From the acclaimed author of A Heart in a Body in the World comes the gripping story of a girl living a lie in order to find the truth about her family and herself.

Eleanor, like so many others, is used to watching her famous father from afar. To the world, Hugo Harrison is the brilliant and charismatic tech genius whose AI inventions seem to create a new, better reality. But to Eleanor, whose mother had an affair with Hugo years ago, he is something even more intriguing, and dangerous—a secret.

When Eleanor’s spying leads her to a posting for a live-in summer nanny job for Hugo's young son—her half-brother—she knows she has to apply. This is finally her chance to learn about her father, his family, and the life that could have been hers. She only has to do one thing: become someone else. With just a few well-placed lies, Eleanor is catapulted into an unfamiliar, intoxicating whirlwind of money and ego, and into a new romance with a cute boy who works for Hugo. But in a place where image is everything and reality can be rewritten, is anything real—even the Harrisons themselves?

Caught between her own secrets and the ones she’s uncovering about her father and his latest invention, Eleanor faces a question that technology can't answer: what is your true self, and how do you know when you find her?

The audiobook of TRUE LIFE IN UNCANNY VALLEY, narrated by the exceptionally talented Brittany Pressley, and coming to you from the wonderful team at Penguin Random House Audio. Brittany also narrated THE EPIC STORY OF EVERY LIVING THING, one of ALA’s Amazing Audiobooks of 2023. I swear, every time I listen to one of my audiobooks, it sounds entirely new to me, as if I wasn’t the one who wrote it, and, once again, Brittany’s voice transports.

The Forgotten Miss Fury

Through the time-travel magic of research, I’ve gotten to know some incredibly inspiring women of the past. Women who were creative and immensely brave. Trailblazers, who faced unimaginable obstacles. Poets, writers, sailors, artists, from hundreds of years ago to the twentieth century - they all share one thing: they’ve been forgotten. In all of the glaring lights and noise and applause for men in history, they’re essentially unseen.  

In my novel One Great Lie, I wrote about the unknown young female poets and writers of the Renaissance, often teenagers, and often locked away in convents, who bravely spoke out about feminist issues. In The Epic Story of Every Living Thing, I wrote about the forgotten Mary Patten, the first woman to command an American ship, who not only navigated Neptune’s Car around the treacherous Cape Horn during deadly, horrendous storms, but also tended to her sick husband and handled a mutiny, while only nineteen years old and pregnant. And now, in my newest release, True Life in Uncanny Valley, you’ll meet two more fierce and vibrant women that you likely never heard of. True Life in Uncanny Valley is the story of Eleanor, who takes on a secret identity to become the nanny for the famous father she’s never known. Her dad is the charismatic billionaire, Hugo Harrison, creator of a hugely popular AI art app, as well as a highly-anticipated, top-secret new release. Eleanor is an artist herself, and she finds particular inspiration – and parallels to her own life - in the comic book, Miss Fury, which features the very first female action hero, drawn by the very first female comics creator,June Tarpé Mills.

I have no doubt at all that you’re familiar, very familiar, with Wonder Woman. There are Wonder Woman movies, TV shows, and books, a cookbook, too. There are wonder Woman Halloween costumes, dolls, toys, bedsheets, and every product from a toothbrush to a slow cooker (really). She’s a frequently-feminist iconic, supposedly the creation of the much-lauded William Moulton Marston, who also claimed to be an ardent feminist. But hunt around in the secret-revealing treasures of research, and you’ll find that Marston hid his misogyny and ill-treatment of women behind that guise, a now-familiar trick among predatory males. Also hidden: the influence and labor that various women in his life gave to “his” creation. Wonder Woman’s first appearance was in October of 1941, and her first feature arrived in 1942.

