This one will be an hour long with plenty of time for Q&A and the only price of admission is that you buy the book.

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A couple of weeks ago my kids set up a lemonade stand outside our row house in Philly. It was 94 degrees and they were killing it.

After a couple of hours, though, they started to get bored. A few neighborhood kids came by and asked if they wanted to play inside and the stand was abandoned. Rather than let a perfectly good folding table go to waste, Nick and I grabbed our Bookcase Books signage, hauled out a stack of summer reads and set up a pop-up bookstore right there on the sidewalk.

Y’all, it was wonderful.

In the next two hours we sold heaps of books, but that wasn’t the best part.

We met dozens of neighbors we had never met before despite living on adjacent blocks. People stopped to browse and ended up staying to talk for at least fifteen minutes. Readers started discussing books they loved and books they hated right there on our stoop. One woman picked up a novel and another passerby immediately launched into an impassioned argument about why the ending was terrible. At one point two readers were flirting over a stack of smutty paperbacks and I think they exchanged numbers.

The kids eventually drifted back outside, confused about why their abandoned lemonade stand had become a bookstore, but not so confused that they didn’t start hawking kids’ books.

I met a curator from the Philly Museum of Art and we started chatting about a Parisian Heist event. We debated congressional candidates with a community board member and then found out how to attend our community board meetings.

I got recommendations for both Botox and a dentist.

It was just a folding table covered with books on a hot afternoon and somehow it became a spontaneous third space for joy, conversation and community.

We’re constantly hearing about America’s loneliness epidemic. We read endless stories about how people have fewer friends, how they don’t know their neighbors, how community organizations are disappearing and how we’re all spending more time online and less time together. We talk about the problem a lot, but we rarely talk about what actually brings people together.

I was at a dinner last night with a delightfully bookish group to celebrate the launch of my friend Chassity’s book Pink Sand Summer (more on that tomorrow). And we started talking about this hunger for community. Someone pointed out this story in the WSJ about young people flocked to church to find one another.

Our table of books gave strangers permission to talk to each other. People stopped because books are one of the last things we can discuss with strangers without immediately descending into politics, tribalism or rage.

When Nick and I started Bookcase Books, we thought we were building a bookstore. We certainly didn’t think we were in the community-building business.

What happened that day on Pine Street happens almost every time we pop up, whether it’s a table at a brewery or with our little book trailer in the Catskills.

People come for the books, but they stay for the conversations. They come looking for a novel and leave having met a neighbor. Amidst all the madness of the news cycle and the world this is what is bringing me hope!

I want to offer just a little taste of that to all of you.

It’s a 60 minute online masterclass with me, organized and facilitated by book coach Maureen Wiley on June 30th at NOON ET!

The question I get asked more than any other is how to actually write a book.

To celebrate the release of The Parisian Heist, Maureen and I are offering a live masterclass where we’ll talk about everything I’ve learned over the course of writing more than ten books including:

• how to get started

• how to write a banger of a beginning and an ending

• how to write believable characters that readers want to spend time with

• how to create an ensemble that makes sense

• how to draft and edit

• what to do when you get stuck

Plus my tips on how to find an agent. We will be doing a second one on how to market and sell a book. This one will be an hour long with plenty of time for Q&A and the only price of admission is that you buy the book. Consider it a bribe if you’d like. I’m not above that. Pre-order the book, send us your receipt, and you’ll get access to the masterclass, live Q&A, and a coaching session with Maureen.

If you’ve already ordered consider yourself pre-invited. Just fill out the form with the email you used on our last pre-order form where we gave away this substack! Also anyone who orders now can also get this substack for a year for free. Talk about value, people :).

» REGISTER HERE «

I am giving away a one-year subscription to this substack FREE when you pre-order Parisian Heist from any bookstore. You can enter your details here.

My dear friend Andi Bartz’s dazzling thriller The Last Ferry Out is coming out in paperback and to celebrate I’m giving away two copies to one lucky winner (US only).

This one is a skillfully plotted puzzle-box mystery, and exactly the kind of immersive, lyrical, thought-provoking read I love. Comment Ferry below to win.

Hi from the Catskills. The snow has finally melted, though it’s much cooler up here than in Philly, which is a blessing.

And that means the Bookcase Books book trailer could finally leave the driveway. It also meant we had some work to do on it.

Here is the podcast episode I did when we first got the trailer. I’ll be updating it soon.

We spent the first couple days of the weekend painting, adding new shelves and doing inventory and then yesterday we finally took it out to do a book pop-up in Spruceton Valley.

