Everyone Is Lying To You, by Jo Piazza

The secret lives of tradwives

But her journalism training proved critical to her fiction work. “I approach all of my fiction as a journalist, honestly,” Piazza says. “I do intense amounts of research and interviews with primary sources. I really think that being a journalist and a nonfiction writer first has made me a lot better fiction writer.” Pursuing fiction was also more compatible with a life with children. She still researches and interviews extensively for her fiction works, but it’s easier to write fiction when caring for children and/or pregnant.

Her newest thriller, Everyone Is Lying To You, focuses on the world of tradwife (or traditional wife) influencers—women who prioritize raising children and the domestic sphere while broadcasting that life through social media. Piazza began covering the tradwife movement since the phenomenon popped up about two years ago. Many people thought it was a fad, Piazza explains, but the tradwife influencer sphere just keeps exploding with followers.

In the book, two former friends reconnect when tradwife influencer Rebecca invites stalled journalist Lizzie to an influencer conference for Rebecca’s big announcement. But when Rebecca disappears and her husband is brutally murdered, Lizzie has to find out who her old friend really is and what is going on in her life.

For the book, Piazza interviewed dozens of former and current tradwives; she also attended influencer conferences. While writing the book, she kept wanting to make it weirder than real life, like adding a character who faked an entire pregnancy using artificial intelligence, but then Piazza discovered a few months later that there was an influencer who did just that. Her editor was constantly in disbelief at some of the scenes in the book, but Piazza insisted, it’s all real.

Piazza believes tradwives are so popular because many women are burnt out trying to have it all. “We look at this tradwife imagery, and they just make it look easy. They strip all of the labor out of life and out of the work of running a home and a farm. We don’t see the labor.” But Piazza pointed out: “It’s all a lie.” For instance, there’s a sub-industry of people renting out spotless, luxurious kitchens so influencers can rent them to create their content.

Piazza finds these accounts to be dangerous because many of them lean very conservative and cultish, encouraging women to leave the workforce and give up their agency for a man. “I just wanted to puncture the fantasy, because these accounts are continuing to grow,” Piazza said. Instead of writing a nonfiction book, she chose to create a “juicy pulpy summer beach read” that people may pick up and find something unexpected. The book is “almost like a Trojan horse,” Piazza explained, in revealing the truth behind those seemingly picture-perfect social media accounts.