The whispers started in the Vogue office back in February—maybe even before. Have you read the trad wife book? “I’ll lend it to you next,” one colleague told me, voice lowered, as if bestowing a secret, sacred text. “But you must give it back.”
What was this book, I wondered, and why was it causing such a frenetic buzz? Enter: Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, which, long before its April release, had already sold to the highest bidder, Amazon MGM Studios. It’s soon to be adapted into a feature film, with Anne Hathaway set to star and produce.
The timing of Burke’s debut novel—which follows Natalie, a 32-year-old trad wife who sells raw milk and farm-life content to her millions of social media followers, before waking up one morning to find that she’s in the actual 1800s—feels like kismet, though it was sold back in 2024 and written before then. “When I sold it, there were people who thought we needed to rush it out the door because it wasn’t going to be relevant by now,” Burke tells me over Zoom from her home in Virginia. She looks bright-eyed and alert, like the type of person who knows what question you’re going to ask before you ask it. “But it feels more relevant now than it did two years ago… [trad wife life] has embedded itself in the culture.”
Yesteryear is more than just a hooky premise, though. Instead, it’s daring, deranged, and cleverly written. Rather than presenting us with a moralistic fable on the dangers of trad wifery, Burke submerges us in Natalie’s consciousness, giving us a nuanced, 360-degree view of the hopes, fantasies, and often dark motivations lurking behind such a figure. The more progressive women in the novel don’t come away unscathed, though—they’re fatigued and underpaid, sold a dream without being able to reap its rewards. You emerge from the novel feeling anew, as though no woman wins under the patriarchy. I could see why such a book was being passed between hands.
There will be more than a few people who compare the novel’s protagonist to a darkly satirical version of Hannah Neeleman—the farmer and influencer behind the monstrously popular Instagram account @Ballerinafarm (she, too, comes from a Mormon background, previously sold raw milk, and posts about raising her many children on a farm). Even so, Burke is careful not to name her directly, instead citing a patchwork of influences. “Something I learned before starting Yesteryear is that you start seeing patterns in terms of how these women present. None of them are unique. I don’t know Hannah Neeleman, I don’t know Nara Smith… You’ve got The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives; there are so many examples of this vision.”
With Yesteryear out now, and a film on the way, there was plenty to get into. Here’s everything we spoke about.
Vogue: Tell me about the seed of the book. Where did it come from?
Caro Claire Burke: I’d started a TikTok, and I was talking about feminist topics and trad wives, and became really involved in that conversation. I was also working as an editor at Katie Couric Media, and so I got to do research for it for my job. So the idea for the novel happened pretty quickly. I emailed [my agent] and was like, “I have a weird idea…” and she was so into it.
What did your research entail? How did you pinpoint the inner narrative?
I did a lot of internet lurking of women who are in these fundamentalist communities. I also got to interview some women for my job, and talk to them about Mormonism and these Christian religions, and what it feels like to be a woman.
I am not from [that background], but so much of it is relatable to all women—it’s just that the dial is turned up to 11. So once I had locked into that worldview, it was pretty easy to create Natalie. And then once I’d found Natalie’s voice, it was like… I just have to listen to her, because she’s so intense. Once you have her on the page, she will lead you in every scene, and that was a cool experience. She’s a nut.
I related to the college roommate. Were there any characters that you felt yourself in?
There are a lot of elements to Natalie that I did relate to. She’s so ambitious, and you’re always experiencing this claustrophobia between what she really wants and what she’ll admit to herself. I don’t have it to the same extent, but I have felt that. I also relate to her daughter, Clementine. She’s a side character, but she’s so important. She’s this person that’s always watching, and can see the person offline and the person online, and I think we all have people like that in our lives.
I feel like the relationship between Clementine and Natalie nailed that complicated mother-daughter dynamic. They were similar, and that created tension.
Yeah, and it was so fun to explore, through Natalie, the shit about motherhood that we’re not allowed to say—like feeling jealous of her when she’s little. Or feeling, Oh, she’s so much like me, what if she replaces me? Or not necessarily wanting to deal with them or fix them. There are so many things that she does with Clementine that are motherhood-adjacent, but not—like the scene where she’s teaching Clementine how to smile. These are normal messages, but with Natalie it’s so sinister, so that was really fun to explore.
A lot of people will inevitably make a connection between Natalie and Ballerina Farm. Were there people you were thinking about while writing the novel?
Something I learned before starting Yesteryear is that you start seeing patterns in terms of how these women present. None of them are unique. I don’t know Hannah Neeleman, I don’t know Nara Smith… You’ve got The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives; there are so many examples of this vision. They’re all presenting as perfect mothers who have a crazy hip-to-waist ratio, and many children, and they’re always smiling. The thing I really wanted to focus on was that image, because it’s propaganda.
