Liane Moriarty: the best-selling novelist who flies under the radar

OVERSEAS she’s a best-selling sensation; here she’s a suburban mum. Who is Liane Moriarty?

141213 TWAM Liane Moriaty photographed at her home at 9 Iona Ave, West Pymble. Picture: Attila Szilvasi. Picture: Captioned ...

THE racing game survives on dreams.

Every few years, it seems, some ex taxi driver turned trainer who lives in a caravan will buy a nag for $1400. He’ll have seen something in the horse no one else has. It’ll win at Gosford and then a group one at Doomben and will prove unstoppable at Flemington and the battler will urge his wondrous steed towards the post at Royal Ascot. This heartwarming tale of a struggler and his sprinter will feed the dreams of 10,000 mugs who’ll sink their savings into horses fit only for the knackery.

The publishing game feeds off a similar fantasy. People will give up perfectly good jobs, solid careers in marketing or law, to pursue this awful, torturous craft, to become a writer, an author. They’ll convince themselves it’s what they were born to do and be driven half-mad and fully broke in the pursuit. If they show early form a publisher will harness a chaff-bag — a five grand advance. We see something in you, they’ll say, we reckon you’ve got the makings, but count yourself lucky, we usually offer two grand. Still they come, but why? They come because every few years someone like Liane Moriarty bursts out of a wide barrier and thunders down the straight at Royal Ascot.

Moriarty, 48, from Sydney, has just published her sixth novel, Big Little Lies. It went straight to number one on The New York Times Best Seller list, where it joined her fifth novel, The Husband’s Secret. She’s said to be the first Australian to have two books, hardcovers at that, on the list at the same time. “The Husband’s Secret, I think, has sold something like two million copies worldwide,” she tells me, slightly mystified by the figure. It has been translated into 28 languages and CBS Films in the US has taken out an option on it. A few months back, Nicole Kidman popped in to see Moriarty for a coffee and a chat; ­Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have joined forces to make a series based on Big Little Lies. Oh, and the Oscar-winning director of The Devil Wears Prada, David Frankel, has signed up to make a movie about her 2010 novel What Alice Forgot.

“I was in New York not long ago for a book tour and was invited to a rooftop party for People magazine,” Moriarty tells me. “Another author came up to me and said, ‘Just enjoy every moment of this because for this moment you’re the belle of the ball’. It was like a lovely dream. I got home to my husband and two kids and we were rushing to get out the door. ‘Come on. Hurry up!’ my husband said. ‘You’re not the belle of the ball round here’.”

And she’s not. Not in her home and not in Australia. Moriarty is relatively unknown here. She’s not been invited to chat about her novels on book shows. She’s snubbed by the literary set as “too commercial”. Her sales here number in the tens of thousands. But with the phenomenal success overseas and the Hollywood deals, all that is set to change. The horse has bolted.

Moriarty arranges to meet me in a cafe on the northern side of Sydney Harbour — she says her house at West Pymble, half an hour to the north, is a shambles. For those unfamiliar with Sydney, Pymble is synonymous with proper manners and golf. It has forever been labelled “leafy”. Moriarty and her husband Adam, a former farmer from Tasmania who now works in agricultural marketing, are doing their house up for sale and moving to another, with a pool. They have two kids, George, seven, and Anna, four.

The cafe is buzzing with North Shore women, older ladies with pearls and turned-up collars and their daughters in Lycra and lipstick manoeuvring off-road prams. I don’t notice Moriarty at first and then, after a few minutes, spot her sitting unobtrusively at a table, hoovering up the scene, the interactions between women, the snippets of conversation.

It is the lives of these north-of-the-bridge women — their conflicts, their affairs, their school dramas — that are now being eagerly consumed by readers in Korea, the Czech Republic, Albania and by the pallet-load in the UK and US. This is Liane Moriarty’s fodder — the complexity of ordinary suburban life. Her novels have the feel of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, but with thank-you notes. There is humour, great drama and suspense in her books and they take dark, ominous turns, but she never mocks her characters, be they a Tupperware saleswoman, the school busybody or a murderer.

While the rest of the women in the cafe are done up to a dazzle, Moriarty wears no makeup. It appears as though she’s just run her fingers through her hair, rushing to get the kids ready. We grab a coffee and head outside to a park by the water, away from the babble.

