Everyone is Lying to You
A sneak peek of the new novel from bestselling author Jo Piazza ...
Hi
Readers!I’m jumping into your inboxes today with an unscheduled posting to share something really exciting - and sort of out of the ordinary for this newsletter.
(Do you see
’ name on the cover? If you weren’t already sold on the importance of this book - Tia’s endorsement speaks volumes!)Let me explain … if you’ve been reading here a while, you’ve probably noticed my sharing of
’s work - whether it’s her popular podcast, Under the Influence, or her own Substack . As you might’ve guessed, Jo writes about a lot of things. She happens to be a former celebrity journalist for the New York Post among other prominent publications, and she holds a master’s degree in religious studies from Penn - in addition to a being a bestselling novelist.Jo and I first connected a few years ago when I first started listening to her podcast, where she artfully pulls back the curtain on mom influencers. As someone who had babies during the explosive growth in online mom influencers and “content creators,” I was riveted by hearing what happens behind the scenes of those gauzy photos (the same ones that tended to torture me when I was 27, newly married, struggling to breastfeed, finishing seminary, and a brand-new mom in a 1 bedroom cramped apartment in a Bay Area suburb).
While I’m now a Lutheran pastor who writes about Christian Nationalism and masculinity in the Midwest, and Jo continues to produce a dizzying amount of content in the form of books, podcasts, and TV/media deals from her home base in Philly - our work overlaps in that we’re both very interested in a) the ways that our current media landscape manipulates the truth in order to further concentrate wealth; and b) the religious undertones of the media and online messaging about gender and parenting, and the way these brands use tactics that sometimes parallel cults - in order to further warp peoples’ perceptions of the world and draw us further and further away from solidarity and compassion for one another.
ICYMI, here’s my previous conversation with Jo from her Substack - and you can also click inside that newsletter for a link to my appearance on her podcast. And if you turn over your copy of my new book, Disciples of White Jesus, you can see Jo’s endorsement on the back cover!
All that to say - I’m so excited to share with you today an exclusive, pre-release excerpt from Jo’s new novel, which comes out July 15! Jo shared this excerpt just for I’m Listening readers. I’ve already pre-ordered, and I actually think it not only makes a great late summer read, but it’s also a really important companion to Disciples of White Jesus. One thing I keep saying in speeches and forums I participate in, is that the flip side to this violent masculinity, hatred, and despair for men and boys that I write about in my book - is the tradwife, fundamentalist, retrograde femininity glorified by mom influencers on places like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram (and on TV: anyone seen Secret Lives of Mormon Lives? Yes - there’s some pushback there, but also - the messaging is loud and clear that women’s preeminent value is as conventionally attractive wives and mothers).
It’s important to understand how both of these movements around strict gender roles (borne in fundamentalist religious ideas, in this case, fundamentalist Christianity) need one another to continue to put down roots in America and control money, politics and policy. We see the very real implications of these ideas today, with the passage of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” and Catholic convert and pro-natalist VP J.D. Vance casting the deciding vote for the bill, which guts Medicaid and assistance for the poor, while enhancing the wealth of the richest Americans and their businesses.
So without further ado, enjoy this excerpt of Everyone is Lying to You - and then you can PRE-ORDER here (here’s a non-Amazon option). I also of course recommend Jo’s fun and compelling newsletter:
.Everyone is Lying to You, an exclusive excerpt:
There’s a right way to be authentic and a wrong way to be authentic. It’s the first thing you learn when you start doing the kind of work I do. But also, the first thing you learn when you marry the kind of man I’ve married. I’m supposed to appear a certain way to certain people. I’m supposed to speak the right words in the right tones. Sometimes I’m not supposed to speak at all. I’m almost always performing, and I have gotten very good at it.
The right way to be “authentic” online is to give away bits and pieces of yourself that seem real, to gently mock yourself, to reveal tiny imperfections, but never big ones. Talk about your stress as a mom, but never your depression (you’ll lose followers real fast). Show a dirty dish, but not an entire messy countertop. Look melancholy at times, but do not cry. Never let them see you cry.
