Yesteryear

by Caro Claire Burke

In her debut novel, Yesteryear, politics and cultural commentator Caro Claire Burke unflinchingly tackles the popularity of tradwife influencers--both the systems that incubate them and the audiences that idolize or scorn them.

Natalie Heller Mills is obsessed with perfection. Once a young, conservative Ivy League student at odds with her professors and roommate, she latched on to the wealthy Caleb Mills as a way to escape her own family. But when she discovers her husband to be rudderless and the birth of her first daughter doesn't spark a maternal connection, she makes a deal with her father-in-law for him to fund an idyllic, palpably manly and Christian pursuit: running a ranch named Yesteryear and living in a house obsessively renovated and curated to "feel authentic." The money will continue as long as she provides a portrait of a traditional American family to bolster his political image. After all, "the job of a woman was threefold. Be a mother, be a wife, and keep the household clean. Oh--and don't forget to smile!"

Now, she is a pregnant mother of five capturing perfectly lit videos of her seemingly perfect family for Instagram. Behind closed doors, does it really matter that her husband is a fairly useless member of an American political dynasty who isn't interested in anything other than the "manosphere" and fringe podcasts? And maybe they can't successfully grow vegetables without secret pesticides or keep cows alive without the help of off-camera migrant workers. But as long as her followers don't know how much money or behind-the-scenes machinations are required to maintain her carefully crafted image, she can continue her sanctimonious reign as a Good Christian Woman espousing a return to the ways of old. What her family has now, in terms of help, allows her to be "present with both my children and my followers in all the ways I wanted to be at all the different points throughout the day. That's the thing about being a mother and a wife and an influencer, all at the same time: it's basically like breastfeeding three babies simultaneously. Like seducing three loves at once."

She just needs to continue powering through her unhappiness--fueled by her obsession with the Angry Women in her social media comments section who love to hate her while being unable to look away--and to keep succeeding. That is, until her husband discovers that she's directing some of her influencer revenue to her own bank account, her new producer seems interested in more than just her job description, and her sheltered preteen daughter asks, with derision, what a tradwife is in one breath before saying she no longer wants to be filmed in the next.

As Natalie's world unravels, one morning she wakes in what seems to be the actual days of yesteryear. Her house has the same layout but none of the hidden appliances and modern conveniences. There are four children calling her mama and a man calling her wife, all of whom seem to be uncanny near-facsimiles of her real family, but rather cold. Panicked and believing she's been abducted, she tries to escape, but she is injured in a bear trap, dragged back, roughly sewn up, and set to the work of a Good Christian Woman. Scrub the laundry on a washboard until her hands crack and bleed. Churn butter. Make soap. Repeat. Is this a reality show full of hidden cameras, giving her what she has claimed she wanted all these years? ("I tried to convince myself that the things I'd seen weren't actually there, that in my fear, I'd misunderstood a cardboard cutout for the real thing.") Is it a test from the Lord? Where is the hidden audience she can still feel watching, and how long will they leave her in this unforgiving, harsh world?

Through a propulsive plot, Burke takes an honest and sometimes scathing look at the systems and people creating a cultural climate that engenders both performative and authentic tradwifery and its associated ideals. This includes Natalie's audience of Angry Women, struggling within a male-dominated society while claiming to have a better, freer way of life. But how often do these women lie to themselves, Natalie rails internally, and how autonomous are their choices, really? Even as she fails to realize how much of her belief she has chosen and created, her own life may be misguided--or altogether untrue.

In sharp, biting prose, Burke writes an unlikable yet sympathetic protagonist who will push readers to engage with the complexities of choice and performance in a timely, tense novel that is perfectly balanced on the pulse point of the current cultural landscape. From its undaunted, straightforward declarations of "America hates women. What a comfort to remember" to the deftly observed paragraphs unfolding the lie Natalie has been sold about the effortless joy that is motherhood and womanhood, Burke asks what the combination of the state of American politics and addictive, unlimited Internet access has wrought for men and women alike. Full of juicy fodder for book club discussions and group texts, Yesteryear smartly weaves big concepts into a scintillating narrative that will keep readers hooked and gasping to the very end. --Kristen Coates

Caro Claire Burke (credit: Aistė Saulytė Photography)

Caro Claire Burke received her Master's in Fine Arts from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the co-host of Diabolical Lies, a politics and culture podcast. Yesteryear (coming from Knopf on April 7), her first novel, is about a "traditional" American woman promoting her pioneer lifestyle to her social media followers. Then she wakes up one morning seemingly 170 years in the past. 

How did you become interested in the "tradwife" segment of social media?

