"Too many of us feel an intense shame about our desires"
Jo Piazza on women, wanting, and her new novel, The Sicilian Inheritance
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I’m working on a little piece about tradwives, so how appropriate that I have for you today a conversation with author and podcaster
of , whose pithy and precise analyses of the #tradwife obsession with being financially dependent on men—I mean, “letting your husband lead” and “not working”— while making motherhood look beautiful, regularly delight and enrage me.See also:
Jo is very funny and endlessly likeable. But she also thoughtfully explores women's desires in all her work, which spans genres and mediums. Last year, for her groundbreaking podcast She Wants More, she interviewed married women about their extramarital affairs, questioning, among other things, whether women are judged more harshly than men for infidelity, and whether affairs can be a form of self-care. In her new novel, The Sicilian Inheritance, Jo examines her own family history. Sicilian is a juicy, fun beach read. It’s also a book about women who want more from both work and relationships—and who find that trying to do or have it all rarely ends well for them.
We talked about tradwives, cultural attitudes towards women today, men leaving Sicily, her next podcast project, and how her new novel connects to her journalism.
I loved the simple audacity and intimacy of your podcast She Wants More. What did you learn about women and desire from your work on it?
Oh my god…. is it too trite to say that everything I now know about women and desire I learned from working on that podcast. It’s a subject we don’t talk nearly enough about or when we do we talk about it in such a stereotypical way.
One of the most interesting things I learned is that too many of us feel an intense shame about our desires, whether those desires are for sex, for professional success, for more free time, for love, for respect. We feel like we shouldn’t want more than we are given and we often feel guilty for desiring things.
You’ve also been archiving the absurd and powerful world of tradwives online. What do you think tradwifery tells us about the state of feminism and cultural attitudes toward women today?
I think the success of the #tradwife accounts and the trends on social media shows us that we still have a long way to go when it comes to caring for women in this world. So much of the work of feminism of the past fifteen years has focused on promoting the narrative of the Girl Boss and leaning in and climbing the corporate ladder and the problem with that is that it ignored almost every single other aspect of a woman’s life. It ignored that we may also want to be mothers and wives and caregivers and good friends and humans who actually relax once in awhile. We need to work so much harder to allow women to be supported so they can make the choice to be ambitious in a variety of things, in motherhood AND in a career.
The failure to help mothers and women generally thrive has caused this backlash where we see beautiful images of these tradwives and think “wow…that just seems so damn easy compared to how hard I have it,” and it has the potential to make young women check out of the workforce altogether.
Can you share one particularly egregious example of that?
I think the craziest thing about the #tradwife accounts is that these women claim they are practicing these gender roles where their husband is the only one who makes money and they stay in the home and they are submissive to him, but these accounts are all making a bunch of money…by pretending they aren’t. Look, at the end of the day it is capitalism at its finest, but I wish more people knew a lot of these accounts were performative cash cows.
Your new book, The Sicilian Inheritance, is also about women’s desire and ambition. In what ways is this book in conversation with your other work?
When my agents and publishers have told me in the past that I should probably stick to one genre or lane because then it is easier to market me I like to say “I have a lane…it is stories about bad ass women that haven’t been told before.” Strangely there is no section for that in most bookstores or a category on Amazon. I’m working on fixing that.
In Sicilian Inheritance I tell two different narratives, one at the turn of the century and one in the present day. Both stories are about women who desire more out of life. They want more freedom. They want to be able to pursue their ambitions. They want to be good mothers, but they also want to live their own lives. They want sex... lots and lots of really good (efficient) sex.
In a lot of ways this feels like a continuation of all of my writing on what women want, need and desire from the world and the many ways that the world makes it so fucking hard to be a woman.
In your research for the book, what did you learn about how wanting and aspiration differ for women in a European context— and/or in the early 20th century? Any relevant takeaways for US feminism/women today?
One of the most interesting things I learned while writing this book was that around the turn of the century in Sicily so many men left the island that the women were given more autonomy and freedom than they had ever previously had. They bought and sold land on their own. They were in charge of lending money. And they embraced these roles with gusto while still taking care of their families and their homes. We can do all of the things if a society will just let us.
Now of course that time period was filled with scores of other problems and dangers for women, many of which continue in Italy today. But during my research I learned about so many women who were essentially keeping towns running and alive during this time and it was so incredibly inspiring.
Talk to me about your decision to approach The Sicilian Inheritance as a novel, rather than nonfiction. The book also has elements of true crime, and I know you are working on a podcast inspired by the book. How have you thought about genre for this project?
We do have a companion podcast also called The Sicilian Inheritance (I like to make life easy… we have too much shit in our heads already).
I started out wanting to write a novel about this little nugget that I knew about my great great grandmother being murdered in Sicily a hundred years ago. I wanted it to be a novel because the facts were so sparse and I also knew that I wanted to write a book about powerful women longing for agency and freedom over their own lives. It was easier to craft that if I was allowed to let my imagination run wild from that single real starting point.
But when the novel was finished I couldn’t stop thinking about Lorenza, my great great grandmother. I couldn’t stop thinking about how my family knew nothing about her except for that she was murdered. She was remembered because of her death instead of her life and that made me extraordinarily depressed. So I set out to solve her murder, not just to excavate the crime, but to figure out how she lived and show she was. Too many stories of women’s lives have been lost to history because they didn’t have the power or ability to tell them. I wanted to try to learn as much about her actual life as I could.
So in a way this is a true crime podcast that uses our cultural obsession with dead women as a hook to explore the actual lived experience of a woman lost to history.