We meet bright, but cold Natalie Heller as she goes off to Harvard. Instead of experiencing the world, making friends and learning, the experience shows her that what she knows is “right” and that the world is wicked. She meets a man, a man who’s family is wealthy and heavily connected to politics and she sees in him someone she can mold and make the perfect husband. They quickly marry and things immediately go downhill. Natalie loathes her husband. He has no ambition, he wants to do “unmanly things” like be a kindergarten teacher of all things!! Things must be done the right way, appearances matter, and happiness is only present if things are done the right way…even if no one is ever happy! So she takes matters into her own hands and gets her father in law to buy them a ranch in the middle of Idaho. There, her husband can pretend to be a cowboy or a rancher and she?? Well…she will pretend to be a loving mother and wife.
Things quickly shape into something entirely different when someone from the Manosphere takes notice of Natalie’s Instagram (at Caleb’s urging because instead of tending to the animals that keep dying, he’s busy learning about chemtrails and the “feminization of men” in various twisted forums)…and she quickly amasses a huge surge of followers on her very humble social media page. Natalie sees this as an escape. Natalie will become the perfect wife and mother, they will have an amazing ranch that hails back to those golden times when everything was simpler–women will want to be her, and she will have the perfect life– even if that means having two nannies, a producer, and twenty or more actual ranch hands that know what they’re doing to make things perfect. As long as it looks like Caleb and Natalie have the perfect life, then of course, they have the perfect life. Things are going great until…Natalie wakes up in 1855 in a home that reminds her of the ranch (it’s also called Yesteryear! How?!?!), a family that is almost like hers but not quite, and that living in 1855 is really hard and painful–quite literally the opposite of her carefully edited videos that made the “simple life” look quaint. Is she being tested by God (at times she thinks so), is this time travel (maybe?), is this some sick reality show (would they let her get actually hurt?)? But the most important question–how can she escape this life and go back to her own time?
I tore through the book that everyone has been buzzing about in about a day, no small feat since on my phone it said it was 397 pages. But each one of those pages ignited a desire for me to continue reading. The writing is sharply satirical and so well done. The character development is fantastic; the rise of the tradwife influencer is as interesting as it is strange to me. Like Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the author connects the rise of the Manosphere, family expectations, personal biases, and restrictive religions that are deeply shackled to the patriarchy and thus shackling women to form this perfect confluence for someone like the flectional Natalie Heller Mills to rise to fame. Are these influencer tradwives actually gaining some freedom by pretending to be the “perfect submissive wife” of yesteryear? What happens, if and when the cracks begin to show (because who can be perfect all the time, especially when you’re not living the life you want to live?). What happens when the carefully curated life that you’ve created becomes your prison? I feel like I need to go back and reread the book immediately because I know that I’ve missed things.
