Big little lives keep books on top
The best-selling author Liane Moriarty tells Jonny Mahon-heap she writes for herself and in doing so tries to be as honest as possible.
Sydney-based Liane Moriarty writes about tranquil suburbs – their mysteries and mischief – which include, from time to time, a little murder. Moriarty’s nine novels – including Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers – have sold more than 20 million combined copies.
Apples Never Fall is the latest to be bought by Hollywood, its rights snapped up by Heyday Productions, the producers behind the Harry Potter films.
‘‘I’m always fascinated by things that look very ordinary on the outside, and the darkness that lies beneath – I enjoy that contrast,’’ Moriarty told Stuff.
Moriarty is returning to New Zealand for the Writers’ Festival, in conversation with Michele A’court at Auckland’s Aotea Centre on August 26, and to headline the Word Christchurch Festival, at St Margaret’s College on August 27.
All her books dissect contemporary family life and explore myths of perfection, but Moriarty never sets out with an agenda.
‘‘I never set out to explore any particular things. I normally start out with a premise. But the story drives the themes – never the other way around.’’
Moriarty is happy to be travelling again, after a pandemic of personal challenges, including the death of her father and a breast cancer diagnosis.
‘‘I lost my father just before the world locked down. For me, it was like the clocks did stop. In a way, it was like a lovely peaceful time to grieve. Then I was going through breast cancer treatment – that was my reason to leave the house each day!’’
Her novels tend to showcase small autobiographical details, rather than such bigger events.
‘‘I had unexplained leg pain for a long time, a few years ago. I remember thinking ‘I’m going to put this into a book, I’m writing it, so it won’t feel like a waste of time.’ But with breast cancer, I have no desire to write about it at all.’’
Moriarty says her plots reveal themselves by spending time with her characters – the book might open with a murder, but Moriarty, like the reader, finds out who the culprit is as she goes. ‘‘From a practical perspective, I do have to go back and change things, once I’ve worked out the ending.’’ While authors belong to different schools of thought – those who need the novel laid out in their head before jotting down a single syllable, and those who discover their characters as they write them – it’s clear Moriarty falls into the latter camp, saying: ‘‘I seem to need to write them to make them move for me.’’
After examining the fractures between the haves and have-nots in Big Little Lies, and the pressures of parenting in Apples Never Fall, Moriarty has become perhaps our foremost author on suburbia, and how it works as the perfect specimen pool for human behaviour.
Moriarty chalks this up to the simple matter of writing about what she knows. ‘‘To be honest, if I had lived a more interesting life, or had grown up in a war zone, I would be writing about that. It’s just that I lived an ordinary suburban life, so I use what I have.’’
Moriarty’s cultural cachet is unusual for contemporary novelists. She requested Meryl Streep for the role of Celeste’s (Nicole Kidman)’s mother in season two of Big Little Lies, and Streep gladly answered.
When I ask whether Moriarty does, in fact, run Hollywood, she laughs me off.
‘‘I don’t know how to answer that! I was just so lucky that my two adaptations ever happened. So many authors had said to me, ‘You should never get excited because your books will get optioned, but then the years will go by and never happen.’
‘‘But then not only did they happen, but they have these incredible stars that they brought to both projects, so I feel lucky that both of them happened and were great.’’
But Moriarty emphasises she is not writing with HBO or Hollywood in mind. ‘‘I’m never writing purely for the adaptation as the end goal.’’
Apples Never Fall, which Moriarty wrote during the pandemic, tests Moriarty as a storyteller, as the central mystery is revealed through the snippets and whispers of an eavesdropping barista or an unseen sibling.
As a chronicler of family life, Moriarty invites probing into her own family – she has a son and a daughter with her husband Adam – and her upbringing, as the eldest of six, with two sisters who are now also writers.
She acknowledges that representing an honest vision of family life and politics, without revealing too much, is the key to authenticity.
‘‘Sometimes it’s tricky. Any time you read an author you know, you know where all these little parts of their life come from, so in a way, you almost prefer your readers to have no awareness of anything because then it’s easier to suspend disbelief.’’
After worldwide fame arrived with the success of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, Moriarty insists that her writing process remains unchanged. ‘‘I write for myself. And when I’m writing, I’m just trying to be as honest as possible.’’
In books as in life, honesty is the best policy – and it’s one Hollywood, and Moriarty’s millions of readers, want in spades.