Do people avoid you in the schoolyard, I ask, worried that they might end up in one of your books? She recites the novelist’s pro-forma ­declaration that she’d never use a story without permission and that her characters are purely fictional. And then adds that folk are always coming up to her at school pick-up to say, “I must tell you about such and such.”

These stories are filed away for possible remoulding, with permission, she says. She’s been collecting them and honing her skills since she was a little girl. Moriarty was destined to become a novelist — it just took her little sister Jaclyn to get there first and prod her into action.

Liane (pronounced Li-arn) is the oldest of six children, five of them girls, born into a solid middle-class Catholic family on the upper North Shore. Her dad, Bernie, built a successful aerial surveying business; her mum, Diane, raised babies. After her youngest child turned five, Diane took in foster kids awaiting adoption. She’d look after some for just a few days while others would stay for many months. She cared for more than 40 kids and there was always a baby in the house, each one with a story of woe.

The Moriarty kids were raised in a safe, ­loving environment but they were acutely aware that others weren’t so fortunate. They were encouraged to be creative, in a capitalist way. “Instead of just giving them pocket money I used to commission them to write stories,” Bernie says. “They’d come to me and say, we want to write a story about such and such. ‘Righto,’ I’d say, ‘how many pages and how much do you reckon that’s worth?’ ”

They loved it. “I remember the absolute joy I used to get out of writing,” Liane recalls. “The purity of imagining something and then putting it down on paper — it was such a pleasure. I read whatever I could get my hands on, from Great Expectations to The Thorn Birds.”

At night the whole family would sit around the dinner table and have long discussions. ­Television was discouraged. One day Bernie found the children squabbling over the TV. He didn’t say a word; just unplugged it, pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and cut the cord. It remained that way for many months, “until the start of cricket season”.

Liane, being the oldest, was forever the ­cubbyhouse mum. In primary school she edited a magazine called Ladies of Leisure, and neighbourhood kids would contribute stories to it. She and her sisters also had their own magazine, Sister Scoop. “Some of my fondest childhood memories are of Liane directing all the neighbourhood kids in plays,” Jaclyn recalls. “It was a game we called the Imagination Game — she’d tell a story and we would act it out. She did it in such a magical way that many of us still remember the stories now.”

Bernie Moriarty had followed his dream, to combine his surveying skills with his love of flying, and he encouraged his kids to do the same. “I’d always say to the kids, ‘If you can enjoy what you are doing and some bastard pays ya’, how good is that?’ ” Jaclyn says her father was much more excited for her when she got her first publishing contract, for $2000, than he was when she won the university medal for law at Sydney University. He loved it that she was following her dreams, and that someone was funding it.

When it came time for Liane to think of a career she was drawn towards journalism, but when she applied for cadetships at the Sydney dailies she found she’d missed the cut-off dates for that year. Someone suggested advertising and so she put her mind to becoming a copywriter. She did this in the most creative of ways: she made up an advertisement promoting herself and her many fine qualities. Her father had 100 Liane Moriarty ads printed and she sent one to every advertising agency in the city. It landed her a job. And so she became an advertising ­copywriter in the go-go ’80s and ’90s — those heady days, with all that cocaine, I suggest. “Oh, no, no, no,” she says, laughing. “I’m a good girl. I was too uncool for all that. I was writing copy that ended up on the back of packets of Sultana Bran.”

It steered her writing away from the literary and into the commercial realm. “Copywriting probably did make me a commercial writer,” she says. “Nobody wants to read advertising copy so you have to keep it punchy, you almost have trick them into reading it. You have to make every sentence work.”

Her career was moving along merrily and then something happened that shook her world — Jaclyn published a novel. “I thought, ‘You idiot, why haven’t you done it yourself?’ If she hadn’t written her first book, I would probably never have done it,” Liane says. In between copywriting jobs, spurred on by her sister, she sat down and wrote Three Wishes. It was published in 2003. (Another sister, Nicola, is also a published novelist). The girls are close, but there is a keen rivalry. When I ask Jaclyn when she realised Liane had made it as a novelist, she replies: “You mean, when I realised she had beaten me.”

