By: Snigdha Chakravarti
Imagine a book where you hate the main character, yet you can’t stop reading it because of that character. It seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Meet Natalie Heller Mills, protagonist of Caro Claire Burke’s recent debut, Yesteryear. She lives with her handsome cowboy husband Caleb, and five (soon to be six) kids in Yesteryear Ranch, a farm nestled in the mountains of rural Idaho. Natalie spends her days baking sourdough bread, gathering eggs every day with her daughters from their chicken coop, drinking raw milk from her cows, and of course, posting every second of her life on Instagram. Essentially, she’s the epitome of a Christian trad wife (short for “traditional wife”): she prays and quotes scriptures, lives in a rustic, old-fashioned home without any modern appliances, and is a stay-at-home mom for her kids. She has the perfect life –at least, that’s what Instagram says.
Her 8 million followers don’t have to know the hired nannies, video producers, pesticides, the crop failure, how the livestock are constantly dying from neglect, and all the everyday modern kitchen appliances hiding behind the planks of Brazilian hardwood. Or the fact that she’s not really the traditional, submissive female, but the imperious breadwinner of her family, authoritative and manipulative of her soft-spoken husband. But why tell them what they don’t need to know? So summarizes Natalie’s life: she’s the sweet trad wife on Instagram, but a cynical, narcissistic woman who solely cares about deceiving her followers with her image of perfection. And her followers? They love it. Until one morning, her perfect life disappears.
Natalie wakes up in what seems like an 1800s household. It’s her house, but it’s not her house. There’s a crackling fire instead of electricity to heat up the house. Outside, there’s a dilapidated barnhouse and chicken coop. Her husband Caleb is older, harsher, yet a seemingly more competent farmer, not the soft-spoken, submissive one from before. And her children? They’re familiar, yet strange. And much to her dismay, she’s no longer pregnant with her sixth. Instead of posting her “homemade” jams and raw milk on Instagram, she’s expected to handwash clothes and haul firewood.
This is the reality Natalie has always wanted: a traditional, 1800s lifestyle, right? Yet, she tries to get herself out of it. She wants to go back to her deluded lifestyle—it gave her so much ambition and power to control millions of people’s perception of someone who she really wasn’t.
Caro Claire Burke herself describes the irony, explaining how “this woman who might claim to believe in those [traditional, Christian] values or, at the very least, has been raised in a community that espouses those values, but she herself really doesn’t act them out.” This tension ultimately leads to her psychological downfall, as she “has a hard time reconciling that with what she thinks she should be doing.”
Natalie eventually reasons that this 1800s lifestyle may be part of a reality show, or perhaps, a test from God. As she attempts to go back to her present life, she soon discovers a daunting, chilling truth about both where she is, and her identity.
Burke refers to Natalie as a “fundamentalist Christian,” explaining how Natalie doesn’t strictly follow a branch of Christianity, and is on and off in her devotion to God and faith. Burke further went on to say how Natalie following “a specific thread of Christianity would really just be more distracting,” and it would have implied “more of an intelligence than Natalie has about her own religion.”
Yesteryear explores a variety of themes, from the tensions of traditional womanhood and modern lifestyles, to the twisted nature of delusion and power. This New-York Time Bestseller truly captures the dangers of romanticizing a so-called perfect life, while degrading your inner self in the process.