In Everyone is Lying to You, the pressure to present an idealized, sincere self for public view creates a sharp divide between a crafted identity and lived experience. Rebecca bases her brand on staged simplicity. Her life does not unfold effortlessly; she constructs it to be intentionally palatable to her audience, even if that means deceiving them. On “media day,” she and her team shoot a week of posts, arranging scenes that mimic casual moments. Her children, already awake and fed, climb back into bed so she can film them waking in sponsored pajamas. She pins laundry to a clothesline for a slow-motion shot even though her family uses an industrial dryer. Rebecca explains that the only way to appear real online is to “reveal tiny imperfections, but never big ones” (18). Her online self becomes a separate, commercial figure that requires constant upkeep and deception, particularly because her marriage is so tense and unhappy. 

That split has a physical counterpart in the gap between her family’s real living space and the spotless farmhouse seen by millions. The family hides in a cluttered “shadow house” attached to the pristine showhouse. This arrangement offers a direct picture of the space between Rebecca’s online identity and her actual life. The showhouse is a set, while the shadow house holds the chaos of six children and the frightening reality of her husband’s abuse. The performance of a blissful domestic life shields her and traps her at the same time. It renders her suffering invisible and creates irony when millions of women look at her posts and envy her life. However, the false narrative that Rebecca stages to create content also provides a lifeline for her and her children: It allows her to generate the money and the business leverage to prepare to leave her husband and start a new life. 

The various female influencers who appear in the novel are pressured to present idealized pictures of motherhood and womanhood. This commodification of authenticity has consequences both for the women who consume this content and those who are obscured by it. Lizzie initially feels depressed about the inadequacy of her own life when she contrasts it with the curated images on her feed, even though she eventually comes to see that she is happier and safer than most of the influencers. Women like Katie and Olivia have their labor erased because acknowledging them would disrupt the narrative of mothers effortlessly meeting all of the needs of their families. However, the social media economy is ultimately depicted ambiguously, as both a potential source of empowerment and a potential trap. Women like Rebecca and Veronica achieve significant financial independence and power, but they do so at the expense of shaping impossible expectations for other women.