Caro Claire Burke Wades Into the Tradwife Conversation With 'Yesteryear'

If you're trying to nail down when the tradwife phenomenon entered the mainstream discourse, you might say it was 2024. The seeds were planted during the coronavirus pandemic, and then, in early 2023, a Richmond, Va., newlywed named Estee Williams went viral for posting about the pleasures of submitting to her husband and asking his permission before leaving the house. The ensuing debate gave a somewhat fringe phenomenon a face to go with its very hashtaggable name. It ramped up in May 2024, when, in a commencement speech at Benedictine College, Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, told the female graduates they had been fed a pack of "diabolical lies" by anyone suggesting they would find fulfillment in a vocation other than "homemaker." But the concept had officially reached the mainstream after The Sunday Times of London published a controversial profile of the consummate tradwife Hannah Neeleman. Ms. Neeleman -- a Juilliard-trained dancer, practicing Mormon turned MAHA-coded lifestyle influencer, mother of eight (now nine) children and founder of Ballerina Farm, a social-media-driven, 328-acre farm business she runs with her husband, David Neeleman, in Utah -- fired back, calling the piece an "attack" on her family. Into the sea of TikTok rants, roiling editorials, comment section throwdowns about tradwives (women who glorify traditional roles as wives and mothers) and the movement's feminist backlash stepped Caro Claire Burke, a onetime rower at the University of Virginia who grew up in a conservative family and voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. Ms. Burke had time to reassess her worldview on a number of matters when, during the pandemic, she and her husband traveled around the country in an Airstream, and she read work by the leftist political philosopher Noam Chomsky, among others. Ms. Burke has said she became "radicalized." A few years earlier, after graduating and bouncing around unfulfilling marketing jobs, she realized she wanted to write fiction and earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Bennington College. Like a lot of M.F.A. graduates, she had two unpublished novels in a drawer and a literary agent who, she said, "never emailed me back." But in January 2024, Ms. Burke downloaded TikTok just in time to wade into the tradwife conversation. After trying to break into more traditional media institutions, like print magazines, she was thrilled to discover a way into a major cultural discussion that dovetailed with her interests in feminism, identity politics and real-world applications of anticapitalist economic theory. Ms. Burke's animated, cheery outrage on a number of subjects, especially the tradwife phenomenon, quickly earned her followers. By early 2025, she had come up with an idea for a new novel, one that was very different from anything she had tried before: a psychological thriller about a "flawless Christian" tradwife influencer named Natalie Heller Mills who is raising six kids and running a multimillion-dollar online business with her pinup farmer husband, and who one day wakes up to discover she has been transported to the year 1805. It would, as Ms. Burke has said, push the ideas she had been debating on social media "all the way to their conclusion." She even had the title: "Yesteryear." What followed was a kind of M.F.A. graduate's fever dream: a first draft that unspooled in a giddy, dizzying two-month sprint, which set off an international bidding war won by the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for a low seven figures. Soon after, the film rights sold to Amazon with Anne Hathaway, who said she devoured the novel in one sitting, attached to star and co-produce. "I was by myself in Atlanta when I sat down with a printout of the book at 4 p.m.," Ms. Hathaway told The New York Times. "When I next looked up, I realized it was night, and six hours had gone by. Caro's writing grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go." "Yesteryear" publishes on Tuesday, and Ms. Burke, who is pregnant with her first child, will be going on a book tour this spring that more closely resembles that of a pop act than a first-time novelist, with stops in 20 U.S. cities before she heads to Canada and Britain. "It's going to be weird to be pregnant on tour, but also very meta," she said in February. "A few weeks ago, Sarah Jessica Parker followed me on Instagram. We'd been trying for a while, and it hadn't been working, and I was like, I don't need a kid! Sarah Jessica Parker followed me on Instagram! That is the biggest accomplishment I could ask for in this life! Then, two and a half weeks later, we're like, Oh my God." What does Ms. Burke think Natalie, the protagonist of "Yesteryear," would say about this development? The writer smiles. "God's plan, baby. God's plan." A Villain Versus a Warped Alter Ego It's tempting to assume "Yesteryear" will read like a progressive revenge story in which an ignorant, imperious, conservative Barbie gets her comeuppance. After all, one of the elements most galling to critics of the tradwife movement is how many of its most prominent members are brazenly anti-feminist while enjoying the liberties made possible by feminists as they build lucrative brands as female entrepreneurs. "To want a job," Ms. Burke said, "you've got to believe in feminism a little bit." Fans and conservative pundits who are familiar with Ms. Burke from her TikTok and from "Diabolical Lies" -- the podcast and Substack