00:06:20.660And then you've got Joe Van Gogh, who's actually a real historical widow who inherited hundreds of Vincent's paintings when the entire world thought they were worthless.
00:06:29.460She made him famous essentially through sheer determination and a hidden figure.1.00
00:06:34.920And so you've got thriller, you've got money, legacy, what women do when the system tries to write them out and off.0.99
00:06:42.560But tell us how this book really started for you.
00:06:44.940Yeah, I mean, I love hearing someone else describe the book because those are all the things I love, right?0.73
00:06:52.200Like, I love talking about ambitious women who are helping one another to rise against all odds.
00:07:00.940I'm trying not to use the word patriarchy as much as I usually do, but, like, let's be honest, that is often the problem.
00:07:07.000This book actually came about because my friend Stephen Weinberg, who's an artist and a children's book author of the book What is Color, discovered Joe's story while he was writing What is Color.
00:07:18.460It's the history and science of color.
00:07:20.060And he was researching Vincent van Gogh and found out about Joe.
00:07:24.320And he's like, oh, my gosh, she's the widow of Vincent's sister.
00:07:27.840She inherited hundreds of his paintings.
00:07:29.500He'd only sold one painting while he was alive.
00:07:32.780These paintings, I don't want to call them worthless.
00:07:34.900I think that that's not the right word, but they did not hold value.
00:07:48.640And all she got from her husband when he passed were hundreds of his brother's paintings that she couldn't sell.
00:07:56.620And so she's like, OK, I'm going to I'm going to figure this out.0.62
00:07:59.860And she became an art dealer during a time when women were not art dealers.
00:08:04.900And also a branding and marketing genius.
00:08:07.920She took the letters between Vincent and Theo, her late husband, and picked and chose which ones to release and when to build this entire mythology and narrative around Vincent, turning him into this kind of madman genius that made him so much more interesting.
00:08:28.820And so especially this is interesting, especially for for your audience. One of the threads in the book is what makes art valuable? Like who decides that something is worth millions of dollars? And often it's because of these patrons behind the scenes or the mythology behind the artists.
00:08:52.480I think about this, you know, in terms of Banksy all the time, right?
00:08:56.160Like, had we known who Banksy was, would anyone have cared about any of this street art?
00:10:07.760And honestly, it could be its own miniseries.
00:10:10.860So let's go back to this world of billionaires and art.
00:10:14.640the Swanson family in this book. They're a dynasty of art dealers. It was very specific and real,
00:10:20.820your writing. And I'm just curious, how deep, how did you find that research? How far did you go to
00:10:26.320understand and embody this world? Yeah. So I did a lot of research into the world of art dealing,
00:10:35.520of what makes this art valuable. And there's just a handful of families, truly, who control the art
00:10:43.820market. And that's a very real thing. The Swansons are fictional, but they are absolutely
00:10:48.320based in reality. And, you know, a lot of it is on the up and up and a lot of it isn't.
00:10:54.800There is a multi-billion dollar shadow market of art that exists, art being sold, you know,
00:11:02.140all over the world for things like drug deals and arms deals. And oftentimes these prominent
00:11:10.340families that are also donating to museums and selling art at auction at places like Sotheby's
00:11:17.080are also involved in this kind of shadowy dark market. Not always, but sometimes. And so I was
00:11:24.060fascinated by this. And if you look into some of these families, the lore around them is insane.
00:11:31.100I mean, it is just like rich people behaving badly to the max. Give me an example. God,
00:11:36.860I mean, it's just so it's just like the buying and selling of islands and racehorses and chateaus and being cut out of wills and terrible, messy divorces where everyone just wants to spill all of the tea about everyone's affairs.
00:13:02.640And then they're also selling it and buying it and working with the museum.
00:13:07.100So they have so much control over what we see in museums, what gets bought and sold and how art gets priced and which artists also get elevated, which is what I find fascinating.
00:13:20.720I wanted to do this story in two timelines with some struggling female artists in Paris.
00:13:27.120I keep saying in the modern day, but it's not. It's in 1996, which I now suppose is probably
00:13:32.640historical fiction. The 1900s. Yeah. People are like, that's 30 years ago. And I'm like,
00:13:37.300no, it's not. It was yesterday. But I wanted to. I still have a sweater in my closet from 1996.
00:13:43.400Same. Princeton lacrosse. Yeah. And so I but I really wanted to set it in a time before Google
00:13:49.980and smartphones, because I think that a heist and a mystery are so much more fun to solve
00:13:56.140when you don't have all of the information in the world at your fingertips.
