I got an email offering to help promote my book – but the book was one my father wrote in 2002

Last year I wrote about how unpleasant I found the new crop of AI-generated publishing spam:

I don’t like getting spam emails as a general rule, but they’re usually pretty easy to filter and don’t cause more than a momentary spasm of irritation:

• Zodiac Signs That Were Born To Be Billionaires

• You earned this: $5 restaurant credit

• Follow up: Rib Remodeling Craze: How Patients Are Losing 4 Inches - Not Ribs

• Beauty Marks or Cancer Clues?

• You’re so close to 60% off…

• Risk-Taking Is Biblical - New Book where leadership, business and spirituality connect

• Meet the Mom who Turned her Child’s School Anxiety into a Nationwide Movement

Usually when I have a book coming out, I’ll see a slight uptick in PR-related spam for a few weeks following the release date. Nothing too serious, much of it doesn’t make it past my spam filter, and historically they’ve been easy to spot and block from the subject line alone.

This year has been different. Everything takes about five seconds longer to sniff out and they’re using irritatingly relevant target words that make me think I’m hearing from a human being who likes my work:

• Invitation to Showcase Your Book at Our November Literary Awards Event

• Christmas at the Women’s Hotel feels like a return to form in the most Lavery way possible

• I recently revisited Women’s Hotel and found myself utterly charmed

• Invitation to Feature Your Book in Our November Program

Once I see the email is signed “Curator Miracle,” sent from “elitebookagency@gmail.com,” or contains a sentence like “It’s both a celebration and a diagnosis of community” I know where I’m at, of course, but those five seconds make all the difference in the world.”

I did get used to this new style shortly after publishing the piece, and they no longer troubles me in the way they once did.

But last night I got an email with the subject line “Ruthlessly Eliminate Hurry.” I couldn’t help but click on it; I knew the expression well. My father said it often.

The Unnatural Son, 1740

I still have auto-forwarding setup for the email address I used back when my name was Mallory Ortberg, almost a decade ago, and this message had been sent to that address from a “Gail Hernandez”:

"You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life." That's the answer Dallas Willard gave you, years ago, when you called him mid ministry crisis asking how to stay spiritually healthy. Soul Keeping grew out of that decades long relationship, and you wrote it the year after Willard died, which is part of why people describe it as a kind of Tuesdays with Willard. This six session study guide isn't teaching a concept you picked up secondhand, it's translating a mentorship into something a small group can actually work through together, what the soul needs, how grace and gratitude restore it, what growth actually looks like when hurry stops running the show.

A study built on that kind of source material speaks directly to a few specific reader groups.

Small groups already using the video study who need the guide to structure their weekly sessions.

Readers introduced to Dallas Willard through your writing who want to go deeper into his ideas without starting with denser academic texts.

Christians feeling depleted by a hurried, overscheduled life who are looking for language to name what’s actually missing.

A 4.6 rating across 425 reviews is a strong, established base for a study guide this specific in format, and it tells me groups are actually finishing all six sessions together rather than losing momentum partway through.

Given how established this guide already is, the clearest opportunity is Goodreads Momentum Builder, since a study this well reviewed should be showing up on more spiritual formation and small group lists than it currently is. Reader List Building could also make sense if you want a way to reach group leaders directly about future studies, rather than relying on Amazon alone.

Just reply and let me know if either is worth exploring, and I’ll send the full breakdown.

But of course that is not the answer Dallas Willard gave me when I called him during a ministry crisis; that is the answer Dallas Willard gave my father, John Ortberg Jr., quite a few years ago now.

I could not help but reply. I do not speak to my father, and he does not speak to me; we do not send one another messages through intermediaries and I do not look him up, but I wanted to talk to Gail about him. I sent her this in reply, although I know perfectly well that no such person as Gail exists, and all I have done now is mark myself as “likely to respond” on a list somewhere.

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, ~1885

Hi Gail,

What’s remarkable about this AI-generated spam is that you sent this to a very old email address, associated with a very old name, which still auto-forwards to my current email address. I’ve changed my name twice since that one.

What’s even more remarkable is the book you’re trying to sell me a promotional package for is not one I ever wrote, but by my estranged father, John Ortberg. I’ve never called Dallas Willard in the middle of a ministry crisis. My father did that, many years ago.

Once Dallas Willard came over to my family home and I spent all afternoon cooking for him, because I felt guilty that I was no longer religious, and I knew this deeply grieved my parents, and I wanted to behave hospitably towards him. I know macaroni and cheese was on the menu; I don’t remember what else I made. Several side dishes, certainly. This was maybe ten or twelve years ago, maybe fifteen.

I just looked it up, and Dallas Willard died back in 2013, so it must have been at least fourteen years ago.

As it happens my father is no longer directly in the ministry at all. He resigned in disgrace back in 2020, after abusing his ministerial position to enable my pedophile brother to spend unsupervised and unrestricted time with children. I don’t speak to him now, but I understand that he makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000 a year hosting a religious podcast. I find this personally distasteful, but as this sort of work does not enable him to exploit children, I see no reason to oppose his earning an astonishingly good living for what cannot be very hard work.