Think about how many women tap into a certain aesthetic without knowing what that represents. Not to say that every person who acts like a trad wife or wears a milkmaid dress is intending it, but these are historical images. 1930s Germany had a bunch of images that looked just like that. So that was what I wanted to play with: this performance, this idea of a person that you don’t really know. You’ve seen that person online a million times. That was the tension I wanted to play with.
I liked how Yesteryear didn’t feel like a moral lesson; it wasn’t a fable. No one wins under the patriarchy.
Obviously, I am secular, I have a job, no one tells me what to do, my husband doesn’t say shit to me about how I dress or anything like that. But part of this book was also about interrogating myself. Clearly, there’s something about liberal feminism, or the way that women have to appear in the world right now, that’s really unappealing. Otherwise, this other option would not be so appealing. It was important for me to highlight that there are bad options no matter what.
I choose the option where we celebrate having basic legal rights, but I also don’t want to diminish the reason why a lot of women don’t enjoy working or getting paid as much as their male counterparts, and don’t enjoy giving birth and having no time off, so they feel like they’re failing at both work and motherhood. Those are real things. So it was fun to have that catharsis, and play with that a little bit. If you’re going to poke fun at trad wives, I think you also have to poke fun at the working woman.
Have you thought about what some of the people more embedded in those trad worlds might think of the book?
I have. I don’t think I intended it as a flippant satire. It was very important to me to show the very real constraints that she has. If you’re not in control of your own money, and you have to give birth immediately after college, and when you feel you have to get married… these are things that are massive constraints on how you can move through the world. Even the challenge of making her husband respectable, and struggling to get pregnant, and feeling panicked about that—I wanted that to feel terrifying.
So, in that sense, I hope people can see that. But also, to a certain extent, I’m not worried about what anyone will think. Some people might read it and might not care about the politics of it, and just enjoy the thrill. And some people will probably debate it a lot.
I liked how Yesteryear tapped into the complexities of heterosexuality and gender dynamics. How did you approach the marriage element?
Natalie’s character was clearest to me. It was harder to figure out who Caleb was going to be. [Natalie] doesn’t behave like how she would write a woman on paper. I thought it would be really fun to pair her with a man who also doesn’t. I liked the idea of Natalie and Caleb feeling like they’re broken, and being a perfect match in hell. I think it would have been easy to have her marry an inherently dominant and abusive husband. But Caleb is not that. If he’d married someone else, he could have become a feminist, nice guy. I liked the idea of showing how people struggle to fit into the expectations of what a man and woman should be.
I wouldn’t describe the ending as happy—it was quite bleak. Why did you choose to go down that route?
That was one of the challenges I faced. Natalie didn’t really grow. A lot of people want a character who learns—they want the parable. I knew I didn’t really want that to happen. She’s still kind of a terrible person. But I think you can also say something about generational change, and how things don’t always happen with a single person. Not to be corny, but each generation has the opportunity to fix the wrongs of the earlier one. So it felt earned, to me, that the children would have the happy ending—not the perfect ending, but they’d be able to move on.
There are a lot of conversations around how to fix your parents, or how to get your friend to see the light, and I think the uncomfortable truth is that sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you’re going to spend your whole life with someone who’s never going to understand you, or accept you. Natalie is a deeply broken person, but her kids aren’t, so that, to me, was a nice balance.
I’m excited [for the film]. I was like… how are they possibly going to bring this crazy world to life?
It is fun. I’ve read an early script that they’re still working on. When I was working on the novel, I thought the same thing. It’s all in her head, she’s out of her mind. But they have some really interesting ideas that I’m excited about, and it’s going to be really cool to come together.
I’m so excited to see who they cast as Caleb, but also as Doug. I’m very invested in who the father-in-law will be.
You thanked Anne Hathaway in the acknowledgements. What was her involvement?
The film auction took place right as I sold the book, and the book was just a draft. The plot was there, but it was very skeletal. So [Anne Hathaway and I] had a number of conversations about who Natalie was, and what it means to live as a public person, what it means to feel surveilled. It was really helpful to talk to everyone about what they were relating to, and how we could take advantage of her interiority versus what she says aloud.
Are you working on anything new?
I’m working on something new. I pray for myself every night. I’m happy with the idea that I have right now, but Yesteryear was such a singular experience that I was like… what do you want to write that follows that? How do you want to have similarities without doing the same magic trick again? So that was the challenge that consumed me for the past year and a half, but I feel like I’ve landed on something fun.
