Reading (and learning from) Liane Moriarty

Have you read Liane Moriarty’s books? I haven’t read all her works yet but they’re on my TBR list. Currently I'm rereading "The Hypnotist's Love Story" and am marveling at her mastery of characterization, plot, pacing– things I never noticed the first time I read it. The first time I read it, I just enjoyed it as a good book that captured my attention and held my interest from beginning to end, but this time around it’s so much more than that for me. It makes me feel like I’m growing right alongside the characters. It’s a master class.
 
The story is revealed (‘revealed’ is a better word here than ‘told,’ because Liane Moriarty excels at showing rather than telling) through the points of view of two characters: the hypnotist (whose point of view is written in 3rd person past tense) and her fiancé’s stalker (written in 1st person present tense) and it's FASCINATING how Moriarty makes them both so real in different ways.
 
Because the stalker is in 1st person, we see the intrusive stuff she does but we also kind of understand her through her memories and experiences and motivations. We grow to sympathize with her and, eventually, to root for her. She's an extremely likeable unreliable narrator who in some places realizes that what she's doing is wrong and crosses boundaries, and (sometimes) she wishes she could just stop, and ... It's amazing, what Moriarty does with her.
 
And the hypnotist– Moriarty writes her in such close, deep 3rd person POV that we are inside her head in ways that are not always flattering but really show her struggles and realizations and flaws and basic decency.
 
We don’t ever get to see things through the fiancé’s point of view but Moriarty lets us get to know him just as deftly as the 2 POV characters, through their observations and memories and interactions with him.
 
What she does in this book seems extraordinary to me. We start reading and think we know these 3 characters, and at times they seem unlikable, but as she builds the story, it's like she's doing one of those forensic facial reconstructions, starting with just measurements that make a basic frame and then fleshing that in, layer by layer, until we see who they really are and where we were wrong about them, and all of a sudden we're rooting for every one of these fully-fleshed out PEOPLE we didn't even like a few chapters ago.
 
She's humanizing her characters, is what she's doing, chapter by chapter, scene by scene, and somehow she's letting them grow at the same time, so that we not only care about the people they are at the end, but we also have new compassion for who they were before.
 
Extraordinary.
 
Rereading this book has given me new writing goals. “Show, don’t tell,” always, of course … but now I want to learn to REVEAL. Gradually, subtly, deftly, as Moriarty does.
 
I feel like something is being born in my head. Painful, but with potential for good things, for my current work-in-progress and for everything I write in the future.
 


PS: Here's the URL for that book on Liane Moriarty's author website:
https://lianemoriarty.com.au/Book/the-hypnotists-love-story-us/