Book Review: Yesteryear

Trad-wives and the women who watch them

I read Yesteryear in two days, which on my private rubric is the single thing I’m asking from a novel: did I want to keep reading it?

It opens, more or less, with this:

“Little idiots. They were desperate to eat me. They had no idea I was the one who was keeping them alive.”

This is Yesteryear‘s narrator, Natalie Heller Mills — a trad-wife influencer with millions of followers. It was here that I buckled up for a juicy read. This freaky, vaguely homicidal energy is delicious to imagine coming from a picture-perfect Instagram icon, the kind that makes even the most confident person think, why is my life not as good as hers? Many of us have looked at those fragments of a life and thought, hoped, she’s probably a really bad person behind the screen. That’s easier to digest than the opposite, which is that she may, in fact, be a hundred times better than you at living, at being a person, at running the operation of a life.

And Natalie is genuinely, alarmingly good at it:

“Hello, ladies,” I sang out. “How are y’all doing today?” Behind me, Shannon tripped on her video cord and swore loudly. “Sorry,” she said, “can you do that part again?” Of course I could. I could do any of it on command, a million times over, in a million variations of singsong. “Hello, ladies! How are y’all doing today?” “Perfect. Let’s move on to a shot of the egg pickup.”

Originally, when I read the premise, I thought we were going to get something flat — a tidy pan on tradwives, every reader closing the cover feeling correct about her politics and clean about her judgment. Instead, Natalie is given enough room to be observant, to be funny, and — alarmingly, more often than I was prepared for — to be right. Watching her former Harvard roommate Reena and the cohort she came up with, Natalie offers this:

“They all planned to be wives and mothers, and yet they absolutely hated men and kids. They talked about nuclear families the same way they talked about the nuclear bomb. It was a destructive, sexist, militaristic, heteronormative force designed to ruin the world.”

And then, a few pages later:

“When they talked about stay-at-home mothers — specifically about their stay-at-home-mothers — their eyes didn’t go misty with gratitude. Instead, they argued bravely that old-school femininity was a scourge. Any woman who chose to stay in the home instead of working in the world was complicit.”

I went to Princeton, not Harvard, but I knew these women. Bold, bright, ambitious girls who had been told that anything a boy could do, we could do better, and who believed it with our chests. We laughed at the idea that any of our male classmates could get a job over us at the bank or the consulting firm or the tech company simply because they were a man. Less talked about, though, was how this drive met the ancient, bone-deep pull to couple up, to find a match, to have babies. These wishes and these wants fought each other in a way they simply did not for our male classmates. We had two jobs. They had one.

But what I loved most was Natalie’s relentless watching of other women. Reena, Vanessa, Clementine, the millions of followers she calls ‘little idiots’. She is measuring their lives against her own and finding theirs lacking. Natalie is obsessed with watching other women, and we — readers, scrollers, screen-lit at midnight — are obsessed with watching her, and women like her.

Here’s one of my all-time favorite quotes by Sylvia Plath, in The Bell Jar:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America... I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.”

So many lives, so little time to choose between them, and once you’ve chosen — or chosen by attrition, or watched the figs go black at your feet — it is awfully tempting to spend your evenings watching the women who chose differently. We are all, on any given Tuesday, peering at the version of ourselves we did not become.

This is also why we hate them, sometimes. Natalie’s takedown of Reena’s imagined IVF future is monstrous — and also, if we are honest, recognizable:

“If she was lucky (and from what I had seen, Reena had never been all that lucky), she’d have to do only one or two rounds of IVF, and there would be only a small handful of months where she found herself joking loudly about lighting money on fire while her husband jabbed at the fat of her ass with a needle (his mind starting to wander past his miserable aging wife to the fun young assistant in his office, the one who was easy and light and funny, the one who had started to look subconsciously to him like the appropriate age for a woman to become pregnant), and when the time came, when Reena finally gave birth, when she finally looked around and realized she’d made it — she was at the top of the mountain, she had it all! — the landscape would look like this: her husband no longer wanted to touch her, and her boss no longer wanted to promote her, and her childless friends no longer wanted to spend time with her, and her friends with children no longer had time to see her, and Reena, sweet precious Reena, would complain about none of it, not the disappearing husband or the flailing career or the crushing loneliness, not a word of it to anyone, because she would technically be one of the lucky ones.”

Watching another woman fail at the life we did not pick reassures us about the life we did. I bet she’s actually a bad person is not just a thought we have about Natalie. It is a thought we have about whichever fig we declined. It is a thought Natalie has about us.

You can disagree with Natalie about almost anything in this novel and I do, mostly. But the menu of lives available to ambitious women is comically narrow, and the women choosing from it are not stupid for choosing strangely. None of us are the enemy for making impossible decisions.

I love an unlikeable, unrealiable narrator, especially one, like Burke’s, who is intermittently correct. There’s never a tidy place to seat her. What fun that is! You don’t have to like a character to love a book.