Getting this thing hooked up to the family Subaru was no small feat, but we made it happen.

It is so damn cute inside. I sort of want to live in it.

We’ll be taking it out again on Friday and popping up at Westkill Brewery!

Here are some of our top sellers right now.

I bitch and moan about perimenopause a lot.

Because perimenopause IS a lot and nobody prepared us for it. Our mothers didn’t talk about it. Our doctors barely talk about it. It just shows up one day like an uninvited houseguest who sweats through your sheets and gives you a hangover after two glasses of wine.

But I’m starting to think that perimenopause might actually be my superpower.

Hear me out.

Exhibit A: I no longer give any fucks and this is glorious.

The fucks have exited the building. Somewhere between the first night sweat and the last normal period, (I now get murder scene periods that leak through everything at all hours of the day, often in public) I stopped caring whether I was being too much, too loud, too ambitious or too anything. Forty years of carefully managing how I was perceived evaporated.

The fucks were heavy. Carrying around everyone else’s opinions is exhausting. Putting them down feels taking off a weighted vest I didn’t know I was wearing. Turns out you can move a lot faster without it. Also I decided I hate the weighted vests.

Exhibit B: The 2 a.m. ideas.

When I wake up drenched in the middle of the night, my brain doesn’t spiral into anxiety the way it used to. It generates all kinds of wild ideas about what I want to do in the next half of my life. And because I need to get back to sleep, I don’t lie there talking myself out of them. I just decide to do them.

This is how I ended up buying a vintage camping trailer and opening a pop-up bookstore. A normal, well-rested person with a full complement of fucks does not do that.

It’s also how I decided to write a middle grade series about the kids of paleontologists. (More news on that soon)

I am giving away a one-year subscription to this substack FREE when you pre-order Parisian Heist from any bookstore. You can enter your details here.

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As someone who is deep in the throes of publicity and marketing for a book I’ve been spending most days pitching The Parisian Heist. It is currently a full-time job (anyone know how to get me on at the bartender on Watch What Happens Live? I am deadly serious…if someone gets me on as a bar…

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So come find me on tour for The Parisian Heist and let’s do all of the things.

BOOK TOUR 2026

JULY 12: Milwaukee — Boswell Book Company

Join us for a special Bastille Day themed launch with Jo! …

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I am not a morning person, but my body is still very much on Croatian time, which means I’ve spent the past several days waking up before dawn. I actually really like it.

Nick and I have been drinking coffee together while the house is quiet. No one is yelling that they can’t find their school pants. No one is accus…

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There’s a lot of talk right now about how to Nonna-max your summer (how to live like an Italian grandma). I’ve got thoughts on that. Much more to come on the nonna. But right now I am entering my Mrs. Roper summer.

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Great list: Parisian Heist is one of the NY Post’s top beach reads this summer. This is a great list all around.

Hello, hello from the beautiful island of Lošinj where I’m wrapping up the Adriatic Writer’s Conference.

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Also THE PARISIAN HEIST got a great new review from Booklist in case you’re still on the fence about getting your order in.

“Piazza’s latest is another deep dive into a beautiful and unique world: Paris of then and now shines as historical characters are brought to life.”

Now onto Spencer Pratt running for mayor of Los Angeles. My friend Jessica Grose, who’s a columnist at The New York Times, published a piece last week that literally stopped me in my tracks.

The headline was: “Unfortunately, We Have to Take Spencer Pratt Seriously as a Politician.”

And sadly, sadly, I agree. Although as we were going to press with this newsletter Trump endorsed Pratt which could be a death knell for him in liberal L.A. But it also might not be if Pratt handles it properly.

The fact is that celebrities with no political experience — and often no traditional business experience either — are often very good at running for modern-day political office. I mean… look who’s in the White House.

As Jess writes in The Times: “Reality TV fame allows Pratt and his peers to get attention for their outsider candidacies, and it gives them much more leeway for bad behavior than the average person enjoys. The public is already used to their antics. That’s what made them famous.”

And I happen to know a little bit about Spencer Pratt. Actually, more than a little bit. I know quite a lot about Spencer Pratt.

Years ago, I wrote a book called Celebrity, Inc.: How Famous People Make Money. It was essentially Harvard Business School case studies for celebrity culture: how famous people monetize reality television, personal branding, social media, endorsements, and attention itself. At the time, I was writing less about Instagram influencers and more about Charlie Sheen getting paid for one of the first branded tweets.

