Fans of Big Little Lies have long insisted they know exactly where the show's sinister school-gate drama unfolds: Avalon Beach, an hour north of Sydney. Author Liane Moriarty says they're close but not quite right — the fictional Pirriwee Peninsula isn't based on any single beach, though she confirms the two giant pines that surfers climb to check the swell really do exist at Avalon. Her new sequel, Big Little Truths, returns to that same coastal community a decade on, with the characters now wrangling teenagers alongside fresh intrigue.
Moriarty sets her books in Sydney for a simple reason: she says she remembers people far better than places, so writing about her home city means she can just look out the window. Yet her invented locations take on lives of their own. When her novel The Last Anniversary conjured up a fictional island on the Hawkesbury River — inspired by a real visit to Ganga Island — readers actually contacted Sydney's tourism board asking how to reach Scribbly Gum Island. It didn't exist.
The appeal, she says, is what she calls the "insular peninsula": beachside communities so desirable that people who work locally joke about never leaving. They also pack together the very wealthy and those scraping by without water views, all thrown together at the school gate — perfect ground for stories about polished lives hiding darker realities. When HBO adapted Big Little Lies, it moved the action to Monterey, California, and gave everyone considerably bigger houses. Moriarty was fine with the change — she only let one character, Celeste, have the dream home — and the Californian setting didn't alter the sequel at all. Curiously, her other book Nine Perfect Strangers was set in California but filmed in Byron Bay, and sharp-eared viewers can spot the Australian birdlife in the background.
For travellers, the interview doubles as a genuinely useful Sydney guide. Moriarty's picks: the Royal Botanic Garden by the harbour, where each January a cinema screen rises out of the water for open-air screenings with a cocktail in hand; the northern beaches, including Balmoral Beach closer to the city; and coffee in Kirribilli, with Opera House views — she notes Australians travel abroad mostly to complain about foreign coffee. She stayed at the Shangri-La Sydney for its harbour views, and names the Golden Door spa in Sydney's north, which she visited while researching Nine Perfect Strangers (no hallucinogens on offer, unlike in the book). When she needs to escape Sydney to write, she heads to Hobart, Tasmania — peaceful, with a small writing community, and the setting for part of her novel Here One Moment.
It's a story for anyone whose reading list drives their travel plans — the overlap between book-lovers and beach-hunters is real, and Sydney's northern beaches deliver both. Just don't expect to find the Pirriwee Peninsula on a map.