I’m not sure I can put you in touch with him. The only email address I remember him having was “Calboy@mppc.org.” (In retrospect, also distasteful.) He’s no longer associated with that church, and that church is no longer known as Menlo Park Presbyterian, so there you are. I don’t think I can remember his phone number off the top of my head anymore, either. I used to know it by heart.

The book you’re thinking of is probably The Life You’ve Always Wanted, which was released in 2002. It currently has 1,099 reviews on Amazon with an average of 4.76 stars. It has over 10,000 reviews on Goodreads and a 4.1 average rating there.

I don’t check my own books on Amazon, but I believe that this book has received substantially more, and better, reviews than any of mine have ever received. It was also on the syllabus for the Foundations of Ministry course I was required to take before graduating from evangelical Christian college in 2009.¹

He’s got a good twenty years on me, of course, having started to publish in the early 90s, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due: He is more successful, and more liked, and more respected, than I am. I don’t mind saying that. He used to tell a fun story in a few of his early books about a naked little dance I used to do around the house as a toddler after bathtime. I called it the “Dee Dah Day” dance. Sometimes as a joke, during college, people would ask me to “do the dance again,” but I did not especially mind it. It was in pretty harmless fun.

I had to look up the title of the book to be sure that’s where the “ruthlessly eliminate hurry” quote came from. I don’t think I’ve looked my father up online since we stopped speaking in 2019.

There’s a terrific picture of him on the Amazon landing page. He used to use it for all his books. It’s probably 20 years old now, but this is still how I picture him. Gail, I can’t tell you how much I used to like to see his face. I found it winsome, charming, endearing, reliable, friendly, and inviting. Looking at that picture now, I think, that’s a face you can trust. And terrific teeth. Not so perfect they look like veneers. He never had veneers, not as long as I knew him; until 2019 at least I can tell you that he never had so much as a cavity. I don’t know about now.

I’ve never had a cavity, either. I believe in giving credit where credit is due.

The About the Author section on his Amazon page is a little out of date, though.

John Ortberg is the senior pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church (MPPC) in the San Francisco Bay Area. His bestselling books include Soul Keeping, Who Is This Man?, and If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat. John teaches around the world at conferences and churches, writes articles for Christianity Today and Leadership Journal, and is on the board of the Dallas Willard Center and Fuller Seminary. He has preached sermons on Abraham Lincoln, The LEGO Movie, and The Gospel According to Les Miserables. John and his wife Nancy enjoy spending time with their three adult children, dog Baxter, and surfing the Pacific. You can follow John on twitter @johnortberg or check out the latest news/blogs on his website at www.johnortberg.com.

He’s no longer the senior pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, as I said above. I believe that now he lives in Santa Barbara with my mother and her mother, my grandmother. I haven’t spoken to either of them since 2019 either, but I do occasionally google my maternal grandmother to see if she’s still alive, and I learned that she now lives at their Santa Barbara address.²

I’m glad she’s living with them; she always worried about having to go to a nursing home. I don’t work in a nursing home now, I work in assisted living, but to plenty of people that’s a difference without a distinction, or a distinction without a difference. I can never remember which.

I think he was allowed to resign from the board at Fuller Seminary, too. I don’t know about the Dallas Willard Center.

I can tell you that John and his wife Nancy do not enjoy spending time with their three adult children. They likely spend time with two of their adult children; I don’t know to what degree they enjoy it. My sister was always sentimental about our brother but did not especially enjoy spending time with him. I don’t know if they’re good friends now, or what.

I know that she sometimes claimed our brother was not allowed to spend time alone with her children, and she sometimes claimed that he was. I found her difficult to pin down on that question. I worry about that.

John is also no longer on Twitter. The dog Baxter is almost certainly dead by now.

All of this is to say, I don’t think my father needs much help in publicizing his books. He’s a very successful man. I wish you all the best in selling your promotional scheme to other authors,

Daniel Lavery (formerly Daniel Ortberg, formerly Mallory Ortberg)

1. I am not even the most successful graduate of my evangelical Christian college. That’s probably Colleen Ballinger, also known as Miranda Sings, who graduated the year before me, or Hailemariam Desalegn, the prime minister of Ethiopia from 2012-2018.

2. I never look up my paternal grandmother. I’m afraid I don’t care if she’s dead or not. I never loved her as much as I loved my maternal grandmother, and I considered her to have behaved not just wrongly but disgracefully with regards to my brother’s pedophilia, such that even if she did used to serve us kids fancy sodas on TV trays when we watched movies at her house (Orange juice, Sprite, Grenadine, all layered like a sunset, the movie I remember watching most often was Rebecca), I no longer miss her. My maternal grandmother I think is basically good-hearted but fundamentally weak, which I find easier to forgive. All this is of course hypothetical, as my maternal grandmother has never said anything to suggest that she would like my forgiveness.