One Sentence Description: It's a book about Americans who believe that they are missing some critical piece of themselves, some piece of the person-hood pie.

Light Thesis: The great, unifying struggle in millennial America is an individual's deeply complicated relationship with performance. Chiefly, one's own performance. A large number of the fears and anxieties of my generation are grounded firmly in a sort of perpetual stage fright. This is, of course, by no means a new issue or problem. Humans have referred to/thought about themselves as some sort of performer for a while. And the hurts/hopes/meaningful stuff associated with this idea has been well documented in all facets of the culture. I submit that now, however, the self-as-actor-thing turns out to be one of our biggest sources of pain and misery. The inner dialogue, using the Internet as medium, has become a stage. A stage with an audience. A status update is a scene. A tweet is an open mic. The stories/characters in "Always Pies" illustrate the effects of "constant audience" at both an individual and cultural level.

-Major Themes-

American Representations of:

Drug addiction.
Sex.
Divorce.
Child Custody Fights.
Death.
Fatherhood.
The State of the American Dream
Loneliness.
Escapism.