In the winter of 2024, I was a very burnt-out writer who had been writing fiction for years and needed to take a break. On a whim, I downloaded TikTok. I ended up becoming involved in conversations about feminism and media literacy as they pertained to the tradwife discourse, which incidentally entered the zeitgeist the same month I downloaded my account. TikTok is a wonderfully democratic platform: if you share a video and enough people resonate with it, then you're in, so to speak. As a person who had spent years trying and failing to get a foot in the door at traditional cultural institutions (pitching culture essay ideas to magazines, for example), it was a shocking experience for me to find a side door. In short order, I grew a following and become a major player in a large cultural conversation which spanned weeks and one morning in that period, I woke up with the full synopsis for a novel in my head. I even had the title.

You co-host a culture podcast--Diabolical Lies--that, among other things, has covered tradwives. How did your work on one inform the other?

My work on Diabolical Lies is often jarringly interconnected with my work as a novelist, even though these are technically two extremely different projects: one exists firmly in the world we live in, requiring me to abide by facts and a basic understanding of reality, and the other allows me to dip into another world entirely, empowering me to diverge from the rigid structure of "fact" in the pursuit of another kind of truth. But both, at the end of the day, come from the same urge to better understand the world around me. Each job influences and fuels the other immensely. I'm lucky in that way.

You've talked about tradwives as a culture critic and have written about them as a debut author. What appealed to you about writing a novel vs. a nonfiction book on the subject? What drew you to making it a thriller, specifically?

I don't think any of these questions were ones I considered in any deliberate sense. I suppose I chose a novel because that's the field I trained in for years; I got my MFA in fiction, and have been writing fiction, both published and unpublished, for over a decade now. It wasn't a decision so much as a creative tic, one I'm sure another writer would recognize: once you have an idea for a story, you're a dog with a bone. It's not rational. It's instinct. As for the question of genre: when I was writing the first draft of the novel, I actually wasn't certain how the book would be marketed. It makes complete sense to me that people see it now as a thriller, but at the time I was focused on all kinds of things: how it operated as thriller, yes, but also how it operated as a black comedy of sorts, and a social satire, and in some ways a strange kind of coming of age.

What questions or feelings did you find yourself working through or exploring as you wrote Yesteryear?

Ha! How much time do you have? Let's just say I see myself in every character in this novel. At this point in my career, it's not clear to me if writing fiction about patriarchy, religious extremism, and structurally enforced misogyny works as a crucial form of emotional catharsis for me, or if I'm slowly marching my way to the nearest asylum by spending so much time immersed in these topics. TBD, I guess.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book was Natalie's relationship to a few core ideas. How would you describe Natalie's relationship to the very ideas of womanhood and motherhood?

Natalie has a very transactional relationship with motherhood, womanhood, and spirituality. This relationship is also quite childlike. She is constantly finding herself disappointed, shocked, and/or outraged by the nuanced way in which each of these realms of identities appears in her adult life. I think her perspective of other women's lives is equally limited. She has an almost pathological ability to misunderstand what another person is thinking or feeling, which means she ends up living in a world of absurdity. I didn't intend to write her this way, it just happened. Every scene that involves Natalie becomes hysterical, mysterious, or terrifying.

What about her relationship to patriarchy, both as a system and to individual men?

I often end up thinking about novels as houses, especially when I'm in the middle of a draft, and in Yesteryear, I view patriarchy as the scaffolding for Natalie as a character. She has built an entire worldview out of patriarchal assumptions, assuming these would hold steady for her entire life--but as everyone knows, scaffolding is a definitionally temporary support system, one you remove when the real work of building something that will last forever is completed. Unfortunately for Natalie, she leans on the flimsy thought structures of patriarchal thinking too hard, thinking they'll hold her. They don't.

The question of choice feels so central to this novel--how much of what happens is Natalie's choice, and how much isn't, for example. Another crucial element is the concept of performance, which is first verbalized by Natalie's mother as a coping mechanism she used to get through daily life while raising her kids. How do those concepts--choice and performance--intersect?

FREE WILL! Now I feel like we're talking on my podcast, where we joke that every conversation always ends up with me with my hands thrown up in the air, gesturing vaguely at the notion of free will. The question of performance is equally dizzying as the question of choice--once you start to think about it, you run the risk of overthinking every element of your life. It's true that we perform versions of ourselves online; that kind of performance is one people tend to feel the most comfortable admitting and discussing with others. But it's also true that we perform at work, and in fitness classes, and at home with the people we cherish most in the world. I'm not convinced anyone has a choice in any of it, but I tend to be a free will pessimist. This reminds me of a line Natalie thinks at one point, one that came to me early and was critical in unlocking the rest of the novel: "Motherhood is its own kind of curation. Which is to say: every woman I know lied to me about what it would be like, before I became one myself."

What role do you think non-supportive spectators (the social media followers Natalie calls the Angry Women) play in the perpetuation of tradwife performance and popularity?

Every performance demands an audience.

Yesteryear feels like it's written to be talked about. What are you hoping readers take away from that interplay?

I have no expectations or hopes for how readers react to this novel. On a personal note, there's nothing more interesting to me as a writer or a person than the grand performance of womanhood. I plan to talk about that for the rest of my life. --Kristen Coates