In 'Yesteryear,' a tradwife influencer wakes up in the time period she’s fetishized

NPR's Book of the Day

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2026

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer with 5 million followers. She drinks raw milk, eats farm fresh eggs, and is “perfect at being alive.” But when she wakes up in 1855, the very time period she’s fetishized, she feels afraid – and paranoid that she’s being filmed. In today’s episode, Caro Claire Burke joins NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe for a conversation about the author’s debut novel, Yesteryear. They discuss Natalie as an anti-hero, Burke’s interest in power hierarchies over religion, and how the author pushed the tradwife trend to “its final conclusion.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Alyssa Nadwarnie, and you're listening to NPR's Book of the Day.
0:06.9	The concept of the book yesteryear is so good.
0:11.3	A tradwife Instagram influencer who espouses the gospel of homesteading and raising children
0:16.6	and living the simple farm life gets transported back to the 1800s, where she actually
0:23.7	lives on a farm with no electricity, terrible tasting food, and no fancy furniture or modern
0:30.1	amenities. It's the debut novel from author Caro Claire Burke. She spoke with NPR's Aisha Roscoe
0:36.7	about the dangers of romanticizing the olden days and about trying to figure out what's real and what is performance.
0:45.4	Welcome to yesteryear ranch, where our narrator raises her children on a farm in Idaho. She drinks raw milk and eats farm fresh eggs. She has five million followers on
0:56.9	Instagram. And who was I? A flawless Christian woman. The manic picks the American dream girl of this
1:04.0	nation's deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be and the wife every man
1:10.2	wanted to come home to.
1:12.2	Like a nun in a porno, it didn't make sense, but also by God it worked.
1:17.8	My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
1:22.3	And then one morning, she wakes up cold and terrified.
1:26.2	The year is 1855. Is it an elaborate hoax, a dream, or could it be much, much worse?
1:36.0	Yesterday is Carol Claire Burke's first novel, and she joins us now. Welcome.
1:41.4	Thank you for having me. Tell us about the star of the novel, the person who's putting on this show, Natalie.
1:49.0	She's very hard to like.
1:51.0	I can't be the first person to tell you this.
1:54.0	No, you are certainly not.
1:55.0	I like to think of her as an anti-hero, but she is certainly a very, very difficult woman. She is ambitious and acidic and
2:04.1	rude, and sometimes the things that she thinks are things that none of us want to admit that we think.
	...

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