The Tradwife Novel for the Chronically Online

In an age defined by an inability to trust what you see on the internet, a novel speculating on what lurks behind the serene appearance of a ‘tradwife’ influencer was destined to be a bestseller. Yesteryear, one of 2026’s most anticipated releases, was viral before even being published. It has been subject to two bidding wars: the first, for the book itself, won by US publisher Knopf for an undisclosed amount following an eleven-way battle in June 2024; the second, only a month later, secured the film rights for Amazon MGM Studios for a reported two-million-dollar deal. Cue Anne Hathaway, both leading lady and producer, opening a PR box containing a copy of the coveted advance reading copy, beeswax candles, a Bonne Maman jam jar and a faux needlepoint reading ‘A man may work from sun to sun but a woman’s work is never done.’

When a book has more hype than history, it’s hard not to be sceptical. In an interview, author Caro Claire Burke said that the first draft was written in nine weeks flat. In Yesteryear’s acknowledgements, she enviably (especially for a debut novelist) credits conversations with Hathaway as ‘instrumental in bringing Natalie to life’ and goes on to thank Somewhere Pictures, Entertainment360 and the Amazon film team for their ‘passion, curiosity, and brilliance’. In the era of recycled IP and declining readership, book-to-film adaptations have proved a reliable path for maximising profits. But a novel that is quickly crafted from zeitgeisty discourse, workshopped with a star and likely optimised for shareability begs the question: as a work of art, rather than simply ‘content’, is it any good?

When a book has more hype than history, it’s hard not to be sceptical.

From a distance, Burke may appear to be just another creator-turned-author whose audience predates the work. Indeed, she does have a substantial social media following across TikTok (~158k), Instagram (~48.5k) and the Substack for Diabolical Lies, the culture and politics podcast she shares with Katie Gatti Tassin (~38k). Look a little closer and she also has an MFA from Bennington, the rural Vermont liberal arts college that inspired Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, previous bylines in Marie Claire and the Atlantic, and a Patreon-exclusive fiction project, Cover Stories, which features short fiction based on songs from popular artists like Taylor Swift.

But virality is never a guarantee, even for those with established audiences. The book must be interesting enough to warrant conversation. What sets Yesteryear apart from the fiction debuts of other TikTok-famous writers is Burke’s rare combination of first-hand insight into what a social media audience wants to see and an ability to translate that into a novel that feels like it’s worth reading.

Yesteryear has an extremely online premise. The rise of the apron-clad ‘tradwife’ social media star coincided with both the first Trump election in 2016 and the beginning of the end for the girlboss era. Economic uncertainty and skyrocketing screen times during Covid lockdowns contributed to further growth and the emergence of new faces such as Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman—both wives, mothers and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (US Mormons have been instrumental in shaping MomTok, aligning with the notion in Yesteryear that ‘the business of influence is not a secular calling’.)

At a time when many people were living and working entirely within their homes while fearful of imminent infection, content featuring open spaces, decadent recipes and more ‘natural’ living was a welcome reprieve. At least in the beginning, the generational wealth of many of the women making a name for themselves online went undisclosed, along with any express political affiliations. As time passed, speculation rose about whether these influencers really believe in so-called ‘traditional roles’ and if they were, knowingly or unknowingly, funnels towards the alt-right or victims of it. It’s ripe material for fictional extremes.

The novel is written from the perspective of one such ‘mompreneur’, Natalie Heather Mills. A thirty-two-year-old mother of six children, with another on the way, Natalie does not brand herself as a tradwife. Instead, she describes herself as ‘a flawless Christian woman’ and, with some on-the-nose self-awareness, ‘the manic-pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies’. She broadcasts her ‘perfect’ life to five million ‘souls’ on Instagram from Yesteryear Ranch: part hobby farming project, part homeschool, part content-creation mill and merch store (much like Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm).