00:14:02.180But then I also got to write like people like smoking in nightclubs in Paris
00:14:06.140and like Liam Gallagher and Naomi Campbell are there.
00:14:08.520So like that just makes it so much more fun.
00:14:11.280I have a really great 90s playlist that I listen to
00:14:14.200when I'm writing and editing this book, which was just a treat.
00:14:22.260So, but I wanted to see these young women in the present day who don't have a patron and who are not rich trying to make it as artists and really struggling because they don't have that privilege and that money to elevate them until they become involved with this family who has both of those things.
00:14:41.980You write a lot about women ambition, female ambition, legacy in this book.
00:14:47.980Both women in this book are fighting to not be erased.0.89
00:14:51.740Jo Van Gogh from art history, Emma from a family empire that wants to use her and discard her.
00:14:56.540There's a line in the press about your book that describes these two women as those who refuse to be written out of history no matter the cost.
00:15:04.160So for those listening women in our audience and men too, who are building their own financial
00:15:10.020legacies, what does your book and what does your research imply about how women have to fight
00:15:14.780differently than men to own their place in any institution? I think you make the point too that,
00:15:20.040or maybe it was in one of your reviewers that like the irony being that these women get nothing
00:15:24.360and then they have to, their husbands die like 20, 30 years before they outlive the husbands and then
00:15:30.680they have to somehow figure it out. So that's also another layer of complexity. But what do
00:15:37.320you think this says ultimately about this fight for female financial empowerment?
00:15:42.220I think we always have to fight so much harder. We have to be a lot savvier and we have to start
00:15:49.020very, very early. I mean, I, and you do this so well and so often, you know, I'm constantly
00:15:56.980talking to young women about financial literacy and taking control and accepting agency over your
00:16:04.400finances as soon as possible. Because, you know, one of the characters in the book, Stella, who0.86
00:16:10.620ends up being the widow of this art dealing family, gets completely written out because she had no
00:16:16.440control over the finances. And it happens to so many women. I mean, you and I were talking about0.94
00:16:20.720strangers the other day, right? Right. Bell Burden. Yeah, Bell Burden. And I mean, I got thoughts on
00:16:26.000strangers. But I like I think it is such a cautionary tale of many, many cautionary tales
00:16:33.240of like we have to we have to take the power back. It's so imperative. And one of the other
00:16:38.500things that I really want to talk about with this book and that I hope inspires young people to to
00:16:44.800take control of their finances is that since the beginning of human history, we've elevated
00:16:49.060this like mythology of the solitary male genius and constantly erased the caregivers who have
00:16:57.360gotten that person there. It's often women. It's often a wife. Sometimes it's a husband. Sometimes0.96
00:17:02.000it's a sister or a mother. It's often a wife. And we write those people out of history who put in0.95
00:17:07.480so much labor and often creativity as well to elevate that solitary male genius. And I think
00:17:14.640that it's time we eradicated that myth so that we give the people that are supporting those so-called
00:17:20.820geniuses their due. Yeah. I was just reading about Dr. Seuss. I don't know this one. Tell me this
00:17:26.700one. So Dr. Seuss, his second wife was essentially the one who like basically made him famous. She
00:17:33.020was his business partner, you know, and was very, she was tough, you know, and she was the one who
00:17:39.780like got him the deals. And yeah, this is all based on his Wikipedia page. So I haven't done
00:17:44.860a new Joe Piazza novel, The Woman Behind Seuss. I think you need to go into the world of cartoons
00:17:49.960and children's books. Great. Done. Easy peasy. Easy peasy. But I mean, there's so many of them,
00:17:55.000right? Like I think about all of Ernest Hemingway's wives, Albert Einstein's wife,
00:17:58.580Robert Oppenheimer's wife, Norman Rockwell's wives. But let's also talk about modern day,
00:18:05.080right you've written about trad wives and and you have a culture podcast and a sub stack and so you
00:18:11.120are also very aware of just how much today too we undervalue the economic contributions of women
00:18:19.020who aren't let's say earning that paycheck outside of the home or even like online but that
00:18:25.100and this also goes back goes back to sort of bell burden and the strangers book which
00:18:29.520just a really quick thing on that i think ultimately i mean there were so many takeaways
00:18:34.720for me on that book, but I was like, at the end of the day, her husband and the world they lived in
00:18:40.020did not value her economic value, economic contributions. They just didn't see her as
00:18:46.100having, bringing any value, like, okay, yes, you're the mom and you're the full-time mom,
00:18:49.820but like, what else are you going to do? Right? How hard could it be? In the absence of that
00:18:54.040mindset, I feel like things might've been different for her. Well, exactly, exactly.
