Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza

I saw a recommendation for this a few months ago, but it's new and I didn't get it from my library until now. In the meantime, I read Piazza's The Sicilian Inheritance and didn't like it that much, so I wasn't sure how I would feel about this one. Fortunately, I thought this was much better.

It advertises as Gone Girl with tradwives, and... it does some cool inversion with that premise. Our narrator Lizzie is a magazine editor who lived in New York with her magazine writer husband until husband lost his job and they had to flee to the Philly suburbs, where he is pretending to write a novel. So they are very clearly a take on Nick and Amy, who have a very similar backstory of being failed NYC magazine people, but the book's first twist is that Lizzie and Philip have a solid marriage. It's not perfect, there are anxieties and conflicts that the book is very interested in, but Piazza sets you up to expect them to be the gone girl couple and then gives you a shocking normalcy. No, it is instead Lizzie's college roommate Bex, who lives on a farm with her husband and six children streaming tiktoks of chickens and homeschooling and #farmlife, who pulls a gone girl on us, a twisty tale of lies and misdirection and violence that ultimately ends up with a very Amy-like pseudofeminist girlboss victory.

I really liked the way the death of magazines here talks back to Gone Girl and speaks to a different, more continuous kind of attention economy. In place of the metronomic daily 10 o'clock news updates about the missing woman, there is the constant algorithmic thrum of tiktoks, complicated by the fact that as Piazza points out several times, influencer videos are typically filmed in batches and released to look timely. The takeover of our attention, so much more invasive than in 2009, is a deliberate campaign of time manipulation. Everyone is lying to you.

Piazza does a very good job of capturing the unreality of the influencer life style and butting it up against the fact that influencers still have human realities to navigate. I love the way she uses the setting of an influencer conference to establish this contrast, with the constant pressure to maintain an image set up against a cadre of savvy women who know all the tricks and aren't fooled. Cleverly, the conference hotel has its own agenda and is trying to craft and sell its own kind of luxurious unreality.

What Piazza's storytelling still lacks is a graceful way to provide exposition. The big reveal felt so awkward it left me cold. She is a gifted narrator of social details, but not a great mystery writer either here or in The Sicilian Inheritance . In Gone Girl, Amy's diary is functional, it's part of her plan, so it's not just a big infodump... and anyway, it's unreliable, so youhave to read against the diary account. The Bex exposition sections of this book don't have any of that exterior motivation. They solely exist because somehow Piazza needs to explain what happened and this is the best she has come up with. It's a shame, because with slightly better packaging this would have been an incredibly memorable story.