In her 2001 memoir, A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk writes that “in motherhood, a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings.” Cusk’s feelings of invisibility and loneliness were met with relentless criticism. “I was accused of child-hating,” Cusk recounts, “of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering, and, most often, of being too intellectual.” Many readers critiqued Cusk’s desire to make those private meanings legible, digestible, even to the extent these struggles were shared.
It might seem strange that the literary, Oxford-educated Cusk would belong in such close proximity to the figure of the internet “tradwife,” but both court controversy for mothering out loud. The tradwife, short for “traditional wife,” is a married mother of, usually, several children, whose baking, cooking, gardening, and home duties are boundless but elegantly executed, making for inspiring, infuriating social media content. Her husband might be a man in finance, or he might spend his days managing a cattle farm. What he does is irrelevant, and, to an extent, what she does is less revealing than what she doesn’t do. The tradwife doesn’t have a full-time job outside the home; she doesn’t mess around with processed foods; she probably doesn’t send her kids to public school; she doesn’t fight her husband to “wear the pants,” since she’s happy in her gingham nap dress.
The tradwife projects conservative values but in a wildly incoherent way, once you consider that acting the part of the perfectly old-fashioned housewife is her full-time social media–enabled job: Would a truly “traditional” wife insert herself into the public square this way, propping up a lucrative persona with a prop-husband and prop-kids? How often are these “traditional” rural paradises being subsidized, even bankrolled entirely, by fat cat fathers-in-law and conservative lobbying groups? (The answer is: a lot.) Hannah Neeleman, a Juilliard-trained ballet dancer turned trad-mother of nine, attracted scorn, sympathy, then scorn again, from readers of her 2024 New York Times profile, who had plenty to say about her husband’s considerable family fortune. But, in an attention economy, disgust and admiration are worth the same dollar amount. It’s all engagement, mama.
As an influencer’s identity online threatens to overtake her responsibilities off camera, she becomes an unreliable narrator, the novelist Adriane Leigh has written in CrimeReads. The mystique and duplicity of the tradwife have precipitated a cycle of popular fiction, many of these novels skewing toward the mystery or thriller genres. These include Saratoga Schaefer’s Trad Wife, Jo Piazza’s Everyone Is Lying to You, Liane Child’s The Trad Wife’s Secret, and, now, Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear.
Yesteryear is not really a thriller, though it is thrilling, and it is not a mystery novel, though the action revolves around a singular puzzle: How did Natalie Heller Mills, one of the world’s most (in)famous tradwife influencers, wake up one morning to find herself not in her modern-day, renovated farmhouse but on a nineteenth-century farm, with zero amenities and nonstop toil? How did she get here, and how the hell is she going to get back?
The extremely online will not be shocked by Yesteryear’s revelations: that the tradwife is phony, that her life is a sham, and so on. But the character of Natalie, shrewd and indelibly observant, speaks with an idiosyncratic voice that takes the reader on a turbulent tour of women’s rage throughout history. A college-age Natalie scours the internet forums, encountering questions such as Why do modern women hate themselves so much? Why is the anger getting worse? Where does unhappiness come from? Shortly afterward, she drops out of school to start a family.
Feminism is not to blame for all this rage and misery, and a traditional lifestyle certainly is no antidote—as Natalie knows, even while her entire business model hinges on pretending otherwise. Leigh asks why we listen to these influencers and why we choose to believe them; Burke wants to know why we hand them our attention even when we know they’re faking it.
At the beginning of Natalie’s journey as an influencer, she attends a webinar designed to help fellow farmwives find their audience. This requires them, as Natalie notes, to “hold so many contradicting truths” at once: that family is everything, except work is also everything; that authenticity is paramount, but that authenticity must be scripted and rehearsed. “It’s the smile,” the instructor says after reviewing Natalie’s posts. “You don’t actually look happy…. Why don’t you practice smiling in a mirror?”
