Have you ChatGPT'd yourself yet?

Sorry, Google, you’re old news. There’s a popular new kid in town who has capitalized on our sadly human tendency to continually seek confirmation of our relevance. With Google versus AI, it’s sort of like comparing dial-up to hi-speed WiFi. Instead of barfing out bunch of links as Google does in answer to a query about oneself, in mere seconds, ChatGPT whips out a detailed dossier.

Check out what that crafty AI robot had to say about yours truly when given the prompt: What are some common themes in Suzy Vitello’s novels:

Suzy Vitello's novels often explore deeply human themes, with a particular focus on adolescence, identity, and the complexities of family relationships. Here are some common themes found across her work:

1. Coming of Age:
   Many of Vitello’s stories feature teenage protagonists navigating the challenges of growing up. This includes dealing with trauma, loss, love, and the search for selfhood.

2. Grief and Loss:
   Death and emotional loss are recurring elements. Her characters frequently cope with the death of a parent, sibling, or friend, and much of the emotional arc revolves around healing and transformation.

3. Secrets and Lies:
   Hidden truths—whether within families or among friends—play a significant role. Characters often uncover or are forced to confront secrets that change their understanding of themselves and others.

4. Family Dynamics:
   Vitello’s work often portrays imperfect families, showing the tensions, miscommunications, and occasional reconciliations that shape her characters' emotional lives.

5. Female Empowerment and Voice:
   Her young female protagonists are complex, flawed, and strong in their own way. They struggle to find their voice in environments that often try to silence or mold them.

6. Emotional Authenticity:
   Whether it’s anxiety, longing, or self-doubt, Vitello captures the raw emotions of her characters with realism and depth, often drawing readers into the intense inner lives of young people.

But, like every leap in the tech world, there are the cautions. There’s a lot of discourse about AI and its impact on the future of literature. Currently, authors’ books¹ are being scrubbed for content under the auspices of “training.” The robots are getting smarter—and voicier—as they steal our words. At this point, in artificial intelligence’s infancy, irony and nuance are largely absent from AI-generated content. But as the technology evolves, AI will bend more toward subtlety and likely learn to mimic emotional nuances enough to win over a huge share of readers. I see a future where the new batch of tech-heads come up with a way to correlate certain types of AI-built books with sales. Then we’re really fucked.

For the above-mentioned reasons, I hesitated to paste a ChatGPT summary of my new novel, The Bequest (OUT SEPTEMBER 9!!). I don’t want to feed the beast, you know. But on the other hand, I sort of like the darkly comic and emotionally charged story descriptors in the summary below. (Also, control-freakery? I’m embarrassed to admit, that’s pretty great twisty verbiage.)

The Bequest

by Suzy Vitello

Genre: Contemporary Fiction / Dark Comedy / Family Drama
Setting: Portland, Oregon, Winter 2024–25

The Bequest is a darkly comic and emotionally charged story about:

• Nadine Bishop, a financially struggling, recently disgraced former restaurant manager and recovering mistress.

• Remmington Martin, a disillusioned, underachieving adult who learns after his father’s death that he may share DNA with Nadine.

• An inheritance scheme, which ties them both to a complicated will involving conditions like sobriety, employment, and cohabitation.

• A deeply troubled legacy left by Dunaway J. Martin, a rich, paranoid, misogynistic patriarch who fathered Remmington through an egg donation and left his estate in legal and emotional chaos.

  SUMMARY

Nadine Bishop, a down-on-her-luck 51-year-old waitress and recovering mistress, is barely scraping by a year after a scandalous relationship with a now-imprisoned restaurateur, Dylan Churchwell. Just before Christmas, she receives a mysterious legal envelope revealing she’s been named in the will of Dunaway J. Martin—her very first affair from decades earlier and the man who secretly used one of her donated eggs to conceive a child via surrogacy.

That child, now an adult, is Remmington Martin, an aimless, self-medicating slacker whose father’s will imposes strict conditions on his inheritance: 90 days of sobriety and employment, under the supervision of none other than Nadine. If Remmington fails, Nadine inherits the entire $2.5 million estate.

Both are resentful of their forced proximity—Remmington bristles at the idea of Nadine as a possible "mother" figure, while Nadine struggles to manage her own baggage, addiction history, and guilt over past choices.

As the pair awkwardly cohabitate in Dunaway’s decaying mansion, they navigate paranoia, power plays, and painful truths about family, legacy, and identity. Their unlikely alliance is further complicated by a nosy neighbor girl with uncanny insight and by the specter of Dunaway’s increasingly deranged final years, in which he veered into far-right conspiracy theories and control-freakery from beyond the grave.

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Key Themes

• Inheritance and entitlement

• Addiction, recovery, and self-sabotage

• Dysfunctional family dynamics

• Redemption and second chances

• Class, gender, and power imbalance

• Aging, especially as a woman

• Satire of wealth, legacy, and ego

1. all of my traditionally published books as well as my self-pubbed collection have been used in this way.