Liane Moriarty was delighted when her younger sister Jaclyn published her first book in 2000.
She was also full of rage and envy.
With the publication of Feeling Sorry for Celia, Jaclyn had fulfilled half of the sisters’ shared childhood dream of becoming writers.
“The anger was really directed at myself because I … hadn’t even given it a chance,” Moriarty told ABC RN’s The Book Show.
It was just the excitement Moriarty needed to start writing again, something she loved to do as a child but had let slip as an adult.
His first attempt, a children’s book inspired by the Olympics, was “enthusiastically rejected by every publisher in Australia”.
He then enrolled in a master’s program and wrote what would become his first book, Three Wishes, published in 2003.
Space for play or pause, M for mute, left and right arrows for search, up and down arrows for volume. Listening duration: 53 minutes 56 seconds53m Sarah L’Estrange talks to Liane Moriarty
“You had to complete 30,000 words to complete the degree, and I wrote 100,000,” he says.
His breakthrough came 10 years later with his fifth novel, El secret del marit. The story of three women connected by a devastating secret, the book became a bestseller in the United States.
In 2014 came Big Little Lies, which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, a first for an Australian author.
To date, Moriarty has published nine novels and three children’s books that have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, and two of his novels have been adapted for the screen.
The adaptation of Big Little Lies, an HBO television series created by Hollywood heavyweight David E. Kelley (The Practice; Ally McBeal) and starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern and Zoë Kravitz, had as high a profile as they come, winning five Primetime Emmy Awards in 2017.
In 2021, Kidman also starred in Nine Perfect Strangers, the Hulu limited series based on Moriarty’s 2018 novel, alongside Melissa McCarthy and Michael Shannon.
Kidman, Witherspoon and the cast of Big Little Lies accept the award for Outstanding Limited Series at the 2017 Emmys. (Reuters: Mario Anzuoni)
Today, the Moriarty sisters, Liane, Jaclyn and Nicola, also a writer, send each other their finished manuscripts at the same time they press send to their respective publishers.
But they’re not looking for honest feedback or constructive criticism: “As sisters, your only job is to read it really quickly and text it really quickly saying, ‘This is a masterpiece,'” says Moriarty.
A loss of trust
Moriarty was born in 1966 and grew up on Sydney’s North Shore, the city where he still resides and where much of his fiction takes place.
Her father Bernie, who died in 2020, commissioned her and Jaclyn to write stories for him when they were young: “He gave us our first publishing deals – he paid a dollar for a notebook full of words,” he says
By the time Moriarty was a teenager, however, he had lost the writing bug.
“As I got older, I wrote less and less…I lost the crazy self-confidence I had as a child,” she says.
She considered journalism, but instead pursued a career in advertising, which she says shaped her writing.
“Nobody wants to read ad copy, so every sentence has to work. You almost have to trick people into reading it, so [you need to write] short, punchy sentences,” he told ABC TV’s One Plus One in 2018.
Stories of everyday trauma
Moriarty fills his books with ordinary people dealing with topics such as death, divorce and domestic violence.
Rosemary Milsom says Moriarty’s success has allowed other Australian writers to “dream big”. (Provided by: Macmillan Australia)
Dr Michelle Aung Thin, a novelist and senior lecturer in RMIT’s School of Media and Communication, says Moriarty’s readers are “very interested in what he has to say about everyday trauma… People are being seen by his writings”.
Many of Moriarty’s characters struggle with infertility.
“I had my children very late, so I was desperate to have children myself, and I had a hard time having them,” says Moriarty, who has two children, George, 14, and Anna, 12, with her husband Adam, a former Tasmanian farmer.
That experience shows up in her fiction in the form of “childless characters who are desperate to have babies,” she says. In 2009’s What Alice Forgot, Alice’s sister Elisabeth struggles to get pregnant, as does Erika in Moriarty’s 2016 novel Truly Madly Guilty.
Most of the time, he gives away these characters with the children who want them so much.
“I always think if I’m in charge of this world and this woman is desperate for a baby, I’m going to give her a baby,” she says.
Newcastle Writers Festival director Rosemarie Milsom, who interviewed the author on stage at the Canberra Writers Festival in August, says family is central to Moriarty’s fiction: “Not just the family in which you have born, but the family you choose, which can be very close. friends.”