Natalie, a good-but-not-nice girl from Idaho, finds her groove by selling the public on her multimillion-dollar “sweet little farm,” cutely named Yesteryear. There is nothing sweet, however, or little about the life she’s built for herself. Having left Harvard to marry into a political dynasty, Natalie discovers her husband, Caleb, is pleasant enough but a bit of a dud, lacking even an ounce of ambition or emotional maturity. With the help of her wealthy politician father-in-law, she creates a rustic family home that is mostly soundstage, which allows Caleb to cosplay as a cowboy while she rakes in a fortune. The best part? Her tradwife responsibilities allow her to offload the grind of child-rearing to two full-time nannies. “I rarely paid attention to the differences in the children,” she confides to the reader. “Both the girls and the boys spoke similarly, laughed similarly. Their clothing was a rainbow of neutrals.”
The book begins with Natalie wielding a tight grip on her brand—“A flawless Christian woman,” she deems herself the “manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies…. Like a nun in a porno.” This is just as the family is contending with a public-relations crisis, one that the reader will only fully grasp in the novel’s final act. Yet she is not prepared to wake up in a cold bed on a farm that looks just like hers, only one hundred years in the past. “This is my home,” she thinks. “This is not my home.”
In her new life, gruff, bearded “Old Caleb” looks a lot like the rich, useless Caleb she married; the kids are different, but they still look like her and call her Mama. Here, Mary, Natalie’s teenage daughter, is, effectively, the woman of the house. Described by Natalie as “fifteen, going on fifty,” she scowls at her mother’s injuries, her helplessness, and, although all teenage girls find their mothers embarrassing, it isn’t the hormones fueling Mary’s rage. It’s the hard, thankless job of running a home, work that Natalie has only ever played at. When Natalie is finally roped into domestic labor, she scrubs clothes until her hands bleed, and watches with boiling rage as her sons horse around in the fields, dirtying their clothes.
This is what it was like to be a woman in the past—not a life of banana bread and blissful ignorance, but one of taxing work and rough marital sex (the latter of which Natalie comes to enjoy, for what that’s worth). Gaby Del Valle has written in The Baffler of pioneer women, whom tradwives imitate superficially: “Scholarly accounts of pioneer women’s diaries reveal profound unhappiness and constant weariness. Their lives were difficult, both because of the inhospitable conditions of the frontier … and because of the isolation they experienced upon arrival.”
As Natalie adapts to her new, tech-free life of drudgery and domesticity, she strives to embody a social media–ready sense of gratitude and to cultivate closeness with her young daughter, Maeve:
I move through the hours as the best possible version of myself, the most obedient wife, the most loving mother. When Maeve appears in my doorway, I’m already wide awake and smiling, arms outstretched. Good morning, darling. Together, we pick out my outfit for the day (The same gray, stained, catastrophe of a dress as yesterday? Fabulous!), and then I limp outside to retrieve the stupid fucking eggs from the stupid fucking chickens.
Natalie’s attempts at positivity are not part of a sincere effort to adjust. If this is a test from God, she figures she can only pass through true surrender—or, barring that, an imitation of surrender so persuasive that even the Lord Almighty will heart the post.
Women in the past were just as angry as, maybe angrier than, Natalie in the present day. But while Natalie is blessed with many privileges at the beginning of the novel, she is disempowered by a punishing prenuptial agreement, a strict religious upbringing, and extreme patriarchal standards. It is the internet manosphere that launches her brand, as male influencers praise Natalie and her husband’s shtick: their performance of being the “tired young mother and the grinning doltish cowboy.” While these paranoid, vitamin-popping men-children champion her, she also gets plenty of attention from the so-called Angry Women—educated, progressive women who comment on her posts with snark and outrage. These are women like her college roommate Reena, who drinks and parties with abandon, or her high school classmate Vanessa, whom she runs into at Target.
Natalie’s insults for these women, real and imagined, only prove that she is the angriest woman of them all. “The Angry Women, after all, are defined by their own infinite capacity for restlessness,” she explains. “If you want to keep them entertained, you must be willing to constantly raise the stakes.” Yesteryear is a book about women angrily watching each other—mothers and daughters, creators and consumers—ostensibly looking for models but, more often, searching for somewhere to pin all that rage.
