I want you to close your eyes for a second. Unless
you're driving. Right, yeah, if you're driving,
please keep them on the road. But for everyone
else, I want you to picture this. You are sitting
in the single most boring place on the face of
the earth. You are on a plane. Specifically,
you are stuck on the tarmac. Oh, the absolute
purgatory of modern travel. Exactly. The air
is stale. Your knees are just jammed into the
seat in front of you. Your phone battery is hovering
at like 12%. And you're just waiting for the
misery of a long -haul flight to actually begin.
Yeah. You're doom -scrolling. You're desperate
for a distraction. And then the atmosphere just
shifts. The social contract breaks. A woman stands
up two rows ahead of you, and she isn't heading
to the bathroom. She starts walking down the
aisle very slowly. Very deliberately. It's so
creepy. It really is. She stops at a row, points
a finger right at a passenger, and tells him
exactly how they're going to die and when. And
not just a vague, you know, you will die someday
kind of thing. Specifics, cause of death, age.
Then she moves to the next person, then the next.
And then she stops, turns, and points at you.
It is a terrifying visualization. And it's the
exact premise that kicks off the book we are
diving into today. Today we're doing a deep dive
into Here One Moment by Leanne Moriarty. Now,
if you've been anywhere near a bookshelf in the
last decade, you know Moriarty. Little Lies,
Nine Perfect Strangers. She is the undisputed
heavyweight champion of the domestic thriller.
She really is. She certainly knows how to ruin
a perfectly good dinner party, or in this case,
a domestic flight. But here's the thing. As I
was prepping for this, looking through the stack
of research you pulled, I realized something.
Yeah. This book, which came out back in September
2024, it initially sells itself as this spooky,
almost supernatural mystery. You have a death
lady on a flight. But as we dig into the sources,
specifically the critical reception and the author's
own research notes, we find that this isn't really
a ghost story at all. No, it's not. It creates
that illusion perfectly, but underneath, it's
something much sharper. It feels more like a
controlled experiment on human nature. That is
the perfect way to frame it. It's a study on
probability, on the way our brains process data,
and how we handle the knowledge of our own mortality.
Right. It asks a question that's honestly more
mathematical than magical. Right. Which is, if
you strip away the illusion of control, do people
break? And that's our mission for today's deep
dive. We are going to look past the spooky hook
and see what this book is really saying about
fate and data. Because the premise terrified
me, but the analysis you've got lined up makes
me think there is a lot more math involved than
I expected. There is always more math than you
expect. Yeah. But trust me, in this context,
the math is actually the scary part. Well, let's
not get ahead of ourselves. Let's set the scene
properly. Let's unpack that flight. Sure. The
book opens on a route from Hobart, Tasmania to
Sydney, a standard, totally boring domestic route.
And that mundane... setting is crucial right
horror always hits harder when it disrupts something
totally boring enter the woman her name is cherry
and readers actually learn that pretty early
on around page 92 according to the notes so we
aren't dealing with some nameless monster here
she's a person right and the source material
notes something crucial about her background
immediately her mother was a psychic medium so
right out of the gate moriarty is planting a
seed of doubt is this ability Is it real magic?
Or is this just a learned behavior from growing
up in that specific environment? And she walks
down the aisle pointing at people without permission.
Can we just talk about the violation? Oh, it's
massive. You're stuck in a metal tube. You can't
leave. And someone is screaming your expiration
date at you. It is an extreme violation of social
norms. And she gives them the cause of death
and their age. And then she drops this line that
the sources highlight over and over. She says,
fate won't be fought. Fate won't be fought. I
mean, that is a conversation stopper. It creates
immediate psychological chaos. Now, obviously,
the plane eventually lands. And in a normal world,
the passengers would get off, collect their bags,
and tell their friends about the crazy lady in
C -12B. They'd laugh it off. That's exactly what
I would do. I'd be tweeting about it before I
even left the airport. But then the other shoe
drops. The catalyst. The sources tell us that
in the aftermath, three of the passengers actually
die. And they don't just die of random, unrelated
causes. No. They die in strangely odd ways that
perfectly match the predictions Cherry made on
the plane. Okay, that is where the panic sets
in. If nothing happened, it's a funny anecdote.
