You’re on a plane, headed to a faraway destination. Another passenger — a stranger — tells you how you’ll die. That’s the plot of Liane Moriarty’s newest novel, “Here One Moment,” out in paperback on July 1.
The Australian author has written best-sellers such as “Big Little Lies,” “Nine Perfect Strangers” and “The Husband’s Secret.”
Moriarty said she got the idea for the novel when she was on a plane leaving Hobart in Tasmania. She had forgotten her book, so she kept herself occupied by thinking about her fellow passengers.
“I was looking around at all the people around me,” Moriarty said, “and I was wondering when and how each of them were going to die.”
6 questions with Liane Moriarty
Why were you thinking about how other passengers would die?
“I think it was a time in my life that I was considering my own mortality. A few things had happened in the years leading up to that flight. First of all, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, then we had the pandemic, so all of us were considering our own mortality. And then I myself was diagnosed with breast cancer. So I think it was all those things.
“Also, just being in my 50s, I think that’s a time when people start to be diagnosed with serious illnesses. So, I was just thinking about the fact that 100 years in the future, somebody would be able to look at all the names of the people on that flight, and they would be able to see the age of death and cause of death. And I think for some reason, it sort of blew my mind that that information would one day be available. It just wasn’t available right now. And that’s when I thought, imagine if somebody stood up and shared that information.”
Can you talk about the baby on board in your novel? His mother is told that her baby will die at age 7 by drowning.
“It’s exploring every mother’s worst fear. As soon as you have a child, that is your greatest terror.
“That’s what you do in fiction, you … put your characters through terrible things, and how would this young mother, if somebody told her something so dreadful, how would she respond?”
Did any of this keep you up at night, or was it more the glee of it’s just fiction? Was the plot something that got to your heart quite a bit, or was it the excitement of having a great story in your hands?
“There’s a little of both. When I’m writing fiction, there is glee in that this is a wonderful premise. And I also want to explore people’s feelings and real emotions. But sometimes you do have to just be quite technical about it because if I allowed myself to really feel fully what I’m putting my characters through, then I’d have to stop writing. I often think that if I had [events like that] in my own life, then I could never, never write about them.
“I always remember that after I wrote ‘The Husband’s Secret,’ where a woman’s daughter is murdered, I received some messages from mothers who had lost their children. And I was sort of overwhelmed seeing their words on the screen [responding to] something that I wrote for the purpose of entertainment. And they wrote lovely things to me, to say that I got some of those things about their own feelings right. And I was really proud that I’d done that, but also slightly ashamed that I, for entertainment, had written about something that was somebody else’s horrendous reality. So yes, I can get myself really tied up in knots about that.”
Sometimes your books can be relegated to being “beach reads” or “chick lit.” Can you talk about your relationship with women readers?
“A lot of the time, my books have been described as chick lit, and I remember when I first heard that term, I thought that was just a fun, cheerful term for books that are about women, for women. And then as I wrote more, I thought actually it’s sort of a dismissive term.
“I always remember a journalist saying to me once, ‘So most of your readers are women.’ And I said, ‘yes.’ And she said, ‘OK, so it’s OK to say that?’ And I said, ‘Of course it’s OK to say that. That’s just a fact.’ And she said, ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. Some people don’t want to say that.’ And that’s when I realized she meant that I wouldn’t want to call my books women’s fiction. And I realized that’s because I felt that that meant that it was something less than. If it’s women’s fiction, it means it’s not as good as.
“So that’s when I thought, ‘so that’s my own internalized misogyny,’ because if a man wrote a book and called it men’s fiction, he would say, ‘yes, I write men’s fiction, and I’m very proud of it.’ So why am I not? And then I turned around and thought, ‘OK, so I should embrace the term women’s fiction.’”
Nicole Kidman has been involved in bringing some of your previous books to the screen, and she’s going to be involved in an adaptation of “Here One Moment.” Is there a part you envision for her?
“I honestly can’t see one right away. But often when the screenplay [is] written, you might lose some characters … I’m not writing the screenplay myself, but there may be two characters combined, so it may end up that there’ll be a role for her. But as I’m writing, I can see the characters, they’re my characters, I’m not seeing anybody in particular playing them.”
What were you exploring through the character of the “Death Lady,” the woman who goes down the aisle telling people when and how they’ll die?
“In the beginning, I didn’t know who she was. I don’t plan my books, so I didn’t know what would be the consequences of her sharing all these predictions. I didn’t know if the predictions would be accurate or not. I just had my premise, this happens.
“But I loved writing, the ‘Death Lady’ and getting to know her through the process of writing her and coming to understand why she did what she did and who she was … I don’t want to give too much away, except that a lot of readers say they don’t like her in the beginning, but then they love her by the end, which makes me very happy.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Tamagawa adapted it for the web.
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Book excerpt: ‘Here One Moment’
By Liane Moriarty
Excerpted from “Here One Moment” by Liane Moriarty Copyright © 2024 by Liane Moriarty. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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