Liane Moriarty - 

Chick Lit?  Maybe something better

I am sorry to say that with The Last Anniversary, I have now read all of Liane Moriarty’s work.  With titles unread, I knew I could look forward to a story that explores deep-held secrets, moves smoothly between multiple perspectives and back and forth in time, and which focuses on personal epiphanies, moral responsibility and growing self-understanding.  A review of the novel referred to Moriarty’s work as “chick lit,” a term I think is pejorative because it implies female characters wallowing in shallow angst over relationships with men.  Her works do, in fact, always focus on women – middle-aged, suburbanites in her native Australia, but the issues are deeper, the narrative itself more complex.  Moriarty’s novels may not be sitting on the classics book shelf 100 years from now or win prizes for great literature, but the woman knows how to tell a story that is interesting and engaging.

The Last Anniversary is set on a private island near Sydney that is close enough that its inhabitants can easily get to the mainland on a jet ski or little motor boat.  The fictional Scribbly Gum Island is a famous and popular tourist destination; in 1932, sisters Rose and Connie find baby Enigma alone in her cradle, mysteriously abandoned by Alice and Jack Munro.  The cake on the counter is fresh and the kettle on the stove is whistling.  The sisters raise the baby and turn the mystery into a lucrative business, creating a tour of the Munro house that includes artifacts that hint at various theories as to what happened.

The story begins in present-day and is told through the perspective of several of the islander women, whose group now includes Sophie Honeywell, the ex-girlfriend of Thomas, Enigma’s grandson, and the person to whom Connie has mysteriously left her house. Sophie’s biological clock is ticking and at age 39, she now wonders if she made a mistake by rejecting Thomas, now happily married to Deborah and father of Lily.  Grace, Thomas’s cousin who also lives on the island with her husband Callum and their newborn, Jake, spends much of the book in self-critical judgment because she can’t seem to summon up any motherly love for her new baby.  When Sophie arrives, Grace begins to think maybe she would be the better mother.  Occasionally, the narrative lens swings to Rose, now in her late 80’s, to Enigma, to Enigma’s two daughters, Laura (now inexplicably out of the country for a year despite the birth of her only grandchild) and to Margie, whose increasing absences at Weight Watchers meetings finally begin to catch the notice of her husband.

All of the main characters struggle with what it means to be a happy and self-actualized person amid social expectations of what it means to be a woman.  While some of the angst does, admittedly, have to do with their relationships with men, much of it has to do with self-acceptance and self-understanding.  There’s also the Jack and Alice mystery, which you know the author is going to have to explain before the end – and she does.  All of her novels have a secret or revelation that is instrumental.  In The Husband’s Secret, a woman stumbles upon a letter that her very much alive husband has labeled “To be read in case of my death.”  There are multiple secrets – both the fact that she reads it and also the secret that is revealed in the letter.  In What Alice Forgot, the novel begins with Alice, about to turn 39, falling off her bike at spin class and hitting her head, inducing amnesia that makes her forget the last ten years of her life.  Told from Alice’s perspective, the secret is the truth of how those ten years have turned her life in a decidedly different direction from the one she remembers.  Truly, Madly Guilty is all about the aftermath of a traumatic event that occurs at a neighborhood barbecue, but what that event is, is not revealed until ¾ of the way through the book.

Although The Last Anniversary is largely situated in the present, there are flashbacks to Connie and Rose’s past.  There are also brief conversations and letters that provide interludes between the narrative chapters and which reveal information that is out of context until much later in the story.  Grace is the artist and author of several picture books and as she works on her newest one in the series, excerpts appear that cleverly reflect Grace’s own feelings and intentions.  This is a technique that Moriarty uses in all of her novels.  In Big, Little Lies (turned into a mini-series that airs next week), snippets of interviews between a police detective and the participants at a school function where someone has been killed appear between chapters, leading the reader to ponder the identity of the victim.

The author’s later books have a little more gravitas than earlier ones; with each new novel, Moriarty seems to take on deeper and darker issues.  They all feature quirky characters who feel very much like real people and the writing is always crisp and playful.

Other Moriarty books that are maybe a little bit lighter and therefore, more chick-lit but fun to read:

The Hypnotist’s Love Story – Ellen, a hypnotherapist has a new love interest, the man who could be “the one.”  He reveals to her that his ex-girlfriend is stalking him and Ellen thinks it might be interesting to meet a woman who would do this.  As the teaser for the book says, “Ellen doesn’t know it but she already has.”

Three Wishes – The story of the thirty-third year in the life of three sisters who are triplets.  In typical Moriarty style, the book begins with a scene in which one sister embeds a fondue fork in the belly of another sister who is pregnant on the occasion of the their 34^th birthday.  The book that follows goes back in time to bring the reader forward to this event.