‘My life is for women’: Bestselling author on female friends and her marriage breakdown
An Australian author has opened up about her marriage breakdown and what she learnt from the heartbreak.
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It started, as great thrillers often do, with a confession.
“I’m thinking of murdering my next-door neighbour,” an elderly woman told Sally Hepworth after a book event. Most might smile nervously at such a statement, possibly call security. Hepworth, of course, is not most people.
“Oh? How are you going to do it?” she asked, leaning in.
“Well,” the woman considered, “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I know that I’m going to get away with it.”
That moment of mutual mischief gave rise to Mad Mabel, Hepworth’s 10th and perhaps most deliciously dark novel to date.
It centres on an 81-year-old woman with a shadowy past, a new friendship with the seven-year-old across the street and a decades-old question: Did a young Mabel commit murder?
The book, her first new release in two years, lands September 30 – just as another of Hepworth’s creations makes its way from bookshelf to screen.
The Family Next Door, her 2018 novel and the first to be set in her hometown of Melbourne, has been adapted into a six-part ABC series premiering August 10.
It’s a female-led production starring Teresa Palmer, Bella Heathcote and Philippa Northeast, directed by The Newsreader’s Emma Freeman and adapted by Strife’s Sarah Scheller.
Since taking up writing during maternity leave, Hepworth has published almost a book a year since 2014, selling more than two million copies worldwide. Four have been optioned for the screen, including The Soulmate, which is now being adapted for TV by Bruna Papandrea’s Made Up Stories (Nine Perfect Strangers) alongside Offspring creator and producer Imogen Banks and actor and producer Asher Keddie.
But it’s the VicScreen-backed ABC adaptation of The Family Next Door that’s made it across the finish line first.
While Hepworth isn’t quitting her day job to join the Hollywood machine, she is one of the show’s executive producers.
“I’m just glad that I got to have a seat at the table,” she says.
“Books are finite and there often is more that I would add … and I love the idea that the story will grow and continue to breathe.”
Still, as excited as she is to see her stories come to life on screen, Hepworth’s mind is elsewhere – whirring around in the next world she’s creating.
“It feels bizarre,” she says of her success, dialling in from her Melbourne home.
“I’m a homebody … I’m so thrilled to have had the success that I have. Reading and writing has always been my great love and so it means a lot to me, but my focus has always been on the work and so my mind’s always on the next book.
“I’m always carrying it in my head.”
Hepworth’s brand of twisty, tender, often wickedly funny domestic thrillers has captured imaginations across the world, earning her a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Her novels – translated into 25 languages – unpack the secrets behind manicured hedges and happy family facades. In fact, “domestic thriller” has never quite cut it as her genre.
“Family dysfunctionality with a side serve of murder,” Hepworth offers as a substitute. “I’m still waiting for a bookstore to create a section.”
Comparisons to fellow Aussie bestseller Liane Moriarty abound (and are well earned), but Hepworth’s voice is distinctly her own – observant, disarming and comic.
It was, however, the success of authors such as Moriarty and Jane Harper that allowed Hepworth to set her recent novels in Australia. Her first three were relocated to the US to appease publishers. By 2018, she finally got the nod to set The Family Next Door – almost literally – in her own back yard in Melbourne’s bayside, where she lived at the time.
“Liane Moriarty, Jane Harper had really paved the way for that and it really showed, which is what I believed the whole time, that American readers could cope with an Australian setting and that, in fact, it might be an additional thing that they like about the book,” she says, having set all her subsequent books in Australia.
“It’s a huge relief and a joy to write my books in the setting that I’ve grown up in and live in now.”
She does often have to reassure her neighbours, and the mums at school pick up, that they won’t end up with their secrets spilled in her pages.
“No one in real life – and no offence is meant by this – is interesting enough,” she grins. Instead, her inspiration is simply women.
“I adore men and have lots of men in my life, but my life is for women,” she adds.
“My lifelong friendships are with women, I’m inspired by women, I hope to inspire women, and I feel like it’s women that I’m meant to write about.”
At this, Hepworth shares a recent text exchange from her group chat: one friend admits her kids had cereal for dinner, another replies, “Well my kids had chicken nuggets”, and a third chimes in wryly, “You give your kids dinner?”
“I look at what women are struggling with, the funny things that I hear in circles and the things that I struggle with,” she continues. “I had a marriage breakdown the last couple of years and that’s taught me such a lot about myself and all of that … is woven into the fabric of these characters.”
Hepworth is a single mother to three kids – aged 16, 13 and eight – and sees the spark of storytelling in her youngest. She was the youngest of three herself, growing up with two older brothers and a vivid imagination.
