Big Little Lies Author Takes Intrigue to the Spa in New Novel

Before Australian author Liane Moriarty was rubbing elbows with celebrities, including Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman (both of whom starred in and produced the Emmy-winning HBO adaptation of her novel Big Little Lies), she was already a wildly popular bestselling writer. Her fifth novel alone—The Husband's Secret—sold more than 3 million copies and sat on The New York Times' bestseller list for a year.

The success of Big Little Lies has certainly kept Moriarty extra busy. She even took a pause from writing her new novel, Nine Perfect Strangers, to create a story line for season two of the show so that Witherspoon, Kidman, Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern, and Shailene Woodley could return to the California beach town of Monterey for more secrets and lies of various sizes.

However, readers shouldn't fret that Moriarty's gone Hollywood. She's back with even more intrigue in Nine Perfect Strangers, which follows nine attendees of an unorthodox health resort who have plenty of secrets (and some tendencies to lie)—a Moriarty specialty. When she talked with Goodreads contributor Mary Pols, Moriarty herself was anything but secretive. She was funny, charming, and honest about how "excruciating" novel writing still is.

Goodreads: I'm calling from the United States; you live in Australia. Does everyone at readings there ask you where you get your ideas, the way they do in the States? And what your writing routine is?

Liane Moriarty: They definitely always ask where you get your ideas, which is fine because I mostly get my ideas from my life. Are you going to ask those questions?

GR: Well, I would like to know what your routines are. Or if you have one.

LM: Sadly not. I do not have a really rigid routine where I light a candle or play a particular song to get started. I do love hearing other authors' routines, so I wish I had a more interesting one. Maybe with my next book I'll come up with one. But coffee is essential, and so is that I use the program Freedom to turn off the internet.

I do feel like when I push the button—it allows you to put in how many hours you want to be off—that always feels like I am programming myself. That is a magical essential.

I tend to do three-hour shifts. That started because when my children were little, we had a nanny who would come for three hours at a time. I actually found that I was more productive with the children than when I had vast expanses of time. The time was so precious, I couldn't waste it. Now they are older (eight and ten), and my husband is a stay-at-home dad.

GR: Your books flow so easily that the hardest part of reading them is forcing yourself to put them down for a bit. Do the words flow out of you easily?

LM: No, it doesn't flow. It is definitely always a lot of self-loathing and flailing about when I first start a book. It's excruciating.

GR: Nine Perfect Strangers features nine people at a health retreat in the remote Australian Outback. Once they get to Tranquillum House, they hand over their car keys and relinquish all control of meals and activities to the owner and director of Tranquillum House: Masha Dmitrichenko (the character Kidman, who landed the movie and TV rights to this new book, is rumored to want to play). So it is set within a self-contained world. Does that cut down on the excruciating process of writing?

LM: I do love exactly this, where you have got them all together somewhere. There is a Jane Austen quote where she says something like "a small village is just the thing." I should know this quote. I am going to look it up while we're talking. Hmm. [Sound of typing.] I just love that you've got them all together and now you can just make them move. It is so much easier—where is this quote? [It's "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on."] I should stop looking for it and talk to you—anyway, in this case I also love the fact that they are doing a retreat. [Ten days.] So there is a small, finite amount of time, which is good because I think I am not very good with time. My very first book [Three Wishes], I remember my editor saying, "This doesn't quite work; check your timeline."

GR: Did you have one?

LM: No. That is where you get yourself into trouble. I am not a planner.

GR: So not even an outline?

LM: I have never done an outline in my life. And I will never do one. The idea of doing one fills me up with a great sense of depression. Of course, once you are done, you go back and fix. That is the way I have always preferred to write. It does make it more difficult at the end, but you just go back and fix.

GR: The health resort setting, along with some of the intense and unorthodox therapeutic methods Masha uses on her clients, feels very timely, given the growing influence of some of the wellness industry, including Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP. Did you go away to a spa like Tranquillum House?

LM: Yes, I was about halfway through the book when I went away. I kept running out of time to go do my research. I was looking up a lot of TripAdvisor reviews, which was a wealth of information. I should have gone to one of the crazy ones. But I didn't want to fast, really, and I didn't want to be silent for a week. So I went to a lovely place, and I didn't have to give up coffee, although I got up very early in the morning.

GR: Did you sneak in contraband, like Frances Welty, the writer who is one of the main characters in Nine Perfect Strangers?

LM: No, but the manager of the resort did tell me about someone who had a meat lover's pizza delivered to the back fence, so that shows up in the book. Also, many, many years ago, when a girlfriend had a broken heart and I had desperately been trying to have a baby—we were both in bad places—she was given a week away at a health resort. And we said, there is no way we are giving up coffee, so we smuggled in our little bag of contraband. (More successfully than the characters in Nine Perfect Strangers.)