In one of her crueler moments, Natalie, still a rising star on social media, eviscerates her sister Abigail’s plan to leave an abusive husband. She describes feeling “sick” with anger. “Do you honestly think the rules don’t apply to you?” she demands, detailing custody-related nightmare scenarios. “That you can just waltz away from all your responsibilities, completely unscathed?” Their mother, watching in horror, can only offer hollow reassurances to a weeping Abigail.
Natalie’s outburst is truly a comment on her own marital despair, taking shape as frustration and judgment. The outcry against Cusk has echoes of this moment from Burke’s story. Are women looking to one another for a way out, or for confirmation that there are no good choices available, that there really is no escape from Yesteryear Ranch?
Throughout her time with Mary, Maeve, and Old Caleb, Natalie attempts to get away. The first time she tries to run, she is wounded by a stray trap and is forced to hobble around on an ankle roughly sutured with twine. Then she finds herself pregnant in a world where her role is to “have as many children as I can until my legs give out beneath me … [t]o smile while the spirit hemorrhages out of me.” But even as her body makes the world smaller and trickier to navigate, Natalie refuses to believe that the rules—these rules—apply to her. She surveys the property for proof that this is not a divine trial after all, but a sadistic reality television show with a legal team on standby.
“A strange, numbing sense of relief” floods Natalie at the prospect that this might all be a setup. “America hates women,” she realizes. “What a comfort to remember.”
Yesteryear is bound to draw comparisons to other titles in the tradwife mini-genre, but it has more in common with breakout bestsellers like Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir or Maud Ventura’s My Husband—voice-driven first-person accounts in which women make questionable choices and often pepper their recollections with strategic falsehoods. These unreliable narrators lend a kind of immediacy to the proceedings: The reader feels close to the action but can never get close enough.
In Yesteryear, Natalie’s intimate tell-all account of her fall from preening influencer to humbled survivor makes thematic sense: She doesn’t know how to behave without an audience, and, when she runs out of lies, she is forced to reveal her truth. The resolution of the novel’s central conceit leans too heavily into the unreliability of our narrator, but Natalie Mills remains heinous and fascinating to the end. Had she been born a man, she could have accrued enough power to wreck the world, but as a woman cowed by conventional gender roles, she can only ruin one life: her own.
One more title, then, comes to mind as a companion to Yesteryear: Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2008 American Wife. A novel about a bookish young woman who also marries the dumbest son in a political family, American Wife is essentially a work of fan fiction that asks liberal readers: What if Laura Bush was “one of ours”? Outwardly, women like Bush, Usha Vance, or that Republican-coded lady in the Harris 2024 ad proudly serve as models of conservative values. But imagine: What if they are secretly as mad as we are, and about the same things?
When Natalie’s husband first exposes her to one of his favorite internet personalities, she is too smart to fall hard. “This guy looks like a whacko,” she remarks. Privately, she fumes about career women who aspire to lean in, but her contempt is suffused with resentment toward a male-dominated world, vowing that the “stupidest path is … accepting a job in an industry designed, filled, and run by men.” And publicly, she shies away from interviews, dreads run-ins with fans, and avoids honest conversations with her husband about his pet conspiracy theories. What sort of vitriol might slip out, after all, in a single moment of unguarded honesty?
Women have been angry, and for a long time. But anger doesn’t necessarily translate to the kind of constructive, “revolutionary” feeling that, as Rebecca Traister has written, can make societal change. Yesteryear recognizes that and ends not on a radical note but with something closer to regret. As one of Natalie’s daughters writes in the closing of the book, “Do you know what makes me the saddest, Mama? How much beauty you’ve missed.” By creating a nostalgia-laced fantasy of life on the farm, Natalie has neglected the possibilities around her—opportunities that her daughter nonetheless senses and is determined to explore. Despite the horrors of the present, this new generation still believes there is more beauty to be found from gazing ahead than from looking back.
It’s a reprieve, a moment of gentleness and hope, in a book powered mainly by rage. I liked it, but, if I’m being honest: I’m still angry.
