sucked me in with its too-familiar characters, real and clever dialogue, and a concept that had my mind ticking over for weeks. For the few rare birds among you who haven’t read all of Liane’s books, What
Alice Forgot is about a woman who loses 10 years of memory in an accident and wakes to find herself believing she’s still a happy-go-lucky new bride desperately in love with her husband and pregnant with their first child, when in fact she’s an uptight and frazzled mother of three (well, it happens to the best of us) going through an angry and bitter divorce.
This idea was fascinating to me. If it happened to me, what would I think of my life now? How would I judge the decisions that got me here? Would I like or even understand the person I’d become? Interestingly, I didn’t realise that the author and setting were Australian until after I’d finished it, which is probably why Liane’s books are so popular all over the world. In fact, the Little Australian Novelist Who Could has gone on to sell more than six million books worldwide, has become the first Australian author to have a novel (Big Little Lies) debut at number one on
The New York Times bestseller list, and is one of very few authors in the world to have three books
(The Husband’s Secret, Big Little Lies and What Alice Forgot) on the NYT bestseller list at the same time. Many of her novels have been optioned (meaning that someone has bought it to turn it into a movie or a TV series), but as Liane told me herself when I interviewed her last year: “I’ve had other books optioned years ago, and they’re all still in the process, but these working mothers came in [Reese, Nicole and Australian producer Bruna Papandrea] and suddenly it’s all happening – Big Little Lies beat them all.” Another example of the undeniable – and ever-growing – power of strong, united women.