Cathy Lamb: I loved The Husband’s Secret. I read your book instead of writing my own. Now I’m behind and scrambling.

Anyhow, back to you. Here we have a lovely family and yet the husband is just tortured on the inside by his decades – long secret.  How did the idea come to you for this book?

Liane: I’m sorry you’re behind with your book! I do exactly the same – read one more chapter, when I should be writing one chapter. My inspiration for The Husband’s Secret was a fascinating article I stumbled upon about real life deathbed confessions. I learned about Christian Spurling, who confessed on his deathbed to faking a notorious photo of the Loch Ness Monster.

There was a famous songwriter who was dying of cancer and wrote a letter admitting, after years of adamant denials, that she had plagiarized a lullaby melody.

Then there was the hapless man who, after suffering a stroke, confessed he’d killed his neighbor thirty years earlier. The only problem was that he didn’t end up dying. After he was released from hospital he went straight to jail.

The article, particularly the story of the man who didn’t die, got me thinking. I was intrigued by that overwhelming desire to share your darkest secret.  That’s when I came up with the idea of a man who feels such a powerful desire to share a secret that he sits down and writes a letter to his wife, to be opened in the event of his death. It’s a deathbed confession, except he’s not dead.

Well, Liane, now no one who has read The Husband’s Secret will ever write a death bed confession if they’re alive and healthy…

I also read What Alice Forgot. Could not put that book down, either. I ate too much chocolate while reading it. A woman loses ten years of her memory when she falls off her bike at the gym and hits her head.  When she wakes up, she’s still in love with her husband, but they’re separated and headed for divorce and the kids are falling apart.

What a gripping plot.  I loved all the real life marriage issues that you hit on, too. What was the trigger for this plot line?

Thank you! You probably ate too much chocolate because of Alice’s obsession with it. My inspiration for What Alice Forgot was my obsession with time travel.

I’d always been intrigued by the idea of going forward in time and meeting my future self. What would I think of the person I’d become? Would I like her? Would I be shocked?

I wanted to write something about this concept, but I always got tangled up in the logistics (not to mention the believability) of time travel.  That’s when I read a story about a woman in the UK who had lost a few decades of her memory and didn’t recognize her own children or anything about her current life.

It was like she was a teenager again.

I realized that memory loss was like a form of time travel. So I came up with the idea of a woman who loses ten years of her memory after an accident at the gym. She thinks she’s 29, blissfully in love with her husband and expecting her first baby. In fact, she’s 39, with three children, and she’s in the middle of a bitter divorce.

When I was reading this, as someone who has been married for over twenty years, I thought, it’s amazing what ten years can do to a marriage. There are many joys, and many struggles, that you cannot predict will come down the pike on your wedding day. 

So, tell us. How do you write your books? By outline? Do you sketch out characters first? Or, do you have a general idea of where you want to go and you sit down and bang it out? How many edits per book?

I tend to just come up with the premise and then take it from there. That makes it interesting because when I sit down at the computer each day I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it also makes it nerve-wracking because what if nothing happens?

As a result, I do tend to procrastinate by editing what I’ve already written, over and over, rather than taking the story forward.

Besides the procrastination, what does a typical day look like for you? When do you write?

I have a five year old son and a three year old daughter. My daughter has just started preschool two days a week, so I fit writing in between drop-off and pick-up, hanging the washing on the line, talking to Mum while I empty the dishwasher etc.

Up until this year I could only write when I had a babysitter to take care of the children. She would come for 3 or 4 hour sessions and I would close my office door and write. This is the first year I’ve had two child-free days and I blissfully assumed I’d be SO productive in the silent house. In actual fact, I work much harder when I know there is someone there to observe me wandering out of my office for yet another cup of tea.

A friend suggested I hire the children’s nanny even when they’re not there. She could sit outside my office like a sentry. I’m seriously considering it.

Liane, I have three kids, they’re 16, 16, and 20 now, but the only time I found to write when they were younger was from ten at night until two in the morning, then I’d be up about 7:30 the next day. Exhausting.  I get the challenges you have.

I put some of the issues/sadnesses/challenges in my own life in my books now and then. I might downplay or exaggerate them, or I might just take the emotion I felt and give it to a character. Do you do that, too? Borrow from your own life for your books?

Absolutely. Any time something bad happens to me, I comfort myself with the thought that  at least it’s good writing material. 

Me, too. I think, hey, one more problem to give to my next character.

When you were a child, what did you want to be? What were your favorite books?

I think I knew from when I was quite young that I wanted to do something with writing. For most of my school years I was adamant that I would be a journalist. I’m still not entirely sure why that didn’t happen. Instead, I accidentally ended up in advertising and stayed there.

My favorite books as a child were the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton, the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S Lewis and the Mary Poppins books by P.L. Travers.

I still have my copies of the Narnia books. How I loved them. I think they are a huge reason I became a writer.  They set my imagination on fire.

Five things you want to do in the next twenty years?

Clear out my wardrobe. Cook a whole roast chicken like a grown-up.  Write a book from just ONE character’s point of view, so readers will stop getting cranky with me about having too many characters in my books. Learn how to stop reading my reviews. Travel again! (I haven’t left Australia since the children were born and I’m getting itchy feet.)

Oh yes, avoid all negative reviews, concentrate on the positive ones, and keep writing. Chin up, carry on, and all that. That’s what I do. Sometimes those reviews are brutal, and they sound so PERSONAL. 

I want to travel TO Australia, by the way. You want out, I want in.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new novel but I’m not sure what it’s about because I keep changing my mind. Also, I keep finding that other people have already written novels using my startlingly original ideas. So that’s upsetting

Well, shoot. That is upsetting! How come they’ve already used your original ideas that you’ve just thought of? The nerve!!

Thanks so much for the interview, Liane.

Visit Liane at her website: http://www.lianemoriarty.com/