The fake rural idyll and influencer housewives. The story of a ‘tradwife’

Should we believe Anne Hathaway? “I started reading the proofs; it was four o’clock in the afternoon. When I looked up, it was six o’clock in the morning – the story had me in its grip.” The actress was referring to the novel entitled “Yesteryear” – meaning “times gone by” – published on Tuesday in Italy by Neri Pozza. It was the talk of the summer in the United States.

The writer’s name is Caro Claire Burke. The protagonist is a ‘tradwife’, the sort of woman who proudly lives as if washing machines and dishwashers had never been invented. The milk is milked from their own cow and brought to the table whilst still warm, with its frothy cream. The bread is kneaded by hand and baked in the home oven. There is no mention of the pill – neither the contraceptive pill nor even painkillers – as if they had never been invented. Anaesthesia is the work of the devil – is it not written in the sacred text, ‘you shall give birth in pain’?

Natalie Heller Mills is 32 years old, a mother of five with a sixth on the way, and the owner of a supposedly rustic business that rakes in several million – we only find out later in the novel how she got there, following a marriage to a very wealthy and equally idle husband. The operation appears effortless—one might expect her to boast about doing the laundry with ash at any moment. In reality, Natalie employs a small team of assistants, kept well out of the camera’s view. She appears elegantly dressed and well-groomed, kisses her fair-haired children, and offers a few mementoes of rustic life for sale.

Christian faith, of course. And if anyone raises objections about the authenticity of a life like hers, she invokes ‘baby brain’ – the mental confusion that follows childbirth. This comes in very handy when a truth slips her mind – the presence of farm labourers, for example – that needs to be kept hidden. She is an unsympathetic heroine. Her perfection and the web of lies she weaves make her unlikeable, yet they also lead her followers to dream of a country house with a butter churn for making fresh butter in the kitchen.

By page 37, the idyll of “on the old farm, all together now” begins to fade. Natalie wakes up one morning to find the house uncharacteristically cold. She initially assumes that the electricity has failed and that the house’s generator—still under warranty—has also stopped working. She has not yet grasped the full seriousness of the situation. She touches the duvet—it feels awful. It isn’t the flannel and linen blend she’d bought a few years earlier. Its surface is rough; Natalie imagines that the usual elegant-yet-rustic duvet is out for washing, and that the one on her bed has been pulled from the back of a drawer without a second thought.

The first thought worthy of the name suggests ‘I’ve been kidnapped’. Yet in the next room are six children, looking even more ragged than she remembered them. And here we begin to understand Anne Hathaway’s interest in this novel, which runs to over 400 pages (several dozen of which could have been cut without any loss). The actress cast as Natalie will be able to perform certain scenes with dishevelled hair and no make-up, out in the woods. And in others, she’ll be made to look as young as she did in her university days – miracles that only skilled film make-up artists know how to achieve.

There are a few twists and turns, though they’re more of the tedious sort than the surprising kind. What we do have, however, are all the talking points we need for today’s debate. The influence of influencers. The allure of the pseudo-rustic world. Men who want to be in charge, even if they end up being incapable of doing anything. Housewives chopping onions on a live stream.