But once you have three data points that match
the prediction, it stops being a story and starts
looking like a pattern. Exactly. And this is
where the sociological experiment really begins.
The remaining passengers are thrust into absolute
panic. They form a Facebook group because, of
course, they do to obsess over the deaf lady.
Naturally. And we start to see these different
archetypes of human behavior emerging. Oh, absolutely.
The summary mentions that the central conflict
becomes how these people change their lives.
You've got some who just accept it, right? The
fatalists. Yeah, the ones who say, well, the
spreadsheet says I die at 45, so I might as well
stop worrying. And then you have the ones who
try to cheat death, which, good luck with that.
That is the classic self -fulfilling prophecy
setup. The sources discuss this tension deeply.
Are these people dying because she predicted
it? Or did she predict it because she could see
the trajectory they were already on? Right. Like
if you tell someone they are going to die in
a car crash, maybe they get so anxious behind
the wheel that they actually cause the crash.
It completely messes with your head. So where
does an idea like this even come from? Did Leanne
Moriarty have a brush with the occult? Actually,
no. She had a brush with something much more
common. Extreme boredom. Really? Boredom? Yeah.
The ordnance story here is incredibly relatable.
Moriarty was waiting for a flight out of Hobart.
just like the characters in the book. And this
is a nightmare for a writer. She realized she
didn't have a book to read. No book. That is
tragic. I panic if I don't have three podcasts
downloaded just for a grocery run. Exactly. So
she was stuck at the gate with nothing to do.
So she did what anyone would do. She started
people watching. She looked around the gate area
at all these strangers and she had this sudden
epiphany. She realized that eventually every
single person in that room would die. I mean,
true, but a little dark for a Tuesday afternoon
at the airport. It is dark, but it's also just
factual. She realized that one day, the data
on everyone's death, the specific age, the specific
cause, would be a matter of public record. It
would literally be a fact on a death certificate
somewhere. Okay, when you put it that way, it's
less about magic and more about bureaucracy.
Precisely. The what if that sparked the novel
wasn't imagine if I could see the future. It
was simply imagine if that information, which
will exist one day, was available right now.
That is a really interesting way to frame it.
It's not predicting the unknown. It's accessing
the inevitable. Yes. And we have to connect this
to the bigger picture of Moriarty's life at the
time, because the sources highlight that this
wasn't just a random thriller idea she pulled
out of a hat. She had been thinking about mortality
quite a bit. Oh, what was going on? Well, she
and her sister had both been dealing with breast
cancer. Oh, wow. Yeah. And her father had passed
away a few years prior. So she was really already
in that headspace. She was. She mentioned in
interviews that she and her friends were talking
about illness and deaths constantly. It was just
the backdrop of her life at that point. So here
one moment comes from a place of genuine reflection
on how fragile we are, not just an attempt to
write a scary plot to sell books. That grounds
the spookiness in something very real. It's that
middle of the night fear we all have. But speaking
of real versus spooky, let's pivot to the thing
you teased earlier, the math. Yes, the skepticism.
Because you mentioned a review from the Skeptical
Inquirer that really changed how you looked at
the book. This is where it gets fascinating for
me. The review was written by Adrienne Hill.
Now, Hill is a high school math teacher and a
skeptic. So she went into this book very wary.
She actually said she almost didn't finish it
because she thought it was endorsing psychic
phenomena. I can totally see that. If you're
a science -minded person. Reading a book that
seems to say, yes, magic is real, might be incredibly
annoying. Exactly. But the twist, at least thematically,
is that the book shifts. Hill noted that in the
second half, the narrative moves heavily into
discussions of statistics and common fallacies.
So the Death Lady might not be magic. She might
just be very observant. The book explores the
concept of cold reading. Moriarty actually used
a book called Psychic Blues. by Mark Edward for
her research. It looks at how psychics use observation,
probability, and broad statements to convince
people they know things. Let's unpack cold reading
for a second. This is like when someone says,
I sense you've had a difficult time with a loved
one recently. And you go, oh my God, yes. Right.