she founded with the finance writer Katie Gatti Tassin -- might be expecting Ms. Burke to punish Natalie for her hubris. But in Natalie, Ms. Burke has created less a villain and more a warped alter ego, a representative of a path she didn't take, but one whose appeal she recognizes. "There is a type of indignation that Natalie feels that I also feel," Ms. Burke said. "I feel indignant about a lot of what's taking place in our world, and I also feel very aware that I'm not going to change any of those systems." The author grew up in Dartmouth, Mass., with a father who worked as a radiologist and a mother who had been a nurse but opted to stay home to raise Ms. Burke and her older sister. Ms. Burke's childhood was "wonderful," she said, but limited. "I didn't grow up in a place where there were writers," she said. "There were doctors and lawyers." Ms. Burke will be the first to tell you that her marriage to Riley Haakon Strand, whom she wed in 2019 when she was 26, gave her the security she needed to pursue her writing career. "He financially supported me on a number of occasions when I was writing," she said. "No one believed more in me, no one bet on the pony at the race more than him." The couple waited to have children, taking time to figure out what kind of life they wanted to build together. "That's another thing with Natalie," said Ms. Burke, who was careful not to give any spoilers as she explained that her character didn't have the luxury of self-exploration. "It took me so long to get to these beliefs. If I got married at 24 and had a baby, would I be out here talking about, you know, 'What is heterosexual?' No! I'd be busy. I would be working. Unlearning things is a luxury. Asking questions is a luxury." Perfecting Life In "Yesteryear," Natalie, a lonely, brainy girl from a sheltered, religious, conservative family in rural Idaho, heads off on scholarship to Harvard expecting to find her people -- similarly disciplined and driven souls who want to "serve Him." Her roommate and foil, Reena Magliotti, is a boy-crazy, social-climbing, insecure, materialistic party girl who rails against the patriarchy. She is "the first angry woman in my life" but far from the last, Natalie discovers, as years pass and she contends with faceless online hordes who come for her and her perfect life. But as with much of "Yesteryear," this outsize, Real Housewives-ish, us-versus-them prize fight contains within it more subtlety and incisiveness than is initially apparent. As time passes, Natalie repeatedly returns to thoughts of her former roommate, sometimes with smug satisfaction, other times with anguished envy. Where is Reena now? becomes a refrain for Natalie when she's feeling lost. That these are often presented as the only two options for women -- slutty career girl or repressed housewife -- emerges as the tragedy at the heart of "Yesteryear." "We were all sold a bill of false goods, and that's true for conservative women and it's true for liberal women," Ms. Burke said. "The point of the book is not that one wins." "In Natalie's mind," she added, "it's like, the alternative doesn't look good. She doesn't want to work in an office and be miserable and poor. And so to pretend that it's like, Why didn't you leave your husband and get a job at a marketing firm in downtown Manhattan and be broke and have a kid? It's like, that sounds awful!" Ms. Burke doesn't know New York well, though she is planning to move there this fall from Charlottesville, Va., where her husband is finishing his master's degree in architecture. "It's funny," she said. "For a long time, I was like, I missed the New York thing. You've got to be 23 and willing to put up with a certain amount of squalor, and that period in my life has passed. But then I thought, I just got the opportunity of a lifetime, the dream debut, and I should be where it happens. I should be in the place where other writers live." This eagerness to be in the center of things and the explicit ambition it implies wasn't really the vibe among her cohort at Bennington. "When you go to graduate school for writing, no one is talking about a career, no one is talking about book deals," Ms. Burke said. "Everyone is pretending that they don't care, or maybe some people don't care." She felt conflicted about her desire for conventional success, and stressed about what she observed as the biggest conversation in the writing world: What is the relationship between being a writer and being a mother, and is it possible to do both? For years, she told herself she couldn't get pregnant until she published her first novel. "I think I realized my own ambition by seeing hers," Ms. Burke said of Natalie. When she sold "Yesteryear," Ms. Burke said, "after years of being like, I don't know anyone in this industry, I don't know if I can make a living as a writer, the door opens, and behind it there are rooms of people who talk about the things I talk about." Ms. Burke is "terrified" of the huge expectations for "Yesteryear" -- the first printing is 110,000, which is an astonishing number for a debut novel. She anticipates that some in her writing community might resent her for "selling out," while others, particularly on the right, will come after her like the "angry women" came after Natalie. "If 'Yesteryear' goes the way it's supposed to, people will be paid to criticize it," she said. But, at the end of the day, like Natalie, Ms. Burke wants everything she's about to get. "I'm desperate for this to work out," she said, smiling. "And also, I mean, it's fun. This is so fun."