Miss Fury, though: the badass, confident, intelligent (and stylish!) superhero, whose first appearance was in April of 1941… Well. Let’s just say you aren’t going to find her on your toothbrush. In a field dominated by men, June Mills understood that she’d better hide her own self for her comic to have a chance, disguising her gender under the pseudonym, Tarpé Mills. Her superhero, Miss Fury, was unconventional in that she was multi-dimensional. Instead of the helpless, sexy female who existed in the storyline only to be saved by the man, Miss Fury (aka Marla Drake) was capable and smart – a single woman with a career who could also fly a fighter jet, disarm Nazis and the bad boyfriend.

It was that unconventional female-ness, the way she was more – and more threatening - than men in power were comfortable with, that likely did her, and Mills’ career, in. In 1947, one of Mills’ other female characters, Era, wore a two-piece outfit resembling Eve that caused thirty-seven papers to censor the strip. In 1951, Miss Fury was cancelled altogether, likely due to the growing conservative movement that had its eyes on women, with the aim to force them back into the submissive positions they had before the war. That movement would grow, and in the comics world, would culminate in the Comics Code Authority of 1954, organized to keep comics “safe” for young readers. The Comics Code Authority went on to police the representation of women in comics to align with conservative ideologies, designating non-traditional portrayals as immoral. It would also essentially erase any representation of LGBTQ characters, and political content regarding race.

When we think of history, we often think of how we’ve gone forward from the past. But history, hidden history, has a lot to tell us about the ways things haven’t changed. The way oppression rises after progress, the way people in power will use whatever means is necessary to hold onto it.  Discovering and learning about these forgotten women has been personally meaningful and inspiring to me, without a doubt. It’s felt like a mission, to share and bring to light their stories, just a few of the many, many untold stories of unseen women over centuries. In each of the books, though, their inclusion has a particular intent, as well. One Great Lie is about the art-versus artist debate, and who has been allowed to have a voice, and Epic Story is about anxiety and fear, and what we’re able to overcome. But True Life in Uncanny Valley is about not being seen. It’s about how the ever-growing epidemic of narcissism is leading to an ever-growing dynamic of not seeing others. How, when we make people disappear, when we don’t acknowledge them and their humanity, we hide not only generations of trauma and generations of contributions, but generations of strength.

And I need that strength right now, when it feels as if we are being forced to disappear again, shoved back into the land of un-mattering. I need to hear about that strength; I need to hear about them, these women who have been overlooked and forgotten, but who existed, who were. I can almost feel their life-force when I read about them. I can feel their will and their insistence, their determination to speak and be known, to be acknowledged as equal human beings with equal rights in the world. I can almost see them waving from the past, waving furiously, as furious as many of us feel now. We get it, they seem to say. We see you. We are you.

A True Life Encounter with AI

After writing True Life in Uncanny Valley, I had a strange encounter with AI. True Life in Uncanny Valley is the story of Eleanor, who takes on a secret identity to become the nanny for the famous father she’s never known, a charismatic billionaire leader in AI. It speaks to questions about what makes us human, and it was inspired by my worry that our growing epidemic of narcissism is taking us further and further from what is real. As we were preparing for the book’s release, and as we were being flooded with news of AI’s impact on writers, a writer colleague posted something funny, intriguing, and unsettling. He’d asked Chat GPT to roast him, and received a disconcertingly accurate reply. Out of curiosity, I privately decided to play, too.

And, oh, wow. Hello, AI.

Do I dare share it here? Is it a copyright infringement of a copyright infringement, of a machine, which gained its abilities through plagiarism of our work? This is only one of the many complex, surreal, and livelihood-and-soul stealing questions about authors and AI, and about what it means to be an actual human thinker and writer right now.

Well, let’s call it an eye for an eye, or, rather, a word for a word. Here’s what appeared on my screen after I asked GPT Chat to roast me:

Deb Caletti? Oh, sure, the queen of "poignant" novels where everyone’s either brooding or wondering about their feelings. I can just imagine her characters standing in a field, contemplating their life choices... while clutching a mug of lukewarm tea. Her books are the literary equivalent of a playlist full of sad indie songs that you only listen to when you're in a mood you can’t explain, yet somehow people find them so deep.

