Yesteryear — Caro Claire Burke

There is a kidnapper in Yesteryear. It took me most of the book to work out who.

The marketing tells you this is a tradwife thriller. A satire about influencers. Natalie Heller Mills larps as a trad wife for millions followers. Raw milk, farm eggs, a husband she steers like livestock, four children who exist mostly as content. Two nannies and an assistant keep the machine running off camera.

Strip the influencer plot away and Yesteryear is a cult story. A cult of one household. That is the version of the book that stayed with me and it. The kids are the congregation. They are the only people in the story who never consented to the aesthetic, and they are the ones who pay for it when the aesthetic becomes literal.

Religion is everywhere in this book, and for a long time I could not work out why. Natalie prays constantly. She swears, then apologises to God for swearing, then swears again. Burke has said in interviews that she is more interested in power than in religion, and once I saw that, the God angle clicks into place. Burke is trying to push this idea that there is a language of certainty that makes control sound like love. Every cult runs on borrowed authority, and God is the oldest authority you can borrow.

Which brings me to her mother.

Natalie's mother is the source code. The hatred of men, the love of God, the whole architecture of her values came from this woman. Natalie does not follow her mother's teachings so much as live inside them. So when her mother finally admits she was lying the whole time, it took away Natalie's role model and while the pillars Natalie built her entire self on were crumbling down. Not only was it crumbling down the person she based the architecture on didn’t even build those pillars in the first place.

I keep thinking about that inheritance. Every parent hands their children a version of the world and calls it the truth. Most of us never find out how much of it was conviction and how much was performance. Natalie found out but her children probably never will.

I wonder which of the two is worse.