While Liane is happy to relay information about her childhood years, her advertising career and her writing, she is very guarded about herself, her husband, her kids and great swathes of her past. For instance, she doesn’t tell me that a few years ago, while on holiday on the Gold Coast, she had a heart attack. It is her agent, Fiona Inglis, who tells me about it, adding that she wrote a very funny story about it for The Wall Street Journal. “For many weeks afterwards, whenever she had to apologise for anything — being late, approving a new deal, signing contracts, etc — she’d always write, ‘Sorry these are a bit late, but as you may know I recently had a HEART ATTACK,’” Inglis relays. “She got a lot of mileage out of it, in an amusing way.” When I send her an email about the heart attack, she says: “All is fine after the heart attack. It was caused by a virus and so is unlikely to happen again. It was a scary experience.”

She brushes over the fact that she was married before. She rushes through decades of her adulthood and previous relationships in a few sentences — the sort of stuff she spends hundreds of pages analysing in her books. “So I married my first boyfriend,” she tells me. “We just married too young. No children. So that broke up. There were a few relationships in between and then I met my husband Adam when I was 37.” It’s more haiku than novel.

Jaclyn offers a little more: “It is a happy ­ending in a way. After a series of bad boys, she found Adam, an intelligent, handsome, gentle farmer and they have two children.”

At our second meeting, at a park in Surry Hills, I ask about the villains in her books: they are invariably men and I am curious to know why. “I had some bad luck with men,” Liane tells me. She reaches for an analogy. Following the Port Arthur massacre she read about old married ­couples who were caught up in the shooting, and the men had stepped in front of their wives to save them. “Well, when I look back on previous men, I had one who would have tried to save me, but would have gone the wrong way. I had one who would have used me as a human shield. One who would have said, ‘We’re all for ourselves, we’re all equal.’ And now, finally, I have found the one who I know, for sure, would jump in front of me, just as my father would do for my mother.” It is a lovely analogy, but ­Moriarty says I can only use it if I emphasise that she means no disrespect to those who died that day.

She and Adam had children late. “Yeah, we had trouble … it took a few years … we very nearly missed out, so I am very happy to have them.” There are at least a couple of chapters in that, I think. She works around her kids. When they were little a babysitter would come in so she could write. One is now at school and the other in pre-school, but she still writes for only three hours a day, four at most, between drop-offs and pick-ups. “I am very efficient,” she says.

So, why is Liane Moriarty so successful, in the rest of the world at least? Caroline Baum, the editorial director of online store Booktopia, says she has a “very firm grasp” on the moral dilemma. This is particularly true of her last two novels, The Husband’s Secret, where a good, middle-class wife has to confront something dreadful from her husband’s past, and Big Little Lies, which begins with a bullying incident in the schoolyard and ends with a murder. “You can always tell how strong the set-up is by the number of writers who say to you, ‘Shit, I wish I’d thought of that’, Baum observes. “It is kind of deceptively obvious, like the Post-it note, until you invent the bloody Post-it note. She is very, very good at very close domestic observations.”

Baum did a video interview with Moriarty and said it was “very unusual” for a woman to turn up to such an interview without lipstick or makeup. “She said she forgot,” Baum says. “When I asked her if she’d like some lipstick, she declined.” Baum says it appears to be part of her character not to draw attention to herself.

In her writing, as in person, says Baum, ­Moriarty is “refreshingly unsnobbish. She is not part of the literary world. She has been ­beavering away at this quietly, completely under the radar, and now people are saying, ‘Whoah, where did she come from?’”

Amy Einhorn, Moriarty’s US publisher, says she was shocked to learn that Moriarty is not that well known in Australia. “She is absolutely huge over here,” she says. “Liane is one of the top commercial writers.” Einhorn says Moriarty is doing something unique, which is combining spot-on observations about domestic life with dark and suspenseful plots. It also helps, she admits, that the characters, middle-class women in the suburbs, are also the biggest consumers of books — they are reading about their own lives.

“She writes very nuanced characters,” Einhorn says. “The trap that authors often fall into when they are writing about this world, of women of a certain age or mothers, is to fall back on the clichés and make fun of these women. Liane doesn’t do that; her characters are fully formed and have depth.”

Moriarty’s Australian publisher and friend, Cate Paterson from Pan Macmillan, says it has been her “career despair” that Moriarty has not been lauded in Australia. “It is a strange thing that Australians need to see that something is successful overseas before they will accept it,” she says. “I have always torn my hair out that she hasn’t exploded here like she has in America.”

It seems not to worry Liane Moriarty all that much and I don’t reckon her kids, George and Anna, will mind much either when they’re splashing around in that new pool in Sydney’s leafy northern suburbs. Their mum is doing what she loves and someone is paying her handsomely to do it. How good is that?