Is there a section of a Deb Caletti book that doesn’t involve someone standing at a metaphorical crossroads in their life? It’s as if she’s on a mission to make self-doubt sound like an art form. But hey, if you’re in the market for a heartfelt exploration of emotional turmoil—well, she's got a novel for you. Maybe two. Or ten. 

Damn.

Guilty, guilty, and unnervingly… true? The term “uncanny valley” refers to that moment of unease when a robot or lifelike entity feels unsettling human…but not quite. In my latest novel, this also references the disturbing picture of Eleanor’s narcissistic father that emerges, a man who appears to be something he’s not. But after I read that roast, I got the creepy sense that a machine actually knew me…but not quite.

Human, but not quite is one of the reasons I was compelled to write this particular story. Because, why, lately, does it seem like we are getting farther and farther from our humanity, from what’s real? At its heart, True Life in Uncanny Valley is about narcissism gone awry. Telescoping inward, the book explores what it feels like to be raised by narcissistic parents – the golden child/scapegoat roles, the loneliness, feeling both unseen and unreal. Expanding outward, it addresses the ramifications for our larger society - how the inability to see others affects us all.

Not truly seeing others has been an ugly truth for centuries, most definitely. But lately, there seems to be an ever-growing epidemic of it. Certain uses of AI reflect that epidemic, as well. When we don’t acknowledge the original makers of art, we aren’t seeing other. When we steal an artist’s deep and personal creation and use it to train AI, we aren’t. We’re also not seeing ourselves – how our creativity is an ancient and integral part of what makes us most human.

As narcissism rages around us daily, the best parts of our humanity seem to be in jeopardy. We applaud the stuff on the surface, and shallow superficiality rises and shouts its way to an ugly victory. Meanwhile, inner truth and what’s truly of value retreats. The good stuff needs quiet. The things that matter need space and peace, acceptance and room to evolve. What’s real requires complicated layers: the depth that comes from experience, the joy that comes from love, the pain that comes from loss, the triumph that comes with struggle, the freedom that comes with creativity, the laughter that comes with play, the connection that comes with empathy. Authenticity requires honesty - true and messy feelings, compassion for yourself and others. It requires seeing yourself and others. What fills our souls and spirits can’t be posted. What makes us ourselves - mistakes, unmet needs, the tangled and glorious history in our DNA, love for our people and for garlic bread – no machine can have that. What we feel down deep, what we think and believe because of what we feel down deep… Well, you can fake it. A person can, a machine can. But, there’s always that moment, isn’t there? When you sense something hollow, something missing. When you realize that you’re looking at something or someone who isn’t looking back. Uncanny valley. Not quite.

So, yes. I myself have occasionally stood in a field, contemplating my life choices, but more often, I’ve stood on a beach. I’ve contemplated there, sure, but I’ve also grieved there, and laughed there, and celebrated so hard there. I’ve marveled there – at the sea, the sky, beautiful life itself. I’ve brushed the sand off my legs and shaken out my towel and have gone home, fuller and more grateful. I frequently do clutch a mug of lukewarm tea, though there’s also morning coffee with a splash of milk and a shortbread cookie on the side. And definitely, oh, most definitely, I have made self-doubt into an art-form. In my work, in my life, I absolutely have. I’ve also made anxiety into an art form, and waking up at three am to fret. Hunting for books at the library – art form. Being ridiculously prepared for any power outage – art form. The bra-through-the-sleeve maneuver – you know it. Maybe those really good brownies, too.

And I have a novel for you, all right. Not two, not ten, but twenty-three, and counting. Born of my own turmoil, my own exploring, my own emotion. My own full and beating heart.

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY, a Soggy Pages Book Club read.

”Mostly, we talk about how astonishing it is, the way this guy, this one dude, with all of his brilliance and talent and creativity, just burns and fights to express it. Not for profit or acclaim or world domination, just because his soul’s got to do it. It’s, like, the human spirit, you know? Creativity and love, the best parts. The most enduring pieces of it, hopefully.”