How Caro Claire Burke Wrote the Biggest Book of the Year
I first heard about “Yesteryear,” this summer’s blockbuster novel about a trad-wife influencer who wakes up in a nightmarish alternate reality, long before it had even been published. In 2024, the book deal alone made headlines as the stuff of fairy tales: Caro Claire Burke, a first-time author who was then just thirty years old, sold “Yesteryear” to Knopf in a twelve-way auction for a reported “low seven figures.” Amazon MGM Studios quickly snapped up the film rights, for a reported sum between “$450,000 and $2 million.” The actress Anne Hathaway climbed aboard as a co-producer and announced plans to develop the property as a starring vehicle for herself. All of this good fortune heaped