Thursday is media day for us. It’s the day when we create almost all my content for the next week. Does that shock you? That I’m not snapping and filming and posting every second of every day in real time? That what you see isn’t exactly my real life?
My audience is a hungry beast. It wants more, needs more. We need to produce photos, videos, captions, content, content, content, to keep the views, to keep the sponsors, to keep the money coming in. We aren’t just on Instagram. We’re on YouTube, TikTok, Discord, Pinterest, Telegram, and a few other places I have never even heard of but my content coordinator says will be the next big thing.
So Thursdays! Media day!
My kids hate Thursdays.
The big kids are so over all of this, except for Bella. My 8‑year‑old daughter loves performing in a way that is both adorable and slightly creepy. Alice, my oldest, hates it and begs me to keep her out of everything. I do what I can. Despite what many of my haters think, I do have boundaries when it comes to my children. This is what happens on Thursdays: First we shoot a “get ready with me” reel. This is our most lucrative asset of the week. It includes seven sponsored products that you might not even notice but which pay upward of $25,000 just to be mentioned in my daily routine. I get the kids up in the morning like I usually do. Kiki helps. She’s our nanny. You’ll never, ever see her on the socials, and Gray hates her and hates that she is here. He has told me over and over again that his mom raised him and his seven siblings without any help, so why can’t I do it? He needs me to know that my lack of self‑reliance is a moral failing.
Well, his mom wasn’t supporting their whole family and keeping a farm solvent while his dad flew all over the place desperately trying to find the next big investment to make him rich. So Kiki is here, and she is my absolute savior and, if I’m being honest, my closest friend. I’m not even sure if she likes me, but I love her.
Kiki and I get the kids up and we get them fed. If Gray’s around he avoids this part of the morning. He’s usually up with the sun, but not because that’s what farmers do. We have a staff for that. He’s working out in the gym down by the barn. He’s been on an ultramarathon kick that consumes most of his waking hours outside of work. He only joins us at breakfast when I tell him he absolutely has to be in the pictures because at the end of the day he knows where his bread is buttered right now. I would never say it out loud. There would be consequences for saying it out loud, but we both know the truth. On media days we also have Stacy, a professional photographer from the city, come out. She used to be a photojournalist for the newspaper but now she exclusively does influencers. She just bought a Tesla. Stacy is killing it.
I try to shoot all the things involving the littles as soon as I get them up and fed, because they have about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, of performing for the cameras before they get pissy and moody and I can no longer get anything good out of them. Stacy is great with camera angles and blending in with the wallpaper, but it’s still a lot of work for the kids.
Stacy arrives while we eat, and we take a couple of shots of me preparing breakfast. It’s mostly made well before we start shooting, but there is always some dough I can pop in the oven. Yes, I still make my own sourdough. It’s easy and pretty, and people love it. And yes, I enjoy doing it. I’m a baker. It’s all I ever wanted to be, and the moments when I get to create food from simple ingredients, the way I used to when I thought that doing that would be my entire life, are some of the happiest moments of my days.
I guzzle coffee and then promote the non‑caffeinated coffee alternative we have a low‑six‑figure brand deal with. I’ll caption it: I am not a coffee drinker, but I crave my morning pick‑me‑up ritual. I sip my DiRT/Wooter in the mornings. Don’t worry, you fasters. It’s totally compatible with intermittent fasting. It gives me the boost I need, and the benefits from superfood mushrooms deliver immune support and focus. I like to dress it up with vanilla Lively Proteins collagen for my skin.
After all the kids are fed, they crawl back into bed, and we shoot me re‑waking them up in their matching pajamas. It’s also #sponsored, of course. One of our first big brands to sign on was an organic linen sheet company, and the matching pajamas are my own brand that comes in seven different prints and is sold on my website.