The problem with ‘chick lit’
Moriarty’s success is unprecedented in a publishing industry as small as Australia’s.
“His writing is incredibly successful and hits the market where the market is. These are impressive skills,” says Aung Thin.
“She’s accessible as a writer … and she understands that visuals and gestures are important; she makes it easy for people to see what she’s doing in her mind.”
However, her focus on the domestic lives of her characters has led to her writing being described as “women’s fiction” or, more problematically, “chick lit,” a label that Aung Thin describes as demeaning.
“Most of the people who read are women. . . . It’s one of those terms that belittles her work and diminishes the contribution that women make as readers.”
When Hollywood comes calling
In 2014, Nicole Kidman contacted Moriarty – “his people called my people,” laughs the author – to buy the rights to Big Little Lies.
Moriarty’s Apples Never Falls was one of Australia’s best-selling books in 2021. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
Moriarty declined the offer to write the script, saying she was happy to step back from the project.
“For me, part of the joy of writing is knowing what’s going to happen in the story, and… I knew what was going to happen. The thought of adapting my own book makes me want to cry with boredom. I can Don’t you think in nothing I want to do less,” he says.
Instead, he says, “I was a very interested bystander to visit the set and enjoy seeing what they were doing.”
He was surprised by the cast’s commitment to the show. “I thought these actors would be quite tired and not care as much as they did, but I found the passion they put into their work quite inspiring,” he says.
Although his remaining seven novels have been optioned for film or television, Moriarty insists he does not write with adaptation in mind. “I never have and I never will,” he says.
The proof, he says, is the fact that “a lot of the time my characters think one thing and say something completely different. I have a lot of internal monologues in my books. Even with Nine Perfect Strangers, I had pages and pages in retreat where they were doing something called the Noble Silence, so there was no dialogue for pages and pages.”
Nicole Kidman played Masha Dmitrichenko, the founder of a wellness resort called Tranquillum House, in the 2021 adaptation of Nine Perfect Strangers. (Provided by: Amazon Prime Video)
Neither does as he writes, except in the case of the novel that would become the second season of Big Little Lies. Her sister Jaclyn suggested she “have fun with it” and write a role for her favorite actor.
Emboldened, Moriarty followed his advice and created a character with the inimitable Meryl Streep in mind.
“I always remember saying to the producers, not quite believing my audacity, ‘I’ve got a role for Meryl Streep’, and they laughed at me saying, ‘Oh Liane, you’ve become so Hollywood, talking on the phone and saying: Get me Meryl! – but one day I got an email that said, “We have Meryl.”
He later tried the same tactic for Oprah Winfrey: “I was pretty serious. I wanted Oprah, but I didn’t get Oprah.”
Australia vs United States
Unusually for an Australian author, Moriarty had success in the US before Australia. At one point in 2015, she had three books on the NYT bestseller list, a rare achievement.
Newcastle Writers Festival director Rosemarie Milsom says part of the appeal of Moriarty’s books to American readers is their Australian setting.
“I know with our cultural creepiness, it might seem a little hard to believe, but she doesn’t change her books to suit an American audience: she keeps the Australian setting, she keeps the Australian vernacular.”
Although Moriarty says he will always set his books in Australia, the adaptations of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers were set in California.
He says that unlike a Jane Harper novel, in which the Australian landscape is central to the narrative, his books “could happen anywhere”.
Still, he hopes an adaptation of one of his novels will retain its Australian feel. At this stage The Last Anniversary, set in the Hawkesbury River region north of Sydney, is the most likely candidate.
“Bruna Papandrea, who is an Australian producer who was involved with the last two productions, has promised me that if we can get it going, it has to be set in Australia… I’d love to see it [more] Australians play my characters,” says Moriarty.
A year of joy
After several years of book tours, meetings with Hollywood producers and a memorable trip to the Emmys, Moriarty decided to take a 12-month break in 2019.
“The idea was that I would only do things that brought me joy,” he says.
Instead of starting a new novel, she thought she’d write some short stories to flex her writing muscles and asked her sister Jaclyn to send her some writing prompts.
Moriarty dedicates Apples Never Fall to his mother, Diane, who took in numerous babies and children in need after her…