Save

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

AAA

When she was a child, Jaclyn Moriarty resolved that her greatest quality must surely be listening.

“I was very shy and extremely quiet and I felt like I didn’t have anything to say to the world,” the author says, sipping a warm drink outside a chocolate shop and cafe, not far from where she grew up in Waitara in Sydney’s north shore. “So I just listened to everybody else.”

This personality trait was backed further by a school activity requiring 13-year-old Moriarty’s classmates to write something nice about each other in a notebook shared in class. They’d drawn the same conclusion.

Author Jaclyn Moriarty’s new book took nearly two decades to write.Steve Brown

“Next to my name it was, ‘Good listener. Good listener. Good listener’,” she says. “So, that was what I was. I did all my expressing in writing rather than through speaking.”

A softly spoken but chatty person, Moriarty’s arrival at the cafe, bearing a backpack, water bottle, sunglasses and hat, comes after a 15-minute walk from her Neutral Bay home.

Now a bestselling and award-winning author of novels for young adults and adults, including the Ashbury/Brookfield series, the Colours of Madeleine trilogy and the Kingdoms and Empires series, the self-confessed chocolate-lover resumes the cafe seat where she spent hours writing her new novel for adults, Time Travel for Beginners.

Writing has been Moriarty’s passion since childhood. From a young age, she and her five siblings were commissioned by her late father to write stories which he read with keen interest. He also paid $1.50 for every exercise book filled with writing.

Moriarty does recall the day, perhaps inspired by the “charisma and confidence” of her older sister Liane - now the bestselling author of Big Little Lies, The Husband’s Secret, Nine Perfect Strangers and more - she inexplicably changed tack and turned up the volume.

“It was in Year 11 when I had to give a speech,” she says. “I’d written it, interesting topic, one joke, done.

Older sister Liane Moriarty (second from left), with Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and producer Bruna Papandrea at the after-party of HBO’s Big Little Lies in Hollywood in 2017.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

“But suddenly, the night before, I felt this sort of surge, like a kind of ruthlessness or madness even.”

Discarding the original, she wrote a new speech, this time brimming with outlandish and wild ideas and packed to the gills with humour. The next day, to a room of expectant faces, her words conjured waves of laughter and applause. Filled with a new sense of exhilaration, Moriarty was sold.

“I know that that was when I found my voice,” she says. “It was a huge success. I have no idea what I was saying. I just know that it was insane and the teacher gave me 19 out of 20 for it.

“And I thought, ‘See, I can be myself and also do well’.”

Moriarty spent several years working in law, but her passion for writing, and becoming a full-time author, has inspired almost 20 books, many bestsellers. She has received awards ranging from the Queensland Literary Awards’ Children’s Book Award to three Ethel Turner Young People’s Literature prizes from the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Jaclyn Moriarty’s new novel introduces readers to the Time Travel Agency where customers can travel to wherever they want in the past.Wendy McDougall

Time Travel For Beginners, she says, took 20 years to write. Not because she dawdled but because it was developed and written while writing other books (Kingdoms and Empires fans can expect the new book, Astrid and the Accidental Slip Between Worlds, in November). She also immersed herself in “ridiculous amounts” of historical non-fiction to see what her book’s time-travellers witness in their travels.

Set in Sydney, Time Travel For Beginners centres on characters Anna, Jade and Teddy, each searching for answers in complicated lives, a quest that brings them to a nondescript shop called the Time Travel Agency. Here, customers are offered travel to wherever they wish in the past without altering the future in any way.

Does meeting Charlotte Brontë walking on the moors sound interesting? Or seeing the construction of Stonehenge? Would revisiting their teenage self be intriguing? What moment in people’s lives would they travel to? And, how would it help them understand the present?

Time Travel For Beginners is about history but also how people grapple with regrets, the ways parenting affects lives and the importance of hope.

Are there places Moriarty would like to travel back to?

“I keep thinking I must prepare for that question,” she says, laughing. “It’s also funny because it’s partly a book about parenting regrets and I probably should have realised people will ask me if I have a regret as a parent.

“Of course, I’ve got regrets. Every parent has a regret because you’re always learning. Somehow, my son [Charlie] has worked out to be magnificent, wonderful, perfect young man.

Photo:

“But that’s because of him, not because of me. Really, the idea for the book came from when I was on a bus going through Neutral Bay and I saw a travel agency with a Time magazine billboard beside it. For one moment I honestly believed time travel had been discovered and here was a little shop offering people trips in time.

“I honestly felt exhilarated and excited and flabbergasted. Because, why wasn’t it in the news? And, just for a fraction of a second, I was intensely excited because I instantly wanted to go back in time to the 18th century or somewhere with horses and carriages.

“But then I looked back and saw it was just a billboard leaning against the travel agency. So, to cheer myself up, I said, ‘Okay, I’ll write a book about it’.”

Expanding the idea to travelling back to when relationships went wrong or mistakes were made as a parent, she explored the nature of remorse, guilt and grief and the sometimes unreliable qualities of memory.

“Regret is designed to prevent you making mistakes again,” Moriarty says. “So it’s meant to be there. The trouble is, it gets jammed in a loop. It becomes a self-destructive rather than helpful system.

“We’re meant to have some level of regret, but I have found that if you say, OK, that was a mistake, the reason I did it incorrectly was because of this and I forgive myself, and now we move on.”

Time Travel for Beginners, full of humour and heartfelt explorations of being human, also brings our conversation to Moriarty’s own parents. Their gift, she says, was their ability to always be delighted by her and her siblings

“Mum is extraordinary, a great storyteller,” she says. “We had her classic books on the shelves and she took us to the library every week at Hornsby Library, one of the great joys and pleasures of my life.

“And my dad. If I could go into the time travel agency, I’d like to go back to tell my dad, ‘You’re extraordinary’. He knew I loved him, but I don’t think I ever said, ‘You’re extraordinary, you’re amazing.’

“He came from a pretty difficult working-class background, became an aerial photographer and surveyor, and he made that happen just by incredible strength and determination to make a dream come true.

“He wanted that for us too. He just kept saying, ‘Find a way to make money from the thing you love. Find what you love and go from there’.”

Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty is published by Ultimo ($35).