Here One Moment
Here One Moment
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Liane Moriarty on Here One Moment
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A delayed flight and an uninvited thoughtThe book’s premise arrived not at a desk but on a tarmac at Hobart Airport, where a long delay left her surrounded by strangers with nothing to do but listen. She had been eavesdropping on a fellow passenger who spent the entire wait on the phone with her young daughter, trying and failing to get the girl to wake Daddy up to make dinner. When the call finally ended and the plane went quiet, her attention shifted from that one domestic frustration to every other person on board.
That’s when this cheerful thought popped into my head: Every person on this plane will one day die. But when? And how? I looked around at my fellow passengers and thought, Will that little girl live until she’s one hundred? Will that young man have his life cut short? What about that beautiful flight attendant? It occurred to me that somewhere in the far-off future the answers to all those questions would be available. I thought, What if that information was available NOW? What if someone walked down the aisle telling every passenger how and when we would die? And what if those predictions came true? When the flight finally took off and passengers applauded with relief, I knew I had a good opening scene for a novel.
The tarmac thought was not random. By the time she boarded that flight, she had absorbed a sequence of losses and near-losses that had changed how she moved through ordinary life. Her sister’s diagnosis came first, then her father’s death, then the pandemic, then her own breast cancer. She and her sister both recovered, but something shifted permanently.
I wasn’t drawn to the concept of fate, so much as death. My preoccupation with my own mortality is perhaps not surprising considering recent events in my life. Firstly, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, then my beloved father died, we had a global pandemic where the whole world stared death in the face, and finally and most recently, I myself was diagnosed with breast cancer. My sister and I are both fine now. (She’s running marathons. I’m doing yoga and the occasional spin class.) However, in spite of my good health I have a new, seemingly permanent awareness of the finite nature of life and I guess that led to the concept of fate.
The distinction she draws, fate versus death, is the book’s engine. Fate is a puzzle to be wrestled with; death is simply the fact that sits behind every passenger on that plane.
How she wrote it
Discovery, a stack of unfinished books, and a list of things to fixShe began writing without knowing how the story would resolve, which is her standard working method. What made it unusually exposed was that the novel’s own premise, a woman moving down an airplane aisle announcing how each passenger will die, demanded that she eventually account for every prediction she had set in motion.
I’m not a planner. I wrote Here One Moment in the order of the text, from start to finish, and I, like the listener, didn’t know at first exactly how the characters’ stories would end or intertwine. That’s always my process: I simply come up with the premise and start writing. It makes it interesting because each day I sit down at my computer and think, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen?’ It also makes it terrifying because what if nothing happens?
Cherry, the older woman at the center of the novel who delivers the predictions, was not designed in advance. Moriarty found her by writing toward her, which meant spending a long stretch of the manuscript unsure whether her central figure’s actions would even prove consequential.
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.
Deciding which passengers to follow from the plane into the rest of the novel required a structural logic, not just instinct. A prediction of extreme old age creates no story pressure; a prediction of imminent, specific danger forces a character to make an active choice about her own life.
If you’re told you’re going to live to 100, well then I think you just go about living your life. But if you’re told you’re going to die in a workplace accident, the question is, do you stop going to work? So that’s why the book then became really about fate and how can you avoid your own fate. [paraphrased from audio]
Research for the book was wide-ranging but deliberately unsystematic. She assembled material on subjects as far apart as mid-century Australian social history and the mathematics of probability, then raided rather than read it.
I had a stack of non-fiction books and memoirs about death, probability, OCD, palm reading, psychics and Australia in the 50s and 60s. I didn’t read them from start to finish but flicked through to see what caught my eye — and it all helped drive the story.
The personal thread
A sideways glance at something terrifyingHer own breast cancer diagnosis arrived after her sister’s, which meant she had already spent months watching someone she loved navigate the fear of waiting for results. When her own biopsy came back, she knew exactly what the days of not-knowing felt like from the outside. She described that interval with precision.
I didn’t so much as look death in the eyes as I gave it a sideways glance, but there were a few very terrifying days while waiting to find out the biopsy results when I didn’t know how bad it would be.
Writing grief for an audience of readers who paid for the experience has been a long-standing discomfort. The response to her earlier novel ‘The Husband’s Secret’ forced the issue: mothers who had lost children wrote to say she had captured something true about their experience, which was both a professional validation and, for her, a source of real unease.
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.
That knot is still present in ‘Here One Moment’, where the passengers’ deaths are plot mechanics and also, for some readers, mirrors of their own losses. She has not found a way to fully reconcile the two.
What she wants us to sit with
A skeptic who keeps her mind openThe novel asks whether a predicted fate can be outrun, but Moriarty’s own answer to that question is not mystical. She lives as though each day contains genuine choices, not a script already written. Her resistance to fatalism is personal as much as philosophical.
I don’t really believe that anything is set in stone. I could start running marathons now — well, I’m not going to run marathons, but I could make another choice today or tomorrow that is going to completely change my life.
Her relationship to the psychic premise she built the book around is one of productive suspension. She has never had an experience that convinced her such gifts are real, and she has not pretended otherwise. But she has not closed the question either.
I’m a skeptic who is desperate to believe. So far I’ve not personally experienced anything that has made me a true believer, but I do love hearing stories from people who feel they met someone with a true gift. My mind is open!
For years she deflected the label ‘women’s fiction’ without examining why, until she traced the discomfort to its source. The realization changed how she talked about her own work in public, and the logic she arrived at applies well beyond genre labeling.
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.’
That shift in self-description is one way to read what ‘Here One Moment’ is doing structurally: it puts women’s interior lives, their fears about death, their grief, their daily negotiations with an uncertain future, at the center of a novel about something that happens to everyone.