Women Talking: The Hustle Is Hard

Jo Piazza on motherhood, marriage and measuring success as an author

Jo Piazza is a force to be reckoned with. She is the author of nine books, despite being younger than me and the mother of three children. She is an award-winning podcaster and journalist. She writes the Substack Over the Influence.

I first discovered her through her novel co-written with her editor Christine Pride, We Are Not Like Them (I’m kind of obsessed with the trend of editors writing books with their authors. See also Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, authors of The Wife Between Us). Their novel seemed to be everywhere the summer of 2021, on every most-anticipated list, chosen by GMA Book Club. I devoured it, a novel that was escapist while not being afraid to tackle real life issues (like race). I also every now and then tuned in to her podcast Under the Influence. I loved her investigation into LulaRoe, her explorations of the costs of being on the internet and how it affected our experience of motherhood. And then, I discovered her podcast on women who have affairs, called She Wants More.

As someone who is deeply invested in how women can tune back into their desires, listening to these accounts of wives and mothers who put passion first, and sought out affairs for a myriad of reasons, was so fascinating. (She has also interviewed Molly Winter, author of the polyamory memoir More).

She’s doing the new book hustle right now, with a new novel out called The Sicilian Inheritance. (I usually just link to Bookshop.org, but due to strong sales, the book is backordered there. Here is the link to the other place you can buy books). Told in alternating perspectives of Sera (present day) and her great-grandmother Serafina (back in 1910), it is a richly layered investigation of the binds we find ourselves in as women, and the risks inherent in pursuing more than marriage and motherhood. It has a newly divorced woman, travel escapism, and maybe even a murder mystery? In other words, you won’t want to put this book down.

Jo and I talked how to define success as a writer, her recent glowing New York Times book review, why honesty about motherhood and marriage is so essential, and how having an au pair helps her family manage their dual-career, non-nine-to-five lifestyle.

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I first came across you because I follow Christine Pride. I also used to be an in house editor and then did some ghostwriting and now am starting to write books of my own, so I saw Christine as a kind of aspirational figure. How did writing novels with Christine first come about? Do you think you’ll return to it?

Christine was my editor at Simon and Schuster. She edited Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win and Marriage Vacation¹ and we became fast friends. She had the idea for a collaboration between a white author and a Black author in her head for awhile and we really wanted to figure out how to work more together so she kind of proposed to me with the idea of We Are Not Like Them and I accepted the rose. 

We have a third book together coming out in 2025 called I Never Knew You at All.

That’s so exciting. Your publishing pace is quite extraordinary.

I finally reached out to you directly when you posted about not liking your husband until you were past the postpartum stage. I think more honesty about the painful parts of marriage are necessary. Everything is black and white with marriage: either bliss or divorce-dom. I’d like more portrayals of - is this worth it? Of course then we have people like Merve Emre who feel strongly about us NOT writing about our personal lives. What started your willingness to be open about the difficulties of motherhood and marriage? 

We are living in an age of filters where we see way too much faux reality about marriages and motherhood on social media. It creates this expectation gap of anxiety when your own real life doesn't live up to those pretty glossy AND FAKE images. So I think it is really important to share the real stories of what a life is like. Marriage and parenting are wonderful and also awful and also totally normal and fine most of the time. But we only see the very best or the very worst and that is dangerous.

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Your recent Instagram post about your new novel The Sicilian Inheritance not hitting the New York Times Bestsellers list was so refreshing and helped name a huge issue. That something that is used as a stamp of having made it as an author is often so completely out of an author’s control. Anyone who has worked inside the book publishing industry knows how arbitrary it is. Editors have seen authors spend months of work and thousands of dollars trying to game a system that is not winnable! Yes it is the algorithm and it is also, as Christine mentioned, what other big fiction titles released that week (and no, as an author, you cannot ask to change the release date of your book). Thank you, as always, for your transparency. Selling 5,500 copies your first week is solid! I had an author whose book I helped write who never hit the New York Times bestseller list, but it hit #1 on the LA Times list and was on the Publishers Weekly list and it was translated into multiple languages and it sold so well they never published it in paperback because they make more money with it being hardcover. It sold over 250k copies. That book was a major success. And yet, not a NYT bestseller. We have to reframe what success looks like. What was one moment for you, as a writer, that made you feel like you had made it?

Want to hear something insane? I still don't feel like a success on a lot of days. It's crazy because objectively my books have done so well, but because "success" as an author is such a hazy metric, most of the time I shrug and I'm like..."I guess I'm OK."  We Are Not Like Them sold more than 100k copies and never hit ANY lists. Sicilian Inheritance just went into a third printing before the end of the third week and we hit the Publishers Weekly bestseller list and have been an Amazon bestseller since before we came out, but not the NYT and that still feels like the major market of success even though I know it is not. 

Everyone who works in the industry constantly tells you, "the List doesn't matter, the List doesn't matter." But then why do we talk about it with a capital L? Why does it SEEM like the only marker of success? I like the Publisher's Weekly list a lot because it shows numbers which feels very transparent to me. I would love a list that showed all the numbers - hardcover, ebook and audiobooks. Audiobooks are not factored into bestseller lists nearly enough and as a person who creates a lot of audio content that makes me sad.

I am constantly redefining success. Right now success for me is readers telling me they fucking LOVED The Sicilian Inheritance, that they devoured it in one night, that they ignored their children all day to read it. And also I have to define success by some career metric, which is that publishers keep paying me to write books.

