Liane Moriarty, one of Australia's most successful living novelists, feels the same anxiety she always feels before publishing a new book.
But on a crisp, clear, unseasonably mild winter's day, a stroll through her favourite places in her native Sydney – places that always figure centrally in her novels – might just be a temporary antidote to the writer's writing anxieties.
So we take a stroll, as the New York Times bestseller has done regularly for years, along the Esplanade adjacent to Balmoral Beach, a picture-postcard stretch of towering Moreton Bay figs, blue water and yellow sand that is as quintessential Sydney as the Opera House or the Harbour Bridge.
“It's always a bit nerve-wracking, but it's also a wonderful feeling, because that's the purpose of this novel – for people to read it and, ideally, say good things about it,” Moriarty says of the impending release of his new novel, Here One Moment, and the grueling promotional tour he's scheduled to undertake across Australia, North America, Canada and the UK.
She enjoys the one-on-one interaction with readers, their interpretations of the book and the personal meaning of her words to them. She recounts the time when a woman approached her at her table at a book signing and explained the significance of “Big Little Lies,” perhaps Moriarty's most famous book, a story of female friendship, coercive control and retribution.
The woman bought the book for all her friends, “as her way of letting them know that she, too, had experienced domestic violence,” Moriarty says. “Things happen that you never expect.”
But these big publicity tours are exhausting. “You get tired of it at the end. You can't stand the sound of your own voice, you're telling the same stories and the same jokes over and over, and you hate yourself so much that you can't stand it at the end. But… there's this lovely middle point, where the tension stops and you really enjoy it.”
Moriarty, 57, is “definitely” shy. She's soft-spoken, and her modesty shines through. She laughs a lot, and when she talks about the contradiction of going from a solitary novelist to suddenly becoming “someone who can speak to hundreds of people,” her responses are thoughtful.
“But I can. I'm not so introverted that I don't need people. I realise this when I go away to write for a week. At first, I enjoy the solitude, but then I go into shops and start chatting to people… I have to talk.”
On the tour, she thinks readers will want to share “a lot of sad stories” with her, which is a natural segue into Here One Moment, a 500-plus page epic novel about life, death and fate with a kicking line: “If you knew when you were going to die, what would you change?”
That's a big question.
The novel begins on a delayed flight from Hobart to Sydney. During the flight, a seemingly ordinary woman roams the plane, predicting how and when passengers will die. As deaths begin to occur and the surviving characters become anxious, the story becomes increasingly chilling as they contemplate death, fate, and how to change its course.
The book was born out of Moriarty's own delayed flight from Hobart to Sydney.
“Then, as I was looking around at the other passengers, a bright thought came into my mind: 'We're all going to die,'” she said.
“At that time, there were some events that made me think about my own death. Being in my 50s, [to contemplate that]First, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, then I lost my father. [Covid] The pandemic hit, we all had to confront mortality, and then I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“My sister and I are both fine now, but at the time we were preoccupied with the finiteness of life. We wondered: 'How am I going to die?' 'How is everyone on this plane going to die?'”
She was momentarily lost for words, distracted by a young woman taking a photo of herself on the beach.
Moriarty laughs. “Oh, look,” she says, “we have influencers here!” Look – Right here.
Moriarty is obviously watching and listening intently to what is going on around her, and as we sit in the shade for a while her train of thought is again briefly interrupted, this time by a young mother strolling towards the end of the low pier and picking up her wandering child.
She often makes notes on her phone, she says, about people's mannerisms, the way they speak, and anything she overhears. She exudes the sense of a bowerbird constantly collecting material.
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“I'm definitely an eavesdropper. Oh, some of the conversations you hear! It's coming from my mom. When I go out to dinner with her, I'll have this dazed look on her face and she'll lean in and listen to what other people nearby are saying.”
Her observational eye for everyday human interaction (especially between men and women) and her keen ear for the conversations and banalities of suburban, largely white, middle-class life have a deep and universal resonance in both the book and the film.
Her characters have such a wide range of appeal in their dilemmas and landscapes that the film adaptations have been able to dramatically and seamlessly shift the setting of the books, from Sydney's Upper North Shore to Monterey, California, in Big Little Lies, and from Byron Bay to a fictional California town in Nine Perfect Strangers.
Of people and their inner thoughts, Moriarty says, “That's what I'm interested in. I enjoy it, and I feel that it's my strength. Whereas, if I were to describe this landscape, this beautiful landscape, I would struggle. So for me it's relationships and people… But you have to describe the landscape a little bit. You have to say where you are. But I feel like I have to work hard at it.”
Although all of her adult novels (she has also written children's novels) have been optioned for film, she has never written them with that goal in mind, and she has always said that she sets her books in and around Sydney (currently on the Lower North Shore), where she has lived all her life.
Her characters are mostly from familiar milieus; “I write what I know,” she says, and perhaps that's what makes her characters so believable and avoids the identity pitfalls that sometimes await risky novelists.
“It's difficult. I don't want all my characters to be exactly like me. And I noticed in my first novel that all my characters were Irish-Catholic-ish. But of course I'm not going to write a protagonist who's totally different to what I know and understand.”
We continue walking in soft dappled light under a canopy of fig trees, surrounded by moms and dads in strollers, joggers, and older parents strolling with their adult children. To our right, a lone red-capped breaststroker flies up and down the glassy bay. Parrots, cawing gulls, chattering cockatoos and other birds add atmosphere to this beauty.
A serene, happy-to-be-alive afternoon. Moriarty's latest novel is full of existential celebrations, but then comes darkness. Death is inevitable, yet a heavy, difficult subject for a writer to face as they devote their time to a book manuscript.
“I became more and more interested [questions of] How do you control your life? What can you control? What can you not control? And I loved thinking about that in my mind, and I loved thinking, especially on a day like this, how can you not be grateful to be alive? It's just a joy.”
Our walk ended with Moriarty getting ready for her photo shoot (she was adorably and only slightly uncomfortable about it), and her eye was drawn to a wedding taking place in the rotunda nearby.
She smiled. “Weddings. Everyone loves weddings, right?”
After taking the photo, she came back.
“Did anyone stand up and say no?” she asks.
Maybe there's some conspiracy going on there.
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Just a moment here The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, written by Liane Moriarty, is currently being published by Macmillan Australia and will be available in the US and Canada on September 10th, and in the UK on September 26th.
