Liane Moriarty On Families
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Joy Delaney has gone missing. With only a nonsensical text message to go on, her four grown children – flighty Amy, dependable Logan, show pony Troy and migraine-sufferer Brooke – are left wondering what has happened to their heretofore entirely predictable mother. When police start asking if their father may have had anything to do with their mother’s disappearance, fault lines appear in this previously united family.
That’s the set-up of Liane Moriarty’s new book, Apples Never Fall. Coming after the massive success of titles such as Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, expectations are high.
The good news is, Apples Never Fail knits together all the signature Liane Moriarty elements that her readers love – compelling characters, an intriguing mystery and trenchant insights into human relationships.
Take the moment when Joy reflects on her husband Stan’s refusal “on principle” to get a mobile phone, and the number of times she has had to hold things together because he is uncontactable. “[If] she thought about that too much and all it implied she could tap into a great well of rage, so she didn’t think about it. That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.”
The novel is a celebration of families, particularly the complexities of sibling relationships. Liane says she didn’t initially plan to write about families, but once she started fleshing out her initial premise – a mother disappearing, a father under suspicion – she realised she was back writing about sibling relationships, just as she did in her first novel, Three Wishes, which focused on a set of triplets.
The oldest of six children, Liane says she is fascinated by the way siblings relate to each. “When I was writing Three Wishes, I read a lot about identical twins and found some research that said that twins separated at birth and brought up in separate environments were more likely to have similarities than twins who were brought up together – because when you are brought up together, you look to differentiate yourselves from each other,” she says.
“It’s interesting in families that you settle on a role – you become the such-and-such person. When you all get back together, you find yourself back in your old roles.”
The Delaney siblings are no exception. The competition between the two boys, Logan and Troy, has shaped their life paths, while the girls both run from and hold on to their long-held roles in the family.
““I’m fascinated by how families have different perspectives of a shared childhood, even though you all grow up in the same household.””
The eldest, Amy, who struggles with her mental health, nonetheless remains “the mad queen to whom lifelong allegiance has been sworn”. Liane admits that, in some ways, she is the classic eldest child.
“I believe I made a quite good manager because I’m good at delegating, as I always had younger children to boss around,” she laughs.
The Delaneys are a tennis family – Joy and Stan ran a tennis academy, all four children were champion players – and they know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Yet as the story unfolds, we discover that all of them are keeping secrets.
“I’m interested in what’s going on behind the surface, even of people you think you know everything about,” Liane says. “I’m fascinated by how families have different perspectives of a shared childhood, even though you all grow up in the same household, and how at different times of your life you might be closer to one than another.”
In trademark Moriarty style, our take on each character is shaped by the opinions of other characters. We learn about each of the Delaneys through the perceptions of their parents, their siblings, their neighbours, even strangers in a cafe.
“I always think I’m going to sit down and just write from one character’s perspective, but I love jumping from one character’s head to another,” she says. “That’s part of the pleasure in writing about a family – each of them can have different perspectives on each other.”
Wrangling so many characters brings its challenges, says Liane. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the trickiest is finding the right name for each character, so that readers can keep track of who’s who.
“You don’t want them to have the same initial letter or the same rhythm,” she says. “Joy was easy – she’s a joyful person. Stan was Stan the Man.
“I once saw on social media that a reader had drawn a little family tree to keep track of the characters, and I don’t want you to have to do that. I want you just to read the story without needing a spreadsheet.”
Liane says she doesn’t map out her complex plots in advance. “When I started this book, I didn’t know where Joy was, I didn’t know if she was dead or alive. It keeps me interested. There’s a lot of ruminating and a tiny bit of magic and it somehow comes together.”
Her favourite writing ritual is one that she shares with her sisters Jaclyn and Nicola, both of whom are also published authors. Whenever one of the sisters completes a manuscript, they send it to the others for comments.
“The point is not to give suggestions, it’s to give fast feedback – and the feedback should be, ‘This is a masterpiece’ or ‘This is the best thing you’ve ever written’. The job is to make your sister feel good.”