Eventually, she says, 'I started to look for things I actually loved doing.'īut making the conscious decision to move back to Kansas following the sale of her first book, 2003's 'The Center of Everything,' was both practical and about what she really wanted.

She was pre-med for a while, trying to ignore the part of her that wanted to write because she didn’t think writing was a practical occupation. 'I loved the rolling green hills of the Flint Hills. Moriarty came to Kansas as a 17-year-old to study social work at the University of Kansas and says she loved the area as soon as she saw it. We know we're not New York, we know we're not California.' 'I would make an argument that the Midwest is in some ways less provincial because we know we're the Midwest,' Moriarty says. She's a transplant to the state who has lived all over the country. Mills' provincialism because we shared a love of theater,'' Moriarty says.īecause that's the only information Moriarty had, she stayed true to it, making Cora Carlisle a fan of the arts, the theater in particular.Īs for the chaperone's provincialism? Moriarty made the character a 36-year-old Wichita housewife who might have been more provincial than Brooks, but her desire to be less so is what spurs her to volunteer to spend the summer in New York with a precocious and irreverent teenage girl.Īnd Moriarty doesn't think Kansans are especially provincial. 'The only lines in Louise's memoirs for the entire summer they spent together when Louise was 15 was: 'I tolerated Ms. Information about the real chaperone has been lost to history. Moriarty says she changed the real woman’s name in the novel to allow herself leeway in creating a character and her movement within the plot, which was based on facts from Brooks' life. The real-life chaperone was named Alice Mills.

The chaperone liane moriarty