GR: How are you managing to write these days? There are so many demands on your time, and expectations.

LM: When I am writing, I can just say, I am not doing any publicity. I did get a little behind on writing Nine Perfect Strangers because I agreed to do the story for season two of Big Little Lies, which took me longer than I thought but which I was very happy to do.

Apart from that, Truly Madly Guilty was the first time I felt the weight of expectations. I wondered whether a lot of people would like it as much as the other books. The Husband's Secret was my breakout book, and people talk about the second-book blues after a hugely successful book. I kept writing away. I became terrified when some people said they didn't like it. Or that they didn't like it as much as Big Little Lies or The Husband's Secret. But then I realized that wasn't actually the end of the world. Certain books will be their favorite. So I came to this book [Nine Perfect Strangers] with a new sense of freedom of "What will be, will be."

GR: You have this main character, Frances Welty, a romance novelist for whom things seem to be going very badly after years of success. She's pilloried by a critic, her private life is in shambles, and her latest book has just been rejected by her editor. I read an interview where you said it was easy to imagine things going south, the way they have for Frances. So even for you, that is true?

LM: I don't know if there is anyone who doesn't imagine that. I wonder. Stephen King? I wonder if he just feels complete confidence? Surely the fear is what helps drive you and makes it exciting. It makes life interesting. If you were too smug, if you thought, "Of course I can do this," it wouldn't be as interesting. It is the terror that helps drive you.

GR: Have you read King's memoir, On Writing? He comes across as so human and down-to-earth that it is hard to imagine him being smug.

LM: I have. I always name that and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott as the best books ever on writing. I should say, both Stephen King and Anne Lamott at one time said nice things about my books. I always felt, if I ever got myself worked up about a review or felt a lack of confidence, I remember I have their endorsements.

GR: Is your favorite author still Anne Tyler? And have you read her latest, Clock Dance? I loved it but realized I hadn't read her in a long time because I had a boyfriend once who shamed me for loving her.

LM: Fancy shaming you for loving Anne Tyler! Yes, I have loved every single one of her books. And on this U.K. book tour, I got to the hotel and they had a signed copy [of Clock Dance] waiting for me. Which was so special. That was a great thrill. I always thought she gave me permission. Because I think every one of her books has been set in Baltimore, I felt she gave me permission that I am allowed to set all my books around Sydney.

GR: But there's this perception of her as being a "women's writer," which you get as well, right?

LM: I just came back from the U.K., where a journalist said to me, "Is it OK to say that most of your readers are women?" I said, "Of course it is OK." It was all women in the audience. She said, "Oh, you would be surprised." I finally realized what she meant is authors not liking to be called writers of women's fiction. I thought, why is there this subconscious idea that somehow it is less, not as good? And then I got to thinking about when I wrote my very first book [Three Wishes], my boyfriend at the time said, "Oh, I can just imagine the cover. I know exactly what it is. It's a girls' book." I remember feeling slightly ashamed. As if I hadn't written a real book. I feel that is really embedded deeply in my consciousness. That it is lesser.

But we're all just writing stories. People who actually love to read don't have any labels at all. As a young reader, I never had labels. I would just pick up the next book. And the next one. There was no women's fiction versus literary. That would have been completely meaningless. It was just another story.

GR: How was it writing the story for season two of Big Little Lies cold, without a novel to support it?

LM: It felt like a different product. I wrote 50,000 words, and at the end I did look at it like, "Where is my novel?" I felt it clarified for me that I am a novelist. I wrote it purely for the series, so I was writing for Reese Witherspoon's Madeline and the other characters, and I was setting it in Monterey, not in my own Australia. In fact, I changed some of the backstories of my own characters.

GR: How did that book and miniseries change your life?

LM: When people have asked, I say: Allowing my husband to stay at home has been the biggest change for my family, and it has been wonderful for the kids. He loves being home with them, and it is one of the things I feel most grateful for.

GR: What about school pickup? Do all the moms look at you sideways now, worried that you might have based some of the less-glowing depictions of motherhood on them?

LM: No, absolutely not! People at the school actually loved it. The teachers and the principal all got together once a week and watched it as a group. They said, "We are so proud of you." They were so keen, and so keen to come up and give me more material, give me stories. They'd say, "I have got a great story for you!" And I'd say, "I am not going to just write every new book about schoolyard politics."

GR: What's next for you?

LM: I have got nothing in the works! So I have no idea at all. I am calling next year my year of joy. I am thinking I am going to read nonfiction. I don't read enough nonfiction. I always thought when I became a grown-up, I would read nonfiction, so I am asking everyone for recommendations. And I am going to spend some time thinking.