Before Hollywood came calling, Liane Moriarty received the biggest news of her career lying in her son’s bed. It was early in the morning, the usual hour for calls from US publishers, and she was recovering from a typical night of parental bed-hopping, staring up at the spaceship pictures taped to the wall, when the phone rang. Big Little Lies had debuted at the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
‘That’s an amazing memory. It’s sort of funny to hear such glamorous, exciting career news while being stuck in our kids’ bedroom,’ Liane recalls with a laugh.
Now, more than 10 years after that fateful morning call – and after a brutal network bidding war, 8 Emmy Awards for the screen adaptation, and entering a new echelon of literary fame – the master Australian storyteller is returning to the universe that started it all.
Initially, the thought of a second book was off the table. It was only while penning the story foundation for Season 2 of the smash-hit HBO series that Moriarty experienced ‘the crumbling of [her] resistance.’ Now comes Big Little Truths, her very first sequel.
Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Truths – quick links
Big Little Truths
Aptly opening a decade on with Madeline’s 50th birthday, the narrative pivots as the Monterey-area kids cross into high school, throwing both generations headfirst into a whole new set of high-stakes problems.
‘That much time had passed in my own life, so a decade seemed like a nice number to pick up with, and because people have changed so much in that time,’ she tells me from her sunlit home in Mosman in Sydney.
‘I felt that I’m ageing with all the characters, because if anybody looks at my books, the characters are definitely getting older along the way. I’m about to turn 60, and your 50s are the time in your life when most people have teenage children and elderly parents, and you’re dealing with your own hormones at the same time as your hormonal children. It’s a lot going on!’
Big Little Truths delivers that signature Moriarty cocktail: a gruelling mystery woven into a humdrum suburban backdrop. In this case, the intrigue involves an anonymous human appendage mailed to the kid’s school and a suspicious car lurking in the shadows.
Writing about teenagers
Much like her characters, navigating life as a parent to teenagers has provided Moriarty with a new lens. Framing the children, who serve as a Greek chorus of sorts, has opened up an entirely new perspective for her, both at home and on the page.
‘Writing the teenage characters was one of the real pleasures of this book,’ Moriarty says. ‘I also think it’s really interesting, maybe this is universal to having children at all, but the whole time you’re seeing life again and you’re re-experiencing things through their eyes. It’s like with Christmas, you remember your own Christmases then and you think about yourself as a teenager. But, there’s this new flip where you see the perspective of your parents back then as well.’
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Indeed, Moriarty is raising teenage kids of her own, but lest fans wonder if Pirriwee’s newest drama is a bit too autobiographical, the author sets the record straight.
‘My children’s high school has never received a severed finger in the mail,’ she chuckles. ‘But, of course, there’d be some things which my kids would be saying, and I’d say, let me write that down because that’s so funny. And then my children would just be demanding a share of the royalties.’
Adapting Big Little Lies
When it came to seeing her fictional world adapted for the small screen, serving as an executive producer on the HBO series Big Little Lies allowed Moriarty to happily trade showrunner duties for front-row seats.
‘I felt more like a really interested bystander on the sidelines. I got to be there on the night that they were filming the big trivia night scene – although they didn’t make a trivia night, but the big glamorous fundraising night,’ she laughs.
‘It was so exciting to see the magnificent costumes, the props and all the behind-the-scenes stuff. I remember walking by and seeing two stuntmen who had mats out and were practising the murder and how people would fall, stuff like working with pretend cocktail glasses. It’s a really fun perk to be involved.’
Her backseat approach didn’t stop her from flexing a little creative power, however. She essentially willed cinema royalty Meryl Streep directly into her television orbit, naming the show’s Season 2 antagonist Mary Louise – which happens to be Streep’s real-life birth name. Moriarty was ‘laughing out loud with amazement’ when she got the call that they landed the Hollywood legend. ‘It was almost a surreal feeling, really.’
With Season 3 of Big Little Lies set to draw from the pages of Big Little Truths, more on-screen rewrites are inevitable. But for Moriarty, the printed page always remains holy ground.
‘I guess I always hope that as much of the story as possible makes it onto the screen, but I also understand completely that changes have to be made because it’s a different medium.’
She adds, ‘Of course, there are particular scenes that I won’t say, because there’d be spoilers, that I love the idea of seeing on screen. But, I’m very hands off. I’m not saying, “Oh, please, you must do this!” And when readers say to me, “I hope they don’t change your book,” I always say, “Well, nobody can change my book because it’s there.” Nobody can change the readers’ experience of reading it.’
As for what’s next, Liane is simply waiting for inspiration to strike. ‘I guess I’m just trying to get to the good part where the story has momentum and I look forward to coming to my desk each day. That normally seems to happen maybe a third of the way through the novel, that the story takes on a life of its own. And once I’m in that state of flow, then there’s no better feeling.’
