Liane Moriarty is pictured in Sydney, on Aug. 29. Her new novel, Here One Moment, examines how one moment can change a life forever.NIC GOSSAGE/The New York Times
Liane Moriarty’s new book, Here One Moment, asks a simple, devastating question: What would you do if someone told you how and when you would die?
That’s exactly what happens to the passengers on an otherwise unremarkable flight between Hobart and Sydney in Australia. A woman stands up, and then walks down the aisle, pointing to people, reeling off an age and a cause of death. A workplace accident at 43. Drowning at 7. Cardiac arrest at 91.
The ripple effects of this bizarre performance – and the backstory of the woman who delivers this information – unravel across 500 gripping pages.
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Moriarty – best known for Big Little Lies, her novel about the dark underbelly of gilded suburbia adapted into a hit TV show starring fellow Aussie Nicole Kidman – has always written books that defy easy categorization. They’re sharply observed social commentary paced like the tautest thriller and devoured with the speed and enthusiasm you’d reserve for a juicy new romantasy.
Even when, as in this case, reading could involve a confrontation with your own mortality.
Moriarty is what you might call “an airport bookstore author,” the sort whose popularity is so widespread that you can reliably find them prominently featured in any given concourse in any given terminal around the world.
“It’s not something I ever take for granted, especially since in the early days, I’d go into bookstores and I wouldn’t see my books,” she says of the experience of spotting her book in the wild like this. “When I was very first published, I didn’t know much about the publishing industry, and I just thought every bookstore would automatically have my book.”
In fact, when her first book Three Wishes came out in 2003, Moriarty thought her book had just sold out when she couldn’t find it in a store.
“I thought it was amazing! I didn’t know how it had happened, but it had. And then my editor very sweetly said, ‘Well, maybe?’” she says, laughing. “And then over the years, I would take it very personally if a book shop didn’t stock my books, in a foolish way. As if the person behind the counter made the decision because he didn’t like me.”
Even now, more than 20 million copies later, Moriarty says she walks into bookstores with “my heart in my chest, ready for my feelings to be hurt. That’s why whenever I see my book, it’s still wonderful.”
It’s actually not uncommon for Moriarty to see people reading one of her books. It’s the best feeling, she says.
“It’s amazing to see somebody on a plane, and sometimes they can be just in front of you. Or whenever I’m walking along the beach, I always look at people to see what they’re reading,” she says.
While she’s never tempted to tap those people on the shoulder with a sly “Oh, I know how that one ends,” Moriarty does remember being on a family holiday when her first book came out, and seeing someone reading it.
“My father walked straight up to them and said, ‘Would you like to meet the author?’ You could see this person thinking, ‘No I don’t!’,” she says. “I’m never tempted to introduce myself, but I do watch them. Because I’m apparently very eager to have my feelings hurt, I’m looking to see if they’re scowling, or have a look of disbelief.”
If she ever sees them close the book and put it aside, Moriarty adds, she thinks, “‘Oh no, did you get bored? Were there too many feelings?’ Obviously I try not to look too long, because that would just be creepy.”
That penchant for close observation of the minutiae of modern life is a hallmark of a Moriarty, the text richly woven with the kind of tiny, delightful, often poignant details such as the headache powders that a character takes that end up causing kidney disease.
“Sometimes they come in organically, and that’s the best way. And of course, the internet is a wonderful thing, because if I’m thinking about something I can find it immediately,” she says, pointing to a piece of paper on her desk that currently says, “ear, shoelace,” a reminder for herself for something she’s working on. “If the scene is feeling blank, I put them in, but it’s best when they happen naturally.”
Case in point: For the opening sweep of Here One Moment – the airport gate lounge and the plane itself, crucial for the entire story – Moriarty says she worked hard on those scenes, spending months collecting details.
“Whenever I travelled, I was looking for things and writing little notes. If my husband was ever on a flight, and it was delayed and he was stuck there, I’d be saying, ‘Send me stuff,’” she says.
The premise itself, in fact, came to Moriarty when she was sitting on a delayed flight. The fact that it is a wider meditation on life and death, however, was courtesy of a confluence of events in her own life: She was in her 50s, for starters, which she says just naturally meant she was thinking more about her own mortality. And then her sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, then her father died shortly before the pandemic, a time when we were all suddenly thinking about the finite nature of earthly existence more than we might usually.
“And then I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” says Moriarty. “My sister and I are both fine now, but having all those things happen, especially having been very lucky not to have had much death at all. It’s just constantly on your mind.”
What she has noticed is the modern “sense of resistance” to contemplating mortality, which she attributes to the privilege many of us, particularly in the West, have of not being exposed to it very much.
“I remember when we were planning my father’s funeral, the funeral director saying that some people will come in to plan their parent’s funeral, and it will be the first funeral they’ve ever been to,” she says. “I’ve noticed with my mother. She grew up in an age where the little boy across the road died of something that these days we’d all be horrified by. As the generations go by, we more and more believe that anything can and should be fixed.”
It’s an occupational hazard of writing a book about learning how and when you die that Moriarty has now had to field the question “Would you want to know?” several times over lately.
“When I think about it, it gives me a horrible feeling,” she says. “I came out of the book thinking, it’s not decided. If there is something in my body right now that is likely to kill me, maybe there is some lovely young person who is a genius who is going to discover the cure.”