Moriarty keeps it real in suburbia Arts Australian author's insight hits Hollywood Liane Moriarty, will be in Canberra next month. She is the only Australian author to debut at No. 1 on The New York Times best- seller list.
Photo: NIC WALKER It's highly likely Liane Moriarty might well pick up an idea for her next novel when she ventures to Canberra on   August 15. 
"People are desperate to give me material," says the quietly spoken best-selling author.
"They'll come up to me and say, 'I've got something wonderful for you, you're going to love this.'
"And it's usually something that has happened to them, or someone they know. Real stuff."
It's this real stuff - the intricacies of seemingly normal lives, the secrets of the suburbs, families and relationships - that has laid the framework for her success.
Success, which until this point, has pretty much gone unnoticed in her own country.
But then Nicole Kidman called.
The Oscar-winning Australian actor wanted to option the rights to Moriarty's novel Big Little Lies, the only book by an Australian author to debut at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list.
Moriarty wasn't getting too excited.
Book rights get optioned all the time. But Kidman said, "No, no, if I option it, get excited."
The seven-episode HBO series, starring Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Alexander Skarsgard, will be out in early 2017.
While she's spent some time on set in Hollywood, Moriarty remains unnervingly real.
The day I ring her, she's busy unpacking the dishwasher, she's got a little time up her sleeve because the kids, a son and daughter aged eight and six, are at a play date, she's happy to admit she's a worrier.
"The whole thing has been amazing and surreal, extraordinary really," she says.
"But because I do like to find something to worry about, I do worry that I'm heading for a fall.
"Some days I'm thinking here it comes, I've had an extraordinary run of good luck and sometimes I feel like I might have to pay for that."
She wonders why women sometimes feel that way, doubt their successes, believe that the universe might just have to even things up if they get too big for their boots. "It's a pointless way to feel and life doesn't work like that ...
but things do go wrong in life.
"  Maybe it's just a part of getting older because you see friends and family and bad things do happen and we feel that way because we have empathy."
Moriarty's new novel Truly Madly Guilty is another exploration of real life. An afternoon barbecue goes terribly wrong and we follow three couples through the before and after. It's another inspection of what she's good at. Real lives laid bare. You wouldn't be surprised if Hollywood came calling again.
Apart from Kidman's deal with Big Little Lies, two more of Moriarty's books have been acquired. CBS Films has The Husband's Secret and Jennifer Aniston has been linked to What Alice Forgot, through Sony TriStar. But she's not thinking about any of that.
"It would paralyse me if I started casting as I wrote my books," she says, admitting she's feeling a little off at the moment. The physical act of writing centres me, I'm not writing at the moment, and I know I'll feel better once I am writing again.
I feel much more like myself when I'm in the middle of it."
+Truly, Madly, Guilty. Pan Macmillan.
$32.99. Liane Moriarty is speaking at the National Library of Australia on   August 15, from 6pm.
$15, includes refreshments and book signing. Tickets can be bought here. nla.gov.au