T
he phrase “no filter” could have
been invented for Jonathan Joly.
No one I’ve ever interviewed
has implored me so often after
oversharing (“Please don’t write
that!”) which is odd because so
much of his family’s life is already out
there: on YouTube, TikTok and Insta-
gram, and now in his memoir, All My
Friends Are Invisible, where he reveals
his struggles with his mental health and
gender identity.
Joly, 41, and his wife, Anna Saccone,
34, began sharing their life on YouTube
in 2014, uploading videos about every-
thing from their dates to trips to the
supermarket with their four children.
They hit on a successful formula — the
Saccone Jolys became the biggest family
YouTube channel in Europe, with 1.7
million subscribers. They even shared
videos of Saccone giving birth.
Before YouTube, Joly worked in mar-
keting, Saccone was a beauty vlogger,
but they soon earned enough from pro-
motional posts and other YouTube work
to give up their jobs. Fans were invested
in their lives, posting concerned com-
ments if they took a day off. There were
critics too, questioning their decision to
bring up their four children, Emilia,
nine, Eduardo, seven, Alessia, four, and
Andrea, three, in the public eye.
Then two years ago everything
changed. The couple quit YouTube and
Joly changed his whole focus. He and
Saccone are both still on TikTok and Ins-
tagram, where he has 2.2 million and
1 million followers respectively, but Joly
uses it to talk about mental health.
I met Joly at the family’s vast home in
Surrey. Their kitchen resembles a show-
room, and they have a second garden
used only by their Maltese dogs. This is
the house that YouTube supremacyTHE MAN WHO SOLD HIS
CHILDREN TO YOUTUBE
buys. “It’s hard to walk away from,” he
says. “It’s a six-figure job — but it wasn’t
worth it.” His children’s struggles were
the catalyst for logging off. Emilia had
anxiety and Eduardo was having “an
identity crisis”, wanting to wear dresses.
It made Joly think about his own iden-
tity. To the astonishment of fans, he put
his own “coming out” video on YouTube
six months ago, although it wasn’t clear
what he was coming out as. In his mem-
oir, he writes that he was really a girl, yet
he says he is fine with male pronouns.
“I wouldn’t put a label on me. My sexual
orientation, I think, is straight. I’ve never
been attracted to men.” He goes fur-
ther: “I have no male friends. It’s prob-
ably because my emotional intelligence
is so high; I feel the level of conversa-
tion with men is empty.” He enjoys
“being a girl”, but doesn’t want to tran-
sition. “[My] label... is probably non-
binary, but I feel like: I’m Jonathan.”
He writes about imaginary friends
and fears readers will see this as an
admission of mental illness, repeatedly
saying: “This is pure madness.”
That isn’t the “maddest” part. “I
never wrote a book before; I never read
a book either,” he admits. When he
received the draft from his editor, he was
horrified at having to check it: “Read
the whole thing? F***ing hell, like!”
Joly seems the embodiment of the
fact that the perfect life posted on social
media isn’t real. His memoir describes
an unhappy childhood in Dublin; his
parents were trapped in a miserable
marriage. He admits to having a com-
petitive attitude that meant he couldn’t
“just join YouTube, I had to become the
biggest YouTube person in the world”.
Does he ever think about returning to
YouTube? “I have four kids in private
school and a mortgage, so it’s tempting,
but that’s just going back in the box.” cAll My Friends Are Invisible is out nowa different sex or gender or background.
I start worrying about what the reaction
might be because it’s so unfathomable.
And that is scary because writers
shouldn’t be following the agenda, they
should be setting it. But that’s not hap-
pening any more. You get writers mak-
ing extraordinary statements, like Sebas-
tian Faulks who said he would never
describe what a woman looked like any
more because that’s objectifying.
“Sebastian is a very clever person.
And when he starts saying things like
that all writers have to begin to trem-
ble. Lionel Shriver goes to the press
and makes statements which are delib-
erately, it seems, inflammatory. I don’t
want to go down that route. My aim is
Jonathan Joly turned his family into a social media
soap opera — then it imploded. By Rosamund Urwin
Loyal following Jonathan Joly’s family
have 1.7 million YouTube subscribersWhodunnit? Lesley Manville and Tim
McMullan star in the adaptation of the
crime novel by Anthony Horowitz, left
| BOOKS
to entertain, to not get involved in spu-
rious and unsolvable rows.”
But whatever the problems, writing
is to Horowitz what breathing is to the
rest of us. He has range, writing TV
scripts, the Alex Rider children’s nov-
els and plays, even though his first one,
Mindgame, was trashed by the critics.
Perhaps because of that, one of his
forthcoming books — The Twist of a
Knife — is about a critic who is stabbed.
Horowitz is nothing if not prolific.
Soon there’ll be a third Susan Ryeland
book, a TV script of the second — Moon-
flower Murders — and Nine Bodies in a
Mexican Morgue, about a plane crash in
the jungle after which the nine survi-
vors start to be murdered.
“The punchline is really innovative.
There’s no killer, incidentally. It’s got a
little bit of Agatha Christie’s And Then
There Were None in there.”
The mention of Christie signals that
he is a grateful inheritor of the Golden
Age of British murder mysteries. This is
being widely revived, notably by Rich-
ard Osman, under the heading “cosy
crime”. It’s a category he resists. “The
idea, for me, of writing books that are
simply throwbacks to the Forties and
Fifties is quite uninteresting. So as
much as I love the golden age of crime,
it’s called cosy because what came after
that is blood splatter and rape and pae-
dophilia. I’m not interested in messy
violence and harsh realities. I like a
sense of nostalgia, but I slightly react
against cosy crime as a genre.”
Admittedly, any description of
Horowitz’s stories should begin with
the words: “It’s complicated.” But
Horowitz’s life has been complicated.
The family started off rich in Stanmore,
but his father was a strange, distant
man and his primary school was “an
evil place”. He was an overweight
underachiever until he went to Rugby
School where three gifted teachers
brought out the writer in him.
His father died when he was 22 and,
it turned out, he had been transferring
all his money into Swiss bank accounts.
The family was left bankrupt.
“It’s never bothered me. In a way I
had a fresh beginning because of that
bankruptcy and having to re-mould my
own life on my own two feet.”
His own two sons, Nicholas and Cas-
sian, have had no such problems. They
set up Clerkenwell Brothers, an adver-
tising and media company, and Cassian
is now working with Rishi Sunak.
“I know the day will come when
somebody writes an article calling me
‘Anthony, father of Cass’.”
We wrap up. “Are we done? Oh
good. Phew! Sorry, that phew wasn’t
about tiredness, it was because I don’t
think I’ve said anything too stupid or
controversial.”
Then he goes off to play, at my
request, the Ivy Club’s little piano. cMagpie Murders is on Britbox from
ThursdayNICK WALL. INSET: BRYAN APPLEYARDWriters must lead the
agenda, not be cowed
into following it
6 February 2022 9