FROM WISH TO PAGE
Reading Liane Moriarty’s novels is an innocent pleasure, writes
Novelist Liane Moriarty is living the writer’s dream
IMAGINE lunching in Los Angeles with one of Hollywood’s finest. If you think that’s surreal, then you know just how author Liane Moriarty felt this April, when she sat down to lunch with Reese Witherspoon. Along with Nicole Kidman, Witherspoon is among a formidable line-up of luminaries starring in an HBO series based on Moriarty’s sixth novel, Little Big Lies. Then came a meeting with the legendary writer and producer David E. Kelley, who has adapted Little Big Lies for the screen. “It was a real honour for me, but a very surreal experience,” says Moriarty. “That’s the only word I can use, it’s so difficult to describe how it feels.”
For the Australian-born Moriarty, this capped a momentous year during which three of her novels not only hit the New York Times bestseller list, but film options to all three were snapped up by major studios. CBS was first off the mark, optioning her fourth novel, The Husband’s Secret, and Jennifer Aniston is now attached to TriStar’s adaptation of her fifth, What Alice Forgot. Not that Moriarty is any stranger to success. Well before her US breakthrough — which brought her worldwide sales to more than six million — she had garnered a doting international readership, and admits she has long “felt lucky to be able to make a living from writing”.
The imminent release of her seventh novel, Truly Madly Guilty, marks 13 years she has now spent crafting the kind of novels that prompted Kirkus Reviews to describe her as “an edgier, more provocative and bolder successor to Maeve Binchy”. Moriarty dreamt of being a writer since the age of eight, but lost her confidence in adulthood, becoming a copywriter instead. She recalls it was only when her sister, Jaclyn, published a teen novel that sibling rivalry took over and she felt compelled to write her own debut novel. “I remain eternally grateful to her.”
She was 36 when the success of that debut, Three Wishes, enabled her to quit her advertising job and write her second, The
Last Anniversary, which folded potent thematic concerns, believable characters and a quirky brand of humour into a superbly plotted mystery. Five novels on,
Truly Madly Guilty speaks to a different set of thematic concerns, yet still reprises familiar ones. Notably guilt. “I do seem to keep returning to guilt a lot in my novels, and I feel guilty about it,” laughs Moriarty. “But I’m just interested in it. Women seem to be pretty good at it, certainly it’s an emotion I struggle with on a daily basis.”
Truly Madly Guilty has a mystery at its heart, shaped around an unspoken-of event at a barbecue. Revolving around three disparate couples, it also probes the nature of a lifelong friendship between two successful women. Erica’s miserable childhood had led to her being unofficially adopted by Clementine’s family since both first attended school, and their adult friendship is sharply observed by Moriarty.
“I’ve known many people who were unofficially adopted by other families because of their difficult home lives. Families just let them become part of their family, which is an amazing thing that people do, but not an official thing. I then thought, what if one member of the unofficial ‘adoptive’ family didn’t really like this person, and how they’d then have this permanent struggle between wanting to feel generous but feeling guilty.”
Now 49, Moriarty, intends taking cues from Margaret Drabble. “If you look at her books, her characters seem to have aged along with her, and I love that. So I’d like to do the same thing.” She also ranks Anne Tyler at the top of her list of inspirational authors, but for Moriarty writing is a choice more than a compulsion.
“I find that I’m happier when I’m writing, I start to get a bit tetchy when I’m not. I hadn’t realised that until I wrote Three
Wishes, and then I felt so relieved. Imagine,” she adds softly, “I could have gone my whole life and not realised that something was missing.” —
‘I’m happier when I’m writing, I start to get a bit tetchy when I’m not’