00:18:58.080Because we do not count labor in the home as paid labor, right? And so I talk about this.
00:19:03.780Money is money. And so and we don't count that as support for the paycheck that's coming in.
00:19:09.840We only think about someone who goes outside of the home to earn money.
00:19:13.940The privilege that comes with having somebody at home.
00:19:16.100The privilege that comes with that. Yeah, the privilege that comes with having someone at home.
00:19:18.700I mean, that is it's really a thing that has to be completely disrupted because we have it has been this way since the beginning of paid labor, frankly.
00:19:28.800And so and we saw it a lot with the mythology around the trad wives. Right.
00:19:33.780because you know they were performing domesticity on the internet but these women were running media1.00
00:19:40.980companies i mean that's where like the title of my book everyone is lying to you came from1.00
00:19:44.240like everyone is lying to you like their content is work content creation is work they're just
00:19:48.920performing this for you and oftentimes their husbands are quitting their jobs to support
00:19:53.100their wives in this endeavor and the breadwinners the trad wedge breadwinners and yet and yet and
00:19:59.900yet, you know, they're promoting this messaging that I'm just a wife. I'm just a mother. I don't
00:20:08.100work. I don't control our finances when they control everything. Right. Right. And so I just
00:20:13.460I want more stories about women who are doing the work and who are getting paid for the work.0.91
00:20:19.500And then also stories. I love the idea of being a stay at home mom. If that's what you want to do.0.99
00:20:23.540Cool. It's not for me. I've tried it like I'm very in very small doses. And I'm like,
00:20:27.580this is this is not my this is not my joy okay this is not this is not this is not my sweet spot
00:20:34.400because it's hard because it's freaking work it's harder than my actual job right and so
00:20:40.000that's amazing but also then you should have a discussion with your husband pay me for this
00:20:43.780labor right like pay me for this support i want a paycheck i want you to be contributing to my
00:20:48.440my 401k i want you to be contributing to my retirement my savings like do not give me an
00:20:54.420allowance. Like the idea of a woman getting an allowance, which we've seen in popular culture0.72
00:20:57.920for so long is so infantilizing. So infantilizing. But we see it, we still see it constantly. And so0.99
00:21:04.340no, it's like you're earning your paycheck, your income for the labor, for the value that you're
00:21:10.840adding to this family. You're one of the few fiction authors I have on the show because so
00:21:16.340much of your work is like, it's real. It's real life. It translates so well and so loudly. For
00:21:23.640For example, too, you write in your book about Emma and how she crosses some serious ethical lines.0.99
00:21:30.760She makes some morally complicated choices in pursuit of justice and survival.
00:21:34.620And it kind of reminded me of, you know, how our society has this double standard when it comes to bad acting women and bad acting men.
00:21:43.280Right. We have very little patience straight to the nunnery for these women who, you know, yes, they committed some crimes maybe, you know, and they should be punished.
00:21:53.020But for men, I feel like they get second, third, twelfth chances.0.91
00:22:22.440They're like, oh, that is that is terrible. That is the worst. And I'm like, male antiheroes are like the best in fiction. Like, look at Tony Soprano and Don Draper and Walter White. Men can be anything. And women are expected to be like put in a box, to put in this like very highly specific mold in culture, in high culture, in pop culture.
00:22:45.320And I'm trying to write women that are many things that are multifaceted.
00:22:49.640Like women are also all the things as men are all the things.
00:22:53.360And I think that we're seeing more of that now.0.90
00:22:55.400I also think that we've actually reached the end of the Tradwife era, which I think is really great.0.99
00:23:02.620If it weren't for yesteryear, I wouldn't get served Tradwife content at all anymore because I do not think that the women that were cosplaying this on social media are doing it anymore.
00:23:11.980Hannah Nealman of Ballerina Farm has stepped up and said, I'm running this freaking company.0.99
00:23:16.040Same with Nara Smith. Right. Like, I think that they're now coming out and saying, no,0.91
00:23:21.640I'm essentially Martha Stewart or the pioneer woman. Like, right. This is my business.
00:23:26.080But I do think they're doing that. I'm curious. Why do you think they're doing that?
