What: In Conversation with Liane Moriarty
Where: Bolen Books, 111-1644 Hillside Ave.
When: Saturday, Nov. 17, 7 p.m.
Tickets: $5
Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty is still largely unsure of what will take place at her Bolen Books appearance Saturday night, the only Canadian stop of her North American press tour. But she knows one thing about the event, at which Moriarty will be interviewed by CBC host Hal Wake: She won’t be reading pages from her new book, Nine Perfect Strangers.
“Unless I’m forced to, I don’t ever read at readings,” Moriarty said with a laugh. “I can’t stand reading my work out loud. I feel ridiculous, so I often pretend to have forgotten my glasses.”
Moriarty, who turned 52 on Thursday, suffers no crises of confidence when she’s writing. The straight-shooting Australian found international success with Big Little Lies, her sixth book, after the tale about the intertwined lives of three women was adapted for TV in 2017.
The series created by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon became a huge hit for HBO, and won eight Emmy Awards, including outstanding limited series and best actress for Kidman.
Through the experience, she developed a friendship with Kidman, whose company Blossom Films recently secured the film and television rights to Nine Perfect Strangers.
With her fellow Australian at the helm of the new project, Moriarty is expecting a process similar to the one that brought Big Little Lies to television. In fact, all of her experiences with the medium have been great, Moriarty said. She also wrote the novella upon which the upcoming second season of Big Little Season is based, and has been working with Blake Lively, the producer and star of an adaptation of Moriarty’s 2013 book The Husband’s Secret.
“The experience [of adapting Big Little Lies] was a pleasure from start to finish,” Moriarty said.
“I was very lucky. I don’t think every author has that experience, so I was lucky that the producers made such a point of making me feel involved and part of it, even though I happily handed it over. They could have ignored me, but instead, they made me feel a part of it.”
Nine Perfect Strangers follows nine people who enroll in a 10-day wellness course at Tranquillem House, a health-and-wellness resort in Australia. The story came to the author years ago when she was on a press tour to promote Big Little Lies.
Moriarty said she was often asked about her next book and didn’t yet have an idea. Needing to buy some time, she made up a story on the spot. “I started saying my next book was going to be set on a tropical island resort, but that I was going to need to do a lot of meticulous research to get it right. But the more I made that joke, the more I started to think: ‘Why not?’ ”
When she returned from that press tour, Moriarty wrote a couple of chapters of her tropical island tome, though that book was quickly pushed aside by another idea, which resulted in 2016’s Truly Madly Guilty.
She eventually went back to the island tale, though the story shifted to a health resort and got a new central character, a former bestselling romantic novelist named Frances. “I can’t lie — of course she has little parts of me within her,” Moriarty said of the author character. “My husband said: ‘You do realize that by the time this book comes out, you will be exactly the same age as Frances. Everybody is going to think it’s you.’ I said: ‘I know — that’s why I made her completely charming in every way possible.’ I gave her the nicest parts of me, and none of the bad parts.”
The story was based, in part, on Moriarty’s experience at a health resort a few years ago. “I have to say I did not suffer that much for my art,” she quipped.
She did find a way to write the book without much else in the way of deep-dive research, however.
“I could never write historical fiction, because I would find that research overwhelming. Even if I do a flashback to the ’80s — and I was there in the ’80s, so I should be able to remember — I get too caught up in the detail. I like doing a little research, but not so much where it’s too beyond my own day-to-day life.”