In the opening pages, titled ‘The Past’, Natalie firmly establishes herself as the anti-feminist anti-hero you can’t help but hate. Her inner monologue is more Amy Dunne from Gone Girl than Christlike. Soon after, cracks in the veneer start to show in her marriage to Caleb, her feelings about motherhood and her ability to sustain the image she’s worked hard to project. What all online detractors, the ‘Angry Women’ as Natalie calls them, suspect is confirmed to the reader: being a tradwife is not all it’s cracked up to be. When social progress seems to be in freefall and inequality continues to rise, a book that exposes the doomed fantasy of a woman who pretends to be perfect is an attractive one for Angry Women everywhere. In 2026, is there any other kind?

Rather than focus on the quotidian maintenance of the façade, and perhaps to maintain the ravaged attention spans of TikTok users, Yesteryear instead employs a dramatic time-travelling twist. In Part 2, ‘The Present’, Natalie wakes up without any technological comforts, smooth finishes or paid help she had previously relied on but hid from her audience. This second Yesteryear Ranch is in the same Idaho hills and filled with a family that looks like it could be her own, but both are fundamentally different. The book unfolds in parallel timelines between what Natalie is told is 1855 and her path to social media stardom in her old, modern life. Giving readers a chance to see what so many have joked about, how would the trad-wife influencer you love to hate fare if she were required to live a truly ‘traditional’ life, manual laundry, abusive husband and outhouse included?

The constant perspective shifting allows Burke to end each chapter on a cliffhanger, a technique once favoured by newspaper fiction serialists (an extinct breed) and a practical enticement for the brain-rot era. The experience propels the reader forward in search of whether Natalie has time-travelled, if she’s lost her mind or if something else is afoot. If a fiction writer’s main role is to keep readers engaged long enough to make it to the end of the novel, Burke has done this brilliantly. In less than four hundred pages she tackles years of complex family dynamics (from the home she was raised in, the one she lives in now, and her husband’s) and paints each character with as much detail as you believe Natalie’s myopic lens could view them with.

If a fiction writer’s main role is to keep readers engaged long enough to make it to the end of the novel, Burke has done this brilliantly.

Pitched as The Stepford Wives meets The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel diverges most from these canonical feminist texts due to its choice of protagonist. Rather than focusing on the perspective of a woman kept in the dark by scheming men, Natalie is the architect of her own suffering.  Unlike Joanna Eberhart, Natalie was not lured to a brainwashed town. Unlike Offred, she hasn’t been captured by a patriarchal fascist regime. Yesteryear Ranch was her idea. She’s a Serena Joy.

Through first-person narration, Burke gives readers insight into Natalie’s mistaken belief that her terrible choices were the only ones available. After learning that women are unlikely to ‘have it all’ in the way that her mother promised her, ‘a good job and a good family, in Jesus’s name, amen’, Natalie marries Caleb and leaves Harvard before graduating. Unsatisfied with living in his parents’ home and his lack of ambition, Natalie pushes Caleb toward the farm to save herself the embarrassment of an unemployed husband.

Caleb’s intergenerational wealth, at the level that he can simply ‘opt out’ of working at all, provides a buffer against real precarity. This sets Yesteryear aside from other recent titles about women driven mad by ambition, such as Marisa Kashino’s Best Offer Wins, where the protagonist feels harangued by threats to her employment, health insurance and ability to have a family if she can’t secure a stable home due to exploding house prices. For Yesteryear’s Natalie, the threat is all reputational. This is crystallised once she achieves social media stardom, a pay cheque contingent on remaining likeable or at least the right kind of hateable. As the saying goes, never work with children or animals—they may one day age out of being cute set-dressing to say ‘stop filming me’.

Yesteryear may prove the publishing industry is hitting its stride with social media audiences, learning to provide both the types of titles they want to read and the conditions that assure commercial success. The secret: listening to the people who have already figured the algorithm out. In my corner of BookTok, which appears to overlap with Burke’s, the most popular books often feature unreliable narrators, dark jokes and women losing the plot: a tidy summary of Yesteryear. It was no surprise when review copies and praise for them started to flood social media, with one enthusiastic TikTok user stating, ‘This is the culturally defining book of 2026.’

Other reviews seem to unconsciously paraphrase Burke’s own insights in the novel. In Yesteryear, Natalie shares what all social media content makers know is the secret to being successful enough to make it a full-time career: ‘The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.’ In a video reviewing the book, a TikTok user echoes this sentiment, saying: ‘This book is difficult to love, but everyone will have something to say.’ Through mastering the tricks of the creator economy, Burke’s debut has cultivated the status of a ‘must-read’. However, what the novel actually has to say is harder to parse.

Perhaps the story is intended as a cautionary tale about thinking you’re the exception to the rule. In the wake of the second Trump presidency and its implementation of Project 2025 policy goals, this is a timely reminder. Burke nods to this when Caleb falls down the alt-right pipeline after following the links Natalie sent him on public school brainwashing to dissuade him from becoming a kindergarten teacher (‘the professional version of a fully flaccid penis’). A correlation between the tradwife phenomenon and MAGA’s neo-fascism is also suggested when her influencer status is used to bolster her father-in-law’s presidential run on a Nazi-adjacent platform. Natalie discovers far too late that building an income off a public brand as a conservative woman and becoming reliant on her husband’s family’s money makes true independence impossible. The foreseeability of this outcome, and others, detracts from it having any lasting narrative impact.

These developments serve to undermine any empathy Burke has slowly built for the anti-heroine. Despite beginning to understand why Natalie feels the way she does (a potentially lethal combination of postpartum depression and loneliness), Angry Women are only really offered a continuous drip-feeding of comeuppance for Natalie’s crime of selling out her gender in the process.

Through mastering the tricks of the creator economy, Burke’s debut has cultivated the status of a ‘must-read’. However, what the novel actually has to say is harder to parse.

If the terrible men make Yesteryear sound heteropessimistic, rest assured, Natalie is just as suspicious of women. It seems the one conservative belief she genuinely subscribes to is that all women, herself included, are duplicitous. Her vitriol on this subject prevents her from having any female friends and even extends to her own teenage daughter, Clementine, ‘Practically a woman now. She couldn’t be trusted.’

In this context, hiring Shannon, a nineteen-year-old pink-haired Barnard dropout, to be her live-in producer is plainly ill-advised. The ultimate strength of the younger woman’s influence on Natalie’s household is shocking. It is unclear if this is intended as a warning to the alt-right or if it reveals a naïve belief in the inevitable success of progressive ideals over time. Instead it serves mainly as confirmation of what many women fear: when you bow to the patriarchy, no matter how exceptional you feel, you will always age out of preferential treatment.

Ultimately, the story doesn’t offer much beyond its confines. While Yesteryear reproduces several social phenomena—tradwife influencers, reactionary politics and the exploitation of children online (harking to another influencer news headline)—it does so within one family and ties all of the loose ends up before finishing. Readers are not taxed with any further attempt to understand how things happened, why and what broader consequences they had. This is a trait the book shares with the film and TV adaptations that keep getting churned out (I’m looking at you, Frankenstein, “Wuthering Heights” and yet another Jane Eyre), where the emphasis may be on making a satisfying story rather than a thought-provoking one. While Burke’s ultimate handling of the alternate timelines is too neat for a book ending, this plot choice could help ensure box office success once the story hits screens, alluring audiences with star power and rage bait yet allowing for passive media consumption. (I also find it difficult to imagine Amazon MGM, recently subject to scrutiny for their eye-watering investment in documentary/propaganda-project MELANIA, delivering a film that really digs into the reciprocal relationship between Trumpian politics and the online tradwife movement.)

In the shadow of the ending’s major reveal is a smaller one. Some of the children from Natalie’s first version of Yesteryear have become activists seeking to prevent child exploitation on social media. Given the lack of insight into their sheltered lives and its relentless broadcast, this does not feel significant. In the few scenes where Clementine does push back, filtered through Natalie’s narcissistic focus, it seems more like typical adolescent rebellion than a criticism of content-creator parents. This feels like a missed opportunity to really say something meaningful about the topic of parenting in the age of social media.

As a compulsively readable book, Yesteryear is a success. As a commentary on the alt-right, the ethics of content creation or a new entry into the feminist fiction canon, it falters. Its biggest sin? Giving readers precisely what they want: a tidy explanation and a chance to watch a woman suffer.

Yesteryear is out now via Harper Collins Australia.