Wherever she goes, Liane Moriarty admits that she is a bit of a snoop. “I’m absolutely a people watcher and eavesdropper,” she tells WHO.
“I find ordinary people to be extraordinarily interesting. Especially the ones who come across as quite dull at first – they often have the biggest secrets.”
Of course, doing that while remaining undetected has become more difficult now the author, 57, is an internationally known household name thanks to bestselling novels like Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers and their TV adaptations starring some of Hollywood’s most famous actresses. But that doesn’t mean it’s any harder to uncover the tantalising truth.
“At events, people come straight up and pull me aside and say, ‘I have the perfect story for you!’ and talk about their neighbour or a parent at their child’s school,” she reveals. “Everyone wants
to appear in the books, but often the stories are just so unbelievable or sad that I couldn’t write about them.”
It was while people watching at the airport that inspiration struck for Moriarty’s latest page-turner. Here One Moment tells the story of a bunch of strangers who are thrown together on a delayed flight to Sydney out of Hobart. They are confronted by a fellow passenger who gives each of them a prediction about the time and cause of their death.
“I was sitting in an airport watching everyone, thinking that they are all going to die at some point, and in the future, we’ll have the technology that will be able to tell most people why and when,” she says. “I wondered would people want to know, and if they did, would they accept it or try and fight it. What would I do?”
Mortality was a subject that had been on Moriarty’s mind in the lead-up to penning the book. In the years prior, her sister Kati battled breast cancer and she lost her beloved father, Bernie, who’d first encouraged her to write.
“Then I got breast cancer myself,” she says. “I didn’t so much as look death in the eyes as I gave it a sideways glance, but there were a few very terrifying days while waiting to find out the biopsy results when I didn’t know how bad it would be.”
Thankfully, Moriarty confirms that both she and Kati are “well, doing fantastic”. But if she could choose to know her fate, just like the characters in her book, would she take it?
“That’s something I was pondering a lot while I was writing,” she says. “But no, I don’t really believe that anything is set in stone. I could start running marathons now – well, I’m not going to run marathons, but I could make another choice today or tomorrow that is going to completely change my life.”
As for destiny and psychics, Moriarty says she is far “too practical” to believe in that. “Though I still knock on wood,” she confesses.
Grab your copy of Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment now from Amazon Australia
