Liane Moriarty wrote the best novel of the year and she came to Toronto to talk about it

One hot stone massage …
Comin’ right up!
It was just the thing on Liane Moriarty’s to-do list the other day here at the Park Hyatt, I understand. The woman behind 20 million books sold — the first Australian to top the fiction lists on this side of the pond — she was trading in “Big Little Lies” for reasonably sized scorching rocks. A dash of storybook TLC — post-red eye — in the midst of a monster global tour for her latest red-hot novel, “Here One Moment.”
“So I’m a skeptic, but I also want to believe,” she would say later to a rapt audience down the street at Koerner Hall, as part of a signature event hosted by the Toronto International Festival of Authors.
As good a thesis statement as any — for a work I personally rank as the best novel of the year. The most genre-bending and thoughts-sautéing at the very least. The quote at its very beginning, courtesy of Stephen Hawking, offering some hint of things to come: “I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predestined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”
How much is fate? How much do we will? How much control should we thrust — and how do we learn to let go? Those are just some of the questions “Here One Moment” circles in this, a narrative that starts with one very intriguing scenario: on a plane. An unremarkable lady who nobody noticed upon boarding — older, a woman named Cherry — has stood up and, while in an almost-trance-like state, and with great conviction, started to make her way through the cabin, predicting the “cause of death” and “age of death” for all of those on board.
Perspectives float in and out from a handful of passengers, even some crew, as we zero in on the destinies of this ensemble, and continue years and years on, while we also get filled in on the sad-funny-strange life of Cherry, whose “voice” is one of the most singular I’ve come across in a book in a while.
Bottom line: the book is at so many things at once and defies expectations at every turn. A suspense novel that is also a philosophical treatise. An un-small book (126 chapters!) that propels faster, faster and faster. Mind-bending but deeply human and swimming in cosy ironies. (In many ways, its storytelling reminded me of the great Anne Tyler, who, as it happens, is a lifelong influence of Moriarty’s. About Tyler’s novel “The Accidental Tourist,” Moriarty once quipped: “I would grab it in a fire, possibly leaving the photo albums behind.”)
Unsurprisingly, our Aussie’s own, ninth novel was inspired by a delayed flight, as she shared. It was in Tasmania, and a morbid thought strolled into her head: “Every single passenger on this plane is going to one day die.” And more than that: 100 years from now, or something, “that information will be available … you will be able to look up these people … find cause of death, date of death … facts just not available yet.”
It came during a time when the now 57-year-old was herself ruminating plenty on mortality. Not long before, her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Then she lost her father. A worldwide pandemic intruded. And, finally, she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though both she and her are sister are all right now, she says, there’s a reason Moriarty likes to call life in one’s 50s like “living in sniper’s valley.”
Veered here, veered there: her onstage conversation here with Canadian bestselling author Ashley Audrain. About having had so many books make it to screen (“Big Little Lies,” with Nicole and Reese and Meryl and everyone else; “Nine Perfect Strangers,” again with Nicole; “Apples Never Fall,” with Annette Bening), she said that she keeps a healthy distance between book and adaptation. Lets it all go and prefers to just see those things “as their own thing.” About the fact she is one of six children, three of whom who wound up being writers — Moriarty has two sisters who also are published authors — she said books were always a part of the household. That she can remember reading “Jaws” when she was 10!
Speaking in gentle, hypnotizing tones — the voice of a first-rate therapist or mixologist — she also revealed that she is writing a sequel to “Big Little Lies.” Given that her two children were really little when she wrote that first book, and now are well into their teens, “they are providing a lot of teenage material.”
About her fixation with multi-perspective narratives, she confessed: “I cannot resist jumping out of one character’s head and then seeing it from other eyes.” No spreadsheets, though. She does not do those. She just writes. And writes. (She does famously write to an hourglass, however!)
“Some readers do get frustrated with me,” she went on. “Too many characters. I am always thinking: the next book, I am going to just do one character.” But, yeah, it never happens. “Now I wrote a whole planeload.”
The conversation continued later, by the way, in dribs and drabs, at the Writers Room, the bar atop the Hyatt, where the mega-author was feted for drinks by her publishers from Doubleday Canada. Here one moment — and then, onto the next town.