Then we take a video of me getting them out the door and into the cabin that we use as a schoolhouse. We have a teacher who comes in to oversee the homeschooling, even though I genuinely try to be as involved as I can, especially with science and math since they were my favorite subjects when I was in school. You’ll never see the teacher, though. I let people assume I do it. The audience likes that. They seem to appreciate self‑reliance in a mother as much as my husband. Then, with the baby in tow, we shoot some images in the barn with the animals. I strap him to my chest even though he hates it and wants to walk. The carrier is getting tight. For as much as my followers and the brands I work with love babies and big round pregnant bellies, I can’t have another one. I just can’t do it.
We gather eggs from the chickens, pet the lambs, say hello to Tripod (who is honestly a massive dingus of a goat, and I would get rid of him if he wasn’t such a fan favorite . . . if he had four legs he would definitely head‑butt me in the ass). We pose for cow‑milking pictures, but we have people and machinery to do the actual milking. I’ve attempted to breastfeed six babies (with a 50 percent success rate despite what you may have seen of me feeding the twins, one dangling off each boob), and getting milk out of a nipple is difficult no matter who or what is doing the lactating.
The big kids start school. The baby goes with Kiki. I head back inside and do some reels of me getting my face on for the day with the organic eco‑friendly makeup brand that’s a new sponsor, and doing my hair with the Dyson Airwrap and raw sugar multi‑miracle hair mist.
We shoot some stills and videos out in the schoolhouse. I change outfits seven times to make sure I have something different on for every video. The kids wear monochromatic linens every single day. We sell them in our online shop so it’s good promo, but also it makes it hard for the audience to tell what they are wearing and whether they have actually changed clothes, since it’s impossible to get them to change their outfits seven times on Thursdays.
Some commenters have gotten irritated with the “sad beige” way that I dress my kids, but it’s really about convenience, and other people love it. The clothes sell out every time we have a new drop. For some reason my audience gets jazzed about watching me make beds and hang laundry, so we always shoot a couple of those videos. In reality we have a heavy‑duty industrial‑sized washer and dryer, and I don’t hang the family sheets on a line like Ma Ingalls. They’d get dusty and filthy in five minutes with all the dirt and wind around here, but it works for the socials. We put those videos in slo‑mo with a quote over them about loving life and living simply and getting back to our roots. The engagement goes bananas.
We always make sure to shoot Gray off in the fields somewhere, on the tractor, riding his horse. The audience seems to get off on the fact that they don’t know that much about Gray, that he’s a cipher of a cowboy. I think it makes it easier to imprint their own fantasies on my husband, which is fine with me. They don’t need to know the truth about him or about us.
Sometimes, late at night or early in the morning when I can’t sleep, I open my own social media accounts and wonder what I would think of myself if I were an outsider looking in. Would I be intrigued? Angry? Calmed? Irritated? Would I be a fan or a hater, because I have both and they’re equally ravenous for my content. My account has grown exponentially in just a few years. There’s an intense hunger for content like mine, for #Homesteading and #PrairieLife, for #BackToYourRoots and #TraditionalLiving. I’ve leaned into it, and there is no going back.
The audience loves looking through the fun‑house mirror I have so meticulously created on my social media.
I wonder what people would think of the hashtag #MyPersonalHell.
Here is what we don’t take pictures and videos of:
The kids and I always eating dinner alone because Gray gets triggered by how noisy and chaotic it is at mealtimes.
Me feeding each of the kids a different meal because none of them eat the same thing, even though we always photograph one wholesome hearty stew, soup, or hunk of meat.
Our caregivers, house cleaners, or the farm staff. To our audience we do it all ourselves.
We don’t show Gray and me sleeping in separate bedrooms or the knock‑down‑the‑walls fights we’ve been having lately.
You’ll never see my bruises.
No one ever sees me cry or hears me scream.
Hope you all enjoyed that; I know I’m dying to read the whole thing!
Thanks for reading,
Angela
P.S. …
A Few Notes:
First, a huge THANK YOU to all subscribers. I get a little email notification every time someone signs up, and every time I get one, I feel joyful and honored that you want to spend part of your day with this community. I mean it when I say: “I’m listening,” to you as well, and please don’t hesitate to share with me your thoughts + ideas for what you’d like to read in this space.
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