00:23:30.560What do they realize? I think what they realized is that they're if they want to grow outside of
00:23:35.780a certain niche, outside of a certain online niche. And I think that all of these women
00:23:40.160want to be moguls. They want to get funding. They want to grow. I think Ballerina Farm1.00
00:23:45.940absolutely wants to become the next Magnolia. They weren't going to do that with the majority
00:23:52.220of customers if they kept putting up this front of, OK, I'm just like cosplaying this mix of June
00:23:58.720Cleaver with Ma Ingalls, both of which are essentially fictional characters, because the
00:24:03.680real Ma Ingalls from Laura Ingalls Wilder, as we know, was not having a good time living in a hole
00:24:09.060in the side of a creek, making sure that everyone didn't get malaria.
00:24:13.000I wonder if for that transition, you know, to go from the cosplaying of Trad Wife to like,
00:24:18.620okay, that was orchestration. And I am actually the CEO of this company. And that's a character
00:24:23.940that I play. But I still make really good, you know, banana bread, buy my pots and pans. Cool,
00:24:29.180cool. But in that process, do they lose audience? Do they lose their, do they lose anything?
00:24:35.440I honestly actually do not think that they're going to lose that much by by saying, OK, I'm also running a business because I think that the majority of their audience are women who work because the majority, you know, women, women work.
00:24:50.360Even, you know, I hate I say this all the time. I hate the word stay at home mom because I'm like, no one is staying like what no one is just staying in one place. Right.
00:25:00.240right but i do not think that just recognizing the value of their labor and talking about it will
00:25:07.000lose them the majority of their audience and you know so many ballerina farm the brand has
00:25:12.84010 million followers and so many of those are women who work outside of the home because it's
00:25:19.640pretty to look at right it's like idyllic it's escapism it's like this fantasy even though like
00:25:24.380I also don't want to bake sourdough because I'm not good at it.
00:25:29.360Well, I think that there is a, there is a, I'm not saying this is my opinion, obviously,0.92
00:25:34.760but there is this like notion out there that like, when you say you're a woman who cares
00:25:40.100about money, makes the money is the breadwinner, that somehow you lose your femininity. And this
00:25:45.340femininity is a lot of what these women are trading on. Like, this is the, this is like,1.00
00:25:49.720this is a thing, right? Like if you want to be soft and feminine and loved and taken care of,
00:25:54.060And a lot of it is like biblical, you know, that like it doesn't work if you are also making more money than your husband.
00:26:03.000Well, and I do I think that the idea of femininity and the concept of femininity has been co-opted by the right, honestly, in the past in the past decade.
00:26:13.100Right. What I'm hoping is that we can recover that.
00:26:17.700And I'm talking about the hard hard right.
00:26:19.300Like, I'm hoping the center can recover that of being like, you can be so-called feminine and soft and also a person who is ambitious and makes money for your household and your husband can also take care of your children.
00:26:34.320And like being feminine should have nothing to do with how your household brings in money.0.98
00:26:41.540And that is just a way like that idea, that false idea is just a way to keep women down, to strip away our agency.
00:26:50.020And what I'm hoping is that we're entering a new lighter period after quite a dark time, quite a dark time.
00:26:57.080I'm actually I'm more optimistic than ever now.
00:26:59.280I was not optimistic last summer when I was on tour for Everyone is Lying to You because we were I kind of saw the writing on the wall and I think we were in peak trad wife and was meeting a lot of young women who were very influenced by the trad wife soft girl lifestyle.
00:27:15.380They're like, I went off birth control so that my boyfriend and I could just start making babies and I'm going to drop out of college because it seems so nice online.
00:33:55.000but also teach us so much about what's important0.99
00:33:57.180in the real world as women, as ambitious people.
00:34:00.980And before we go, I just, I want our audience
00:34:04.380to learn from you in terms of just your career arc
00:34:07.640and all of the work that you've done as a writer.
00:34:10.420a lot of people, they'll say, I want to be a writer one day, you know, and I mean, even like
00:34:14.46030 years ago before AI and before technology really took over, being a writer was also very,
00:34:20.000it was like this romantic dream. Now I feel like people are just like, it's a dead end because why
00:34:25.120would I, how could I be a writer in a world where AI is writing books? Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
00:34:30.340I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, I like to be very honest about this, right? I mean,
00:34:35.420And I truly believe that humans writing books will continue, will transcend because we can create ideas and situations and human beings hopefully better than machines can.
00:34:49.300But I also don't know how AI is going to change the world.
00:34:52.800It's changed it so much just in the past year.
00:34:54.720It's mind blowing when you sit down to think about it.0.89
00:34:57.040So, I mean, anyone that wants to be a writer, I say just get your butt in the seat and write.
00:35:00.500That's the advice that I give to every person who wants to be a writer.0.69
00:35:02.860I'm like, you have to sit down and do it.