Author Interview: True Life in Uncanny Valley by Deb Caletti

Author Interview: True Life in Uncanny Valley by Deb Caletti

What happens when the lines between truth and illusion start to blur, not just in the world around us, but within our own families? In True Life in Uncanny Valley, Deb Caletti unpacks this question through the eyes of Eleanor, a young woman pulled into a high-tech, high-stakes unraveling of identity, secrecy, and what it means to be truly seen. We chatted with Deb to talk about the inspiration behind the story, how technology is reshaping our relationships, and why the search for connection in an increasingly disconnected world hits closer to home than ever. True Life in Uncanny Valley is available now!

True Life in Uncanny Valley

by Deb Caletti
Published by: Labyrinth Road
on March 18, 2025
Genres: Contemporary, Contemporary Romance, Young Adult
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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?

Author Interview

In this story, Eleanor embarks on a journey of uncovering family secrets and questioning her own identity. What inspired you to explore themes of self-deception and the search for truth, especially in the context of technology and family dynamics?

I wasn’t exploring self-deception as much as other-deception. Or, rather, the ways it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell what is real in this current vortex of AI, misinformation, and the online presentations of perfect people leading perfect lives. We seem to be getting further and further away from what is true, and that worries me. Every one of my books is inspired by something weighing on my mind, and, along with that thought, I’d also been concerned about how and why we’re not seeing each other. I wanted to explore this, and to dive deep into what might be a crucial component of that why – narcissism, and how it plays out in both the largest arena of society and the smallest circle of a family. The two worries I was having definitely intersect.

Hugo Harrison’s inventions and the world of AI play a significant role in the story. How do you see technology shaping our understanding of ourselves and our relationships? Do you think we’re becoming more disconnected from reality as technology evolves, as seen in the novel?

A large part of narcissism is the inability to see others. Not truly seeing others has been an ugly truth for generations, but lately, there seems to be an ever-growing epidemic of it, and certain uses of AI and technology in general reflect that. The effects of technology on the best parts of our humanity are too numerous for one novel, but True Life in Uncanny Valley particularly zeroes in on social media, rife with false presentations, and AI and the theft of our creative work to train it. As the book discusses, 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 part of what makes us most human. In the book, I mention other seemingly-unbelievable tech, too, that seems to rattle the very heart our humanity. That tech is based in truth, though – either here now or currently being researched. So, yes – I definitely think all of this is taking us farther from what is real, and the most cherished parts of being human.

Eleanor’s decision to lie in order to infiltrate Hugo’s world is central to the plot. How do you approach writing complex characters who use deception to explore their identities? What do you hope readers take away from Eleanor’s experiences with secrecy, both in her personal life and her relationship with Hugo?

I think it was important to show that Eleanor’s deception was understandable and justifiable, so that we could root for her and worry for her. In spite of having a famous, billionaire father she never knew, Eleanor is in a predicament that many readers might relate to. Her parents aren’t divorced, but she is in a familial dynamic that many kids of divorce have experienced, where the relationship with one parent is considered a betrayal to the other parent. Eleanor is also the ill-fitting, left-out member in her family of three – her mom and sister are practically best friends, and she is hoping, hoping so hard, that the missing Hugo Harrison will be her connection, the one who might actually see her and accept her. In her house, though, Hugo is the enemy. She doesn’t dare even try to reach out in fear of angering and further alienating her mom. So, when she gets this chance to live with and get to know Hugo, his glamorous wife, Aurora, and her little half-brother… She has to do it, even if it involves increasingly catastrophic lies. Because of her family dynamics, Eleanor has a deep need to be seen and understood. My biggest hope is that readers who might relate to this will themselves feel seen and understood.

Many thanks to Penguin Random House for gifting a finished copy!






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