When Liane Moriarty wrote Big Little Lies back in 2014, she, of course, had pictures of the characters in her head. But when it came time to write the sequel, Big Little Truths (Aug. 25) – after the first book had been turned into an HBO Emmy-winning series starring some of the most famous actresses in the world – things got blurry. “Now I was seeing sort of morphed versions of my Madeline and Reese Witherspoon’s Madeline,” Moriarty tells Zoomer. “I was very aware of the fact that readers would be doing exactly the same. So [in the sequel], I did things like not mention the colour of Madeline’s hair – even though I had originally pictured it brown – as that would be sort of jarring for the reader.” Witherspoon, after all, is very much a blonde. Also, Moriarty recalls, in the original she hadn’t given much thought to the height of the character of Celeste. “But in the new book I have a scene where someone tells Celeste, ‘You’re too tall to do that.’ So I was obviously seeing Nicole [Kidman] when I was writing that.” And the biggest shift happened, she says, with a secondary character from Big Little Lies. “Renata only played a small role in the first book,” says Moriarty, who confirms that Big Little Truths will form the basis for a third season of the HBO show. “So she wasn’t clear enough in my mind to withstand Laura Dern’s performance. This time around, I made her a bigger presence and all I could see was Laura.”

The Australian celebrity author – whose books Nine Perfect Strangers and Apples Never Fall have also been adapted for the small screen – never actually saw herself writing a sequel – although she had written an outline for season 2 of the show that was never published. But it’s pretty hard to walk away from this star-studded and successful Big Little world. Instead, she waited 10 years, so that she could realistically return to her group of moms when they and their children are a decade older. The kindergartners are now 15 and play a pivotal role in the new domestic mystery. “My favourite part of the new book was writing the teenagers – they felt fresh to me,” she says. “Even though I started off with the critics’ voices in my head, thinking they’d say: ‘Moriarty seems to think that teenagers are blah, blah, blah … ’ As I was writing, I was thinking to myself, ‘What are people going to say I’m doing wrong with these teenagers?’ But then I forgot about all that because I’d come to love them so much.”

Not that the author is planning to pivot to YA at this point in her career. “I’m so interested at the moment in 60-year-olds. I’m turning 60 this year and my friends are turning 60, and we all find it hilarious – the things that are happening to us. And I assume more things will keep happening when we’re 80. And hopefully when we’re 90. So I want to keep writing about those times.” 

So there’s no retirement on the horizon for the novelist? “I’ve noticed every time when I finish a book I think it’ll be great to just have a whole lot of time off and just read poetry – just fill my days like that,” she says. “But then I get really twitchy and irritable. So I assume writing will continue to do something for me that I need.”

Speaking of taking time out to read, we asked the author to answer our Shelf Life questionnaire and give us a peek at her favourites – past, present and future. 

What is the best book you’ve read in the last year?
Time Travel for Beginners by my sister – and there’s no bias whatsoever. [Two of Moriarty’s four sisters – Jaclyn, who wrote the above book, and Nicola – are also bestselling authors.] It’s about a suburban time travel agency and a woman who gets a job there. I loved it. 

What book can’t you wait to dive into?
So, sticking with time travel. There’s a sequel coming to The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is called Life Out of Order [by Audrey Niffenegger]. The Time Traveler’s Wife and my sister’s book just made me believe their worlds were true. I’m not so keen on pure fantasy. But I love books set in the contemporary world where something slightly magical has happened. I haven’t written time travel myself; I get too caught up with the logistics. 

What is your favourite book of all time?
That’s a hard one. But I will say The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler because it was my introduction to her work, and she’s my favourite author. I have a personally signed first edition of The Accidental Tourist that my American editor got for me, and I always say I would save it in a fire. I can remember telling my husband when I got it, “This is the best present I have ever received in my life.” It kind of set the bar high for all future presents. 

I did read that a couple of your favourite books are by Canadian authors, Mary Lawson and Miriam Toews.
Oh yes, All My Puny Sorrows [by Toews] is absolutely in my top books. Oh my goodness, it’s so heart-breaking. She’s amazing – all her books are amazing. And Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake – I remember when I finished it, I said, “That was just perfect.”

Mary Lawson has a new book out this fall, called Solace in Winter.
That is great news. That is what I should say I’m most excited to dive into then. I will pre-order that right after this. 

What book completely changed your perspective?
The one that comes to mind is one that I just read recently called The Traveler, by Joseph Eckert. It’s time travel again, but it’s a bit more science fiction-ish. He jumps forward in time, and every time he jumps, the amount of time he jumps doubles. So it covers huge jumps of time – hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years into the future. It certainly made me aware of that feeling that you’re just a little dot on the huge timeline. It gave me a vague change of perspective. 

If you could have dinner with any author, living or dead, who would it be?
So my first thought is Jane Austen because I think she’d be fun. But maybe she wouldn’t be because, you know, some people who are funny on the page aren’t in life. So I would leave Jane be. I would say, two authors I  actually know but who live on the other side of the world, so I don’t get to see them very often. And I’ve never actually seen them both together: Marian Keyes and Jojo Moyes. The reality is, I’d like the three of us to have dinner sometime, so hopefully that actually could or will happen.