Big Little Lies
Big Little Lies
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Liane Moriarty on Big Little Lies
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Three sparks, none of them enough aloneThe book’s central crisis grew out of an image Moriarty couldn’t shake from a book tour through rural New South Wales. Watching her traveling companion hunt through every shop stop for a pearl choker to wear as Audrey Hepburn at a school trivia night, she began populating an imaginary event: all the women as Audrey, all the men as Elvis. Then came the question she couldn’t answer, which meant she had to write the book to find out.
It just made me laugh so much. It seemed to have everything in it as a scene. It had the drama of imagining if you were one of the parents and thinking to yourself, I hope it wasn’t my little boy who did the biting, and also just the comedy of it because it was like a police lineup.
That scene, told to her by a friend about a kindergarten’s first day, gave her the second structural element: a community’s rush to assign blame, a lineup of children, and the question of what happens when an accusation sticks to the wrong person.
The Celeste storyline, the book’s most emotionally serious thread, came from the tail end of a radio interview Moriarty nearly missed entirely. A domestic violence expert described a middle-aged woman who, when her father attacked her mother during a family visit, reverted in an instant to a childhood reflex. That fragment lodged somewhere that Moriarty couldn’t fully account for until she had finished writing.
One spark was a radio interview, in which a domestic violence expert was discussing a woman who was middle aged, but had gone home to visit her elderly parents. Her father began assaulting her mother and her immediate reaction was to hide under her childhood bed because that’s what she used to do as a child. It didn’t inspire the whole novel but when I finished, I realised that was why I kept writing that particular character. It stayed with me; I kept imagining what it must’ve felt like.
How she wrote it
Working backwards from a body no one expectedMoriarty began with a crisis and no blueprint for reaching it. She knew a school trivia night ended in disaster; she did not know who died, who caused it, or how the three main women connected. Her method was not to plan those answers in advance but to write her way toward them, which she acknowledges sounds deceptively casual.
I don’t plan my novels... I just flail about a lot at the beginning. Obviously by the end I’ve worked it all out, so then I can go back and put in some little red herrings. I sometimes worry that when I say I just make it up as I go along that it sounds so easy.
The book’s structural signature, snippets of school parents being interviewed after the fact as a kind of suburban Greek chorus, was not designed as counterpoint to the main narrative. It was originally supposed to be the whole book. Most of what Moriarty wrote in that mode was eventually cut.
Originally I was thinking it would all be that way, with three main characters. I think I actually wrote quite a bit and scrapped all that, but then I used a little part of it.
What survived became the chapter-end voice of the school community: collectively unreliable, frequently wrong, and often funnier than the characters they’re commenting on. The form only worked because most of it was thrown away.
Writing Celeste required moving in and out of emotional registers deliberately. After demanding scenes, Moriarty shifted to a lighter corner of the book as a way of sustaining the work rather than abandoning it.
Most of my books are a mixture of light and dark, so I know after I’ve written a particularly dark scene—for example, with Big Little Lies—after I’ve written a scene about Celeste, then I’d have great fun going back to Madeline or the interview snippets.
When the title Moriarty had committed to was replaced, it cost her something. She had been attached enough to the original that the change required convincing. Her UK publisher went a different direction entirely, releasing the book under yet another name.
‘Big Little Lies’ was meant to be called ‘Sticks and Stones.’ Yeah, and I was really stuck on that, that title. [paraphrased from audio]
When the HBO adaptation moved production to Monterey, California, and gave David E. Kelley room to add new subplots, Moriarty let most of it go. The one condition she held to concerned what the camera would show Celeste doing, not what was done to her.
It was very important to me that her character doesn’t just take the abuse—she hits back. That was my only stipulation. I didn’t want her to be a passive, pretty victim. I wanted to show how these relationships become tangled and confused.
What she wants us to sit with
Not bitchy mothers, but women who show upMoriarty began the book believing she was writing a social satire about bullying at every scale, from kindergarten to marriage. The dedication she wrote when she finished told her she had been wrong about her own subject.
In my mind, it was a book about bullying – schoolyard bullying, all the way through to domestic violence. But then when I finished it, I dedicated it to a close girlfriend of mine because when I look back on it the story was actually about friendship. I don’t like it when people review the book and talk about bitchy mothers. Of course I had fun with some of the ‘chorus’ characters, but my main characters are supportive of each other. Really it’s about the fact that although we might judge, in the end we’re there for each other.
The Celeste arc drew criticism from some reviewers who felt domestic violence was too serious a subject to carry in a commercial novel. Moriarty did not dismiss the objection. She sat with it long enough to genuinely ask whether the criticism had teeth, and she found her answer not in her own defense but in her readers’ letters.
I can get myself all caught up in that because I do understand what they’re saying. If a book’s not well written enough, then you may feel too detached from whatever it’s describing. So I wonder, did that reviewer have a point?
Women wrote to tell her that recognizing Celeste’s cycle on the page had given them the courage to leave their own situations. That was the measure she settled on.
Moriarty’s goal with the abuse plot was to make the contradiction legible: that a woman can fight back and still feel responsible, can know she needs to leave and still be in love. The moral was not the one that would have been easiest to write.
I wanted to show how these relationships become tangled and confused, how if you defend yourself you start to feel complicit in the violence and how it’s possible to still be deeply in love with your abuser, even as part of you knows you need to leave.