I too have been unpacking the discomfort women have around talking about money with The Divorce Diaries, because as much as I saw women opening up about the experience of leaving men and marriages, I didn’t see them talking about the $ required to do so. And the $ negotiations in their divorces. And whether they were asking for or receiving spousal support (which I personally think is a feminist issue). So what do you wish more people were honest about regarding the ins and outs and the pain of publishing? What has been the most financially beneficial aspect of your work? Film options? A great book advance? Advertisements on podcasts? 

It is definitely book advances. There is very little money in any of the other things. And the trouble is that authors used to have a lot more options to make money outside of book advances. There used to be a lot more magazine and newspaper jobs with great salaries and benefits. Freelance writing was still a viable way to make money. There were more teaching positions that paid a living wage and didn't treat you like a gig worker. Those are few and far between now and almost every author I know is struggling financially or cobbling together ten jobs to make ends meet. 

Congrats on the New York Times review! I’m always so nervous reading a review for an author I’m connected to, but I felt like she complimented you and the book many times, even comparing your characters to those of John Updike! What was it like to finally get a glowing NYT review?

FUCKING GREAT. Hahaha it was a great review and I will be comparing myself to John Updike forevermore.

But I say this all the time.... I do not think that it is good practice to have other authors reviewing you. Publishing is a difficult and often competitive industry and having other authors review instead of unbiased reviewers leaves space for petty jealousies and grandstanding. That didn't happen here thankfully, but I see it every single week in the review section. 

“By Page 53, I put the book down, but not for long. I simply had to go online and search for flights to Italy. (I did the same while reading “Siracusa,” by Delia Ephron, another intoxicating tale set on the largest island in the Mediterranean.) Here, Sicily shimmers off the page, utterly enticing — azure waters for swimming, hunky Italian chefs, moments like this one that nearly made me drop a few thousand bucks I do not have on plane and ferry tickets: “The cheesemonger asked both of us to open our mouths and close our eyes before placing velvety ricotta directly onto our tongues.”

I enjoyed Piazza’s twisty narrative and complicated characters, especially her contemporary women, who are strong and feisty — not so different from Updike’s lost, lusty Rabbit.”

From Amanda Eyre Ward’s New York Times review of The Sicilian Inheritance

I am late to the game on your podcast She Wants More, which you released last year. I love your desire to interrogate things, your journalist’s curiosity, your willingness to go where no woman has gone before. I’m personally not a big fan of affairs but very pro ethical non-monogamy. I found your podcast guest who compared wanting more sexual experiences outside of her marriage to being a very skilled tennis player wanting to play with players at her level so interesting! A year after producing that podcast, anything you wished you’d dug deeper into? Do you think you’ll return to those topics? 

I would love to do more episodes. I hear about the show every single day, but iHeart decided not to do a second season and they laid me off in the middle of publicity for this one sadly. I would love to self produce another season and also one exploring polyamory. 

I believe the only time I’ve referred to your work on my Substack was in my post about how motherhood is bad for marriage and I refer to the article you wrote for Bustle called The HR-ification of Marriage. Talk to me about the au pair who lives in the house with you, how you came up with that as a solution for your childcare needs. As an extreme introvert, I’ve always cringed at the thought of a stranger living in my house (besides the fact that, living in California, we don’t have space for an au pair). But I understand that eventually they start to feel like part of the family. Is that right? 

We have cycled through a variety of childcare options. When you have three kids, daycare in any big city becomes insanely expensive. Nannies are often difficult to hire as well. The situation in San Francisco was especially fraught. One daycare wanted to charge nearly six figures. 

Nick and I are big travelers. We met while traveling and we want to instill a love of other cultures in our kids. We love the au pair program because of that. It is also flexible when it comes to hours and you genuinely do get a chance to connect with some wonderful young people. It isn't always a great fit and trust me there are horror stories. But for us we have become a lot less precious about personal space and we really enjoy opening up our home. It also allows flexibility when it comes to hours. Both Nick and I have gone through periods where we each travel a lot for work so a nine to five childcare situation isn't always the most ideal for us.  

You wear a lot of hats. Podcaster, journalist, novelist, Substack newsletter writer, not to mention keeping up with social media. Tell me, in your dream life, what would you be doing? If you could just do one of those things moving forward and it would pay your bills, what would you choose? Or do you like being a jack-of-all-trades?

I do like being a jack of all trades. I genuinely love storytelling in all forms and that is what I want to keep doing. That said, the hustle is making it very hard. I would love to be able to keep doing all of this for a long time, but I keep watching various forms of media that pay journalists and writers implode and I just do not know how plausible this career will be about five years from now. 

Thank you, Jo! If you’re looking for something juicy to read on an upcoming trip, do yourself a favor and order The Sicilian Inheritance before it becomes backordered again!

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ICYMI:

Sara Petersen

and her thoughts on being an author:

What Nobody Tells First Time Authors

This lovely piece on divorce:

'I love my husband...which is why I'm divorcing him.'

Amanda Montei

in The New York Times Magazine: “Can A Sexless Marriage Be a Happy One?

And don’t miss our conversation:

1. Marriage Vacation is a novel that Jo ghostwrote. It stemmed from the TV series Younger, where a character on the show writes a novel called Marriage Vacation. Her publisher decided they wanted to publish a real version of the book, thus Jo writing as Pauline and if this doesn’t show the fuckery that is publishing, I don’t know what does. But the TV show gets 5-stars. I loved it.