This was the very early era of celebrities turning themselves into billboards. Not just for products they endorsed, but for products they created, identities they sold and entire lifestyles they monetized.

I had several chapters in the book devoted to reality television, and one of the biggest focused on Spencer Pratt.

To report it, I interviewed Spencer multiple times over the course of about six months (including one long brunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel). And I discovered a few things.

First: Pratt is intensely charismatic.

Second: He’s really freaking smart.

Third: There is no limit to his ambition.

He also understood where culture was heading before almost anyone else did.

Long before influencing became a legitimate career path, Spencer Pratt knew that attention itself was a commodity. Fame no longer needed to come from talent or accomplishment or even likability. It just needed to come from being impossible to ignore.

People laughed at Spencer and Heidi back then. They treated them like a punchline. But revisiting this chapter now, in a world where virality and politics are basically indistinguishable from each other, it feels a lot less like nostalgia and a lot more like a warning we should have listened to.

Some of my favorite lines:

“I was like, ‘This is awful. I have to get on a television show because that is the easiest job in the world,’” Pratt said.

“I thought, ‘Wow being yucky just got me a $40,000 promotion. I’m cool with this,” Pratt said. His mentality was, “We’re not raping people, we’re not killing people, we’re not racist. It’s better than going to work and being a jerk and not getting paid to be a jerk.”

“We were divorcing each other’s brands and in our world that was so logical,” Pratt said.

Today, I’m excerpting my chapter on Spencer Pratt from Celebrity, Inc. because it turns out the prototype for modern political celebrity culture and also perhaps a warning to us all.

I am giving away a one-year subscription to this substack FREE when you pre-order Parisian Heist from anywhere. You can enter your details here and I will add you for free for the next year. I won’t do anything weird with your emails. Except send you glorious musings in the middle of the night.

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I loved looking at art and I certainly bought a lot of art while tr…

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American Rambler is a gorgeous blend of memoir, history, and travelogue and an ode to the American heartland, a meditation on…

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And Nick Aster got me new sweatpant jeans on our way home from our Mother’s Day with this amazing racing stripe. I haven’t taken these off.

Real Simple magazine also gave this rave to Parisian Heist.

“It’s a dazzling read with a powerful message about taking control of your legacy.”

And finally, me seeing my billboard for the very first time. Yeeeeeeeeep!

And then Glynnis came to see the billboard too after a two-Bloody Mary Brunch.

Ok so now onto my latest productivity hack. I have starting making a DONE list, in addition to a TO DO list.

I am a massive list maker, my to-do list runs my life and I am insane about making sure that everything is ticked off every day or moved onto the next day’s list.

I got this cutie list when I was in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

As much as I love checking items off my to do list, it’s just not enough for me right now. I often feel like I’m simply not getting enough done, like I’m failing at a certain part or many parts of my life every single day.

I also know rationally this is not true. I am actually doing about five jobs right now, writing books, consulting, making various podcasts. And then momming, wife-ing and friending.

Yet, by the end of the day something starts to nag me. Did I work on the new book enough? Did I promote Parisian Heist enough for the day? Did my kids feel loved enough? And then what about all the housework—laundry, general clutter. Should I text a friend?

It’s the hamster wheel of feeling like we should be doing all the things all at once.

BLARGH! So at the end of the day I have been doing a DONE list.

And this can include work, family, social, domestic tasks. I either write it or type it to myself in an email. Sometimes I send myself a voice memo and have my transcribing app write it up for me so I’m not giving myself even more work. Here is what it looked like for yesterday. Nothing is too big or small for me to put on it.

I am giving away a one-year subscription to this substack FREE when you pre-order Parisian Heist from any bookstore. You can enter your details here. I hate asking people to pre-order. It feels shameful and dumb and yet it is the number one thing you can do to support me and my writing right now. THANK YOU. SMOOCHES.

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I loved the new musical Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) from the moment that I saw a YouTube video of one of their songs.

It was this one.

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I have a fun invite from my friend Amy Nelson for anyone looking to start their own hustle. Starting tomorrow she’s hosting a fun, free 10-day challenge called the **Set Up Your Solo Business in 10 Days.

We also got a great review of Parisian Heist in Publisher’s Weekly.

“Potent questions about artistic integrity and family ties ripple through Piazza’s d…

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After the train museum we set forth to a working Amish farm called Old Windmil…

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…

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Onto the greatest hotel my k…

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But stuff is sometimes nice too. This newsletter is designed to be forwarded to the present-getters in your life. And let them know the cherry on top is a pre-order o…

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