Though she began writing during maternity leave from a corporate career in HR – “probably a bit brave as a first-time mother” she laughs – she hasn’t looked back.
“Some people say, ‘Do you treat it like a job?’ And that always makes me laugh because it’s a bit like saying to a dentist, ‘Do you treat that like your job?’” she laughs.
“It’s my only job. I’m a single mum and I support my family by this job.” She writes every weekday during school hours – these days, mostly from her couch.
“It’s quite unromantic like that,” she continues.
“It’s not wait for the muse to strike. I sit down and the muse just has to show up because that’s my job, and it does.”
Of course it wasn’t an overnight success.
“It just made sense to me to give it a go, and I loved it,” she reflects.
“And I want to be clear, the first book I wrote was utter garbage and I then went and wrote a second book – even worse. But it was that moment in time and sometimes maternity leave can be that for people or if they step away from a job … a pondering of what I want to do and what brings me joy, and that was how I found this career and I’m lucky that it worked out.”
The Family Next Door, the book-turned-series, is set in fictional cul-de-sac Pleasant Court – an ironically titled strip of suburbia where neighbours seem friendly but rarely cross the threshold of the welcome mat.
Hepworth, by her own admission, is the nosy Mrs Mangel of her street – a nod to the Neighbours character – and her idea came while watching real-life neighbours from her home office window.
“I’d see the neighbours having a conversation, or the man next door wheeling his bins out, and I would start to think, ‘Imagine if he had a dead body in that bin?’” she says.
“Whenever there’s a big crime that happens in suburbia, everyone always says, ‘ … he was such a nice man’. You never see them say ‘ … you could tell he was going to have a woman in the basement’. And I thought, that would not happen in my street; I would know.”
The story is about motherhood, identity and the pressure to be perfect. It follows several women whose carefully constructed family lives start to unravel, exposing personal struggles, infidelity and long-buried traumas.
“What do we know about our neighbours? What are they hiding?
And then inevitably my books will come back to why are they hiding it?” Hepworth continues.
“I hope readers can connect to the why – what would cause someone to do this?”
While she takes the storylines to extreme conclusions, they always start from that familiar niggling – the what if?
“Taking that little familiar feeling all the way to the end. If I really leaned into that feeling of jealousy, would I end up killing my husband?” she adds.
“It’s quite fun to explore that in the safety of a book where you don’t have to go to jail.”
The TV adaptation twists and expands the world of Pleasant Court and brings in new characters – including Lulu and Holly, a same-sex couple raising a child.
Hepworth embraced the changes, delighted to hand over the story to an all-female team.
“I was so thrilled with the team that in the early stages of it, I said to them please don’t be afraid to change it,” she explains.
“This is a different medium for storytelling … so changes were not a fear of mine. The story’s the same – and by that I mean the story of motherhood, that desperation for motherhood.
“I did give notes along the way, and I was encouraged to … In fact, my only specification at the start was that I wanted Sarah to take all the good things and then make it better. I said, ‘Make me look good’. And I think she did that.”
Even the setting remained faithful.
Hepworth’s cameo (a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment) was filmed in her favourite local cafe near Half Moon Bay, just around the corner from the house where she wrote the book.
Much to her delight, Bayside locals were on to the shoot long before it was public knowledge. The Bayside Community Hub – a “wonderful Facebook group of Mrs Mangels” – was abuzz with rumours about filming and inside tips about the Sally Hepworth book being made into a series.
“I thought, these guys would know if there was a body in the basement,” Hepworth grins.
Which brings us back to Mad Mabel, the novel inspired by the intriguing woman at the book event who insisted she would get away with murder.
“Because there are two groups of people that are never suspected of murder and one group is old ladies and the other is little girls,” the woman explained.
“I thought, my God that is the truest thing I’ve ever heard and that’s what my next book is about,” Hepworth says.
Two years of ruminating later and the possibility of murder is once again a side serve to richer themes of loneliness, friendship and, of course, women.
“It’s my favourite book that I have written,” she says, catching herself.
“I know people say that every time, but I’m really excited about it.”
Despite all the acclaim, Hepworth keeps her head down. She’s grateful for the advocates fighting the big battles in the creative industries – such as the threat of AI – but her focus remains, as it always has, on the next story to tell.
“I keep my eye on the work and that can be selfish at times,” she says. “The industry will change and there’s no question we have to change with it but, for me, I’m a single mum – I just have to keep hustling.”
And if you’re wondering whether that elderly fan went through with her plan to murder her neighbour?
“Well, she’ll never get caught,” Hepworth grins, her ever-reliable muse having shown up once again.
“I’m not giving her up.”
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