Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty has outgrown the box she once was put into, said in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). The 52-year-old Australian novelist, whose Big Little Lies was an instant No. 1 best-seller in the U.S. even before it was turned into a hit drama series starring Nicole Kidman, now pushes back against the label “chick lit.” Her novels, which have sold 14 million copies worldwide, typically spotlight a group of striving, anxious, backstabbing women. But Moriarty won’t apologize for writing for women, who read far more books than men, and she can’t see the logic of categorizing such stories as a niche genre. “If I’m at a party and someone asks, ‘What sort of books do you write?’ I have no idea what to say,” she says. “If I was a man I’d probably just say ‘contemporary fiction.’”

Whatever you want to call her latest, it’s a misfire, said

in The New York Times. Nine Perfect Strangers, a closed-door mystery set at a tony spa retreat, “struggles to get any momentum going.” But Moriarty clearly had fun with the premise, creating another set of prickly characters who all yearn to remake themselves, said also in the Times. Kidman has snapped up the screen rights, while Meryl Streep and Blake Lively are signed up to headline other Moriarty adaptations. All that’s nice, Moriarty admits, but it’s knowing that readers are responding that has allowed to her push past self-doubt. “It actually feels like it would be wrong of me to say, ‘Oh, I don’t know if it’s any good or not,’ when all these people are telling me what my books have meant to them,” she says. “I’m doing something right.”