The Last Anniversary
The Last Anniversary
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Liane Moriarty on The Last Anniversary
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A ghost ship and a railway health fundThe Munro Baby mystery, the unsolved disappearance at the heart of the novel, needed a historical precedent sturdy enough to feel genuinely inexplicable. She found one in the nineteenth century, not in Australian waters but in the Atlantic Ocean.
In a roundabout way it was inspired by the mystery of the Mary Celeste — the abandoned ship found in the late 19th century. I was always fascinated by that story.
The mystery’s architecture came from the Mary Celeste, but the women who populated Scribbly Gum Island came from a very different source: a corporate history commission Moriarty was writing at the same time she was drafting the novel. She was still a freelance copywriter, and one client sent her in an unexpected direction.
I wrote the history of the NSW Railway & Transport Health Fund because they were a client of mine, and I think that very much influenced my second novel.
The women she interviewed for that institutional history carried voices she could not leave behind on the page.
Her very first novel, Three Wishes, had reached readers only because of a rivalry she has never been coy about describing. By the time she was writing The Last Anniversary, that same competitive engine was still running.
If my sister hadn’t been published first, I’m quite sure I would have never pushed myself to finish that. It was pure envy that drove me to finish that first novel.
How she wrote it
No plan, mixed signals, one firm conditionMoriarty starts every novel the same way, and she has said so often enough that it reads less like a stylistic preference and more like an admission of how her imagination actually works. The plan always loses.
Each time I start a new novel, I think, ‘This time I’m going to do a systematic chapter-by-chapter plan’ but then I get bored and think, ‘Oh, why don’t I just start writing it and see what happens.’
Writing without a plan into a story that blended mystery, family drama, and comedy produced a book that early critics found slippery. Moriarty remembered their objection clearly, and her tone in recalling it suggests she disagreed with the premise of the complaint.
This book can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it a this, is it a that? As if you have to stay in your lane. [paraphrased from audio]
She had heard the genre-mixing criticism before it was leveled at this book, and she had already worked out where the real difficulty lay: not in whether humor belongs beside serious material, but in how to move between the two without unsettling the reader’s footing.
That’s always my line I have to walk if I’m dealing with serious issues and then I have humor as well. I don’t want the reader to feel too off balance with that. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
What the facade is always hidingThe novel’s central secret, held for more than seventy years by the Munro family of Scribbly Gum Island, is not an anomaly in her fiction: it is the premise her fiction keeps returning to. She named the preoccupation directly, not in relation to this book but in terms that describe its engine precisely.
I’m always so interested in what goes on behind the facade that we all present to the world. I’ve always found that if I’m at a party, and I have a particular perception of somebody, and if conversation goes deeper, then there are always things to surprise you.