But statistically, almost everyone has had a
difficult time with a loved one recently. It's
called a Barnum statement. Something that feels
personal but actually applies to everyone? So
Sherry, the character on the plane, might just
be really good at guessing based on actuarial
data. Like looking at someone and thinking, okay,
middle -aged man, high stress, clutching his
chest, likely a heart attack. That is the implication
the Skeptical Review highlights. It turns out
the Death Lady might be using observation and
math rather than magic. It raises the question,
if you predict enough things based on statistical
likelihood, Eventually, you will be right. And
the human brain is wired to remember the hits
and forget the misses. Confirmation bias. Exactly.
If she points at 50 people and gets three right,
those three become legends. The 47 she got wrong,
people just forget them. That is almost scarier
because it implies that we are walking billboards
for our own health issues. It suggests we are
essentially walking data points. But there's
another layer the skeptical inquirer praised,
and that is the mental health aspect. The review
points out that Moriarty does a very accurate
job depicting specific conditions. Yeah, I saw
mentions of smiling depression. That's a term
we're hearing a lot more often lately. It is.
It's that high -functioning depression where
someone appears perfectly happy, productive,
and put together on the outside while suffering
intensely internally. The source notes that this
along with obsessive compulsive disorder, or
OCD, is portrayed with a lot of care. How does
OCD tie into the psychic prediction stuff? I
mean, I have an idea, but... Well, think about
what OCD often involves. It could be a desperate
need for certainty or control. Intrusive thoughts
about bad things happening. Right. Now imagine
you have that condition and someone tells you
you will die on this exact date. Yeah. That is
going to spiral you completely. The book details
treatments for OCD and explores how incredibly
harmful it can be to believe in a deterministic
fate. So the villain isn't just the spooky prediction.
The real villain is the belief that you have
no choice. Precisely. It connects the thriller
aspect to an educational one. It shows the psychological
harm of believing that fate is locked in. It's
not just a plot device. It's a look at how dangerous
that loss of agency can be for the human mind.
That makes the book sound pretty heavy. And I
know Moriarty is known for balancing heavy things
with wit. I mean, Big Little Lies was funny despite
being about murder and domestic abuse. But did
the critics think she pulled it off this time?
I know her track record is usually spotless,
but was this one universally loved? It was definitely
more of a mixed bag this time around. The consensus
wasn't nearly as unified as it was for her earlier
hits. Who didn't like it? Let's hear the bad
news first. Well, The Guardian was quite harsh.
The reviewer, Adele Dumont, called the plot far
-fetched. I mean, to be fair, a psychic pointing
at people on a plane is far -fetched. True, but
her criticism went deeper than just the premise.
She called the book disappointingly orderly.
Orderly. That's an odd critique for a thriller.
Right. She felt that despite all these heavy
themes we just discussed, domestic violence,
self -harm, sex, the reader is never really unsettled.
She actually described the ending as beige and
paint by numbers. Ouch. Beige is a rough insult
for a thriller. You want neon red or pitch black.
You do not want beige. The New York Times had
a pretty similar take. Leah Greenblatt felt it
missed the tug and wallop of a taut thriller.
She described it as feeling like a work in progress
that was still searching for its final form.
So some critics felt it was a bit half -baked.
Or maybe that it was just trying to do too many
things at once, like be a thriller, be a math
lesson, be a character study. That seems to be
the friction point. for the negative reviews.
But surely there were fans. Oh, certainly. The
Washington Post had a much more positive take.
Stephanie Mary wrote that if you stop expecting
a pure puzzle, you find a lot of value in it.
She argued that the is she psychic or not question
becomes way less interesting than the actual
character study. So she liked watching the people
squirm. In a way, yes. She valued the book for
showing how people react to their ephemerality.
She said the book induces a sense of sanguinity.
Sanguinity. Okay, hold on. That is a $5 word.
Let's unpack that for a second. It's a great
word. It basically means a cheerful optimism
or peace, specifically in the face of difficult
situations. So the book about death made her
feel peaceful. Yes, because it forces you to
accept that we are temporary. And Hannah White
from the Colgate Maroon News backed this up completely.
She called the book bold. and recommended it
for anyone looking to look inward, even if she
admitted the structure could feel a bit overwhelming
at times. It sounds like if you went in expecting
a pure adrenaline thriller, you might be disappointed.
But if you wanted a character study on death,
you'd be happy. That seems to be the main divide
among readers. And just to place it in context,
Good Housekeeping ranked the Moriarty books in
March 2025. They put, here, one moment at number
three. Bronze medal. That's respectable. What
beat it? The Husband's Secret was number one.
And Big Little Lies was number two. It was sitting
right behind the absolute classics. That is very
good company to be in. Now, before we wrap up,
I have to ask about Leanne Moriarty herself.
We've talked about the book's stance on psychics,
that it leans heavily toward the math and skeptic
side. But what about the author? Does she believe
in this stuff? Because she wrote a whole book
about a woman who might be the real deal. She
actually identifies as a skeptic. But she has
a fantastic anecdote about visiting a psychic
for research that I think, perfectly encapsulates
the whole theme of the book. Oh, do tell. Did
she go undercover? She did. She went to a fortune
teller while researching. Here, one moment. She
wanted to see the technique up close, the cold
reading, the observation. So the psychic asked
her a bunch of questions, including what she
did for a living. And she said, I'm an international
bestseller who has sold 20 million books and
Nicole Kidman stars in my adaptations. She was
a bit more modest than that. She just said, I
write books. Okay. Vague. I like it. Give them
nothing. And the psychic, in a stroke of absolute
genius safety, looked at her and said, I think
you should do pretty well with that. Pretty well.
That is the understatement of the century. Exactly.
But think about it from the perspective of cold
reading. It was a prediction clearly based on
safe guesses. If someone tells you they write
books, telling them they'll do pretty well is
a flattering, safe bet. Right. If they fail,
they just think, oh. I haven't done well yet.
If they succeed, the psychic looks like a genius.
It's a win -win for the psychic. It really is.
And it only reinforced Moriarty's skepticism.
She said she would love to believe she really
wants that magic to be real, but her experiences
just haven't amazed her. It's all just vague
validation. It's funny because that real life
experience mirrors the book so perfectly. It's
all about the interpretation. If she had been
a struggling writer, she would have clung to
that prediction as a lifeline. She wouldn't walked
out of there thinking it's going to happen. The
spirit said so. But because she's already wildly
successful, she sees it as exactly what it is,
a safe guess. That is the core of the novel,
isn't it? It is not about the prediction. It's
about the reception. The death lady is just a
mirror reflecting the passenger's own fears and
insecurities back at them. The date she gives
them forced them to look at their lives right
now. It forces the question, am I living the
way I want to be living? So let's wrap this up.
We have a book that starts with a terrifying
supernatural premise on a plane. It takes us
through the absolute chaos of these passengers
trying to outrun their expiration dates. But
ultimately, it lands as a critique of how we
obsess over the future and a deconstruction of
the psychic industry itself. And a pretty detailed
look at mental health along the way. Is it a
thriller? Yes. But it's one that asks you to
bring your calculator and your therapist along
for the ride. I love that. OK, here's the question
I want to leave you with today. We talked about
the data of death, the fact that the date and
cause of your death will eventually be a matter
of public record. It is a file that, theoretically,
exists in the future. It is entirely inevitable.
So, if that file existed right now, and it was
sitting on a table right in front of you, would
you open it? That is the ultimate question. Ignorance
is bliss, or is knowledge power. If you knew
the date, would you live differently? Would you
quit your job tomorrow? Or would knowing the
end just ruin the middle? I think I might be
too curious to resist. I would open it, and then
I would probably spend the rest of my time trying
to prove the data wrong. Which ironically, as
we learned today, might be exactly what causes
it. See, I think I'm with the skeptics on this
one. I'd rather just enjoy the flight, have my
little bag of pretzels, and not know when we're
landing. Probably the safer choice for your blood
pressure. And that is why we make a good team.
You analyze the risk, and I just ignore it. Thanks
for listening to this deep dive into Here One
Moment. See you next time. Bye.