Trad wives have been baking, churning, scrubbing, and harvesting their ways through our social media feeds for several years now, praising homemaking and subservience to their husbands on countless dedicated TikTok channels. With her pristine makeup and prairie dresses and endless cheerful obedience, this internet persona—the trad as in “traditional” wife—seemed predestined to end up as a character in fiction or film.

But that in no way makes Caro Claire Burke’s new novel Yesteryear, starring a trad wife influencer, any less bracing. On the surface, Burke’s protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, has everything she dreamed of: an internet following and sponsorships to match it, hard won by turning her life into an 1800s pioneer fantasy with her strapping farmer husband Caleb and their gaggle of children on a farm in the foothills of Idaho. She hasn’t even really had to give up modern luxuries; her children are tended to by (off-camera) nannies; there’s a refrigerator hiding in a pantry off the kitchen (a possible nod to the most famous real-life trad wife influencer, Hannah Neeleman, who goes by the handle Ballerina Farm). Sure, there are hordes of angry online commenters out to get her, and yeah, Caleb may be sleeping around, but life is mostly perfect.

One morning she woke up with the idea for the title of her book, Yesteryear, which felt “all-encompassing.”

Then one day Natalie wakes up to everything a little off-kilter, and pieces together that she has time-traveled to the actual 1800s, an era of little medical intervention, no electricity, and low patience for female opinions. Darkness sets in early, and the food sucks. But small observations soon have her questioning whether she has really time-traveled—or whether she’s caught up in some kind of dark West World-like reality show. The narrative unspools from there, with detours into Natalie’s origin story, and there are more than a few satisfying twists that kept me reading late into the night.

Burke came up with the premise after watching too many trad wife videos on TikTok in the winter of 2024, she told me on a phone call—the phenomenon was something she “became very obsessed with very quickly,” she said. She was working for Katie Couric Media at the time but had a fiction MFA and had been hoping to also write a novel. One morning she woke up with the idea for the title of her book, Yesteryear, which felt “all-encompassing.” She’d never written a thriller; all her fiction until that point had been, in her words, “small, quiet, family interiority drama.” Perhaps because of that, she “was really able to go for it,” unencumbered by her own expectations.

The resulting book is juicy, vindictive, and loads of fun—and has already been optioned by Amazon MGM Studios, with Anne Hathaway planning to co-produce and star in the film adaptation. While Burke’s tale serves as somewhat of an indictment of conservative gender roles, it’s not without its nuances. “It was very important to me to be just as honest and hard-eyed at liberal culture,” she says.

Burke also co-hosts, with Katie Gatti Tassin, the podcast Diabolical Lies, which lends a feminist lens to all manner of culture and politics topics, including young conservatives and the manosphere. I spoke with Caro about her own political awakening and her thoughts on trad wives’ agency.

I read that you grew up conservative. Anything resembling tradwife conservative?

I grew up in a Republican household, and I was Catholic, I got confirmed. But I also went to liberal schools, and so I was never cloistered away. I kind of grew up in the Bush-Romney era of conservatism. It wasn’t as hard of a pivot as the ones that you might see in the book.

You told an interviewer that your life changed after watching the movie Captain Fantastic, and then wondering who Noam Chomsky was. Is it true you and your husband then ditched your jobs to live in an Airstream?

It was a little less romantic than that. It was the pandemic era. We bought this, like shit kicker 1967 Airstream, and he renovated it, and then we lived on the road for two years, off and on. The Captain Fantastic of it all was pretty inspiring for us. The van life craze hadn’t super kicked off, but we were definitely a part of that as it was happening. So, yeah, I bet we probably were Chomskied a little bit.

So much was happening in America at the time—I don’t know if I would have radicalized honestly if our country hadn’t been radicalizing too.

It struck me that the off the grid life depicted in Captain Fantastic, and the supposedly off-the-grid life of your trad wife protagonist, Natalie, might actually have some overlaps, like back-to-the-land hippie or back-to-the-land Christian conservative? It’s kind of this place where the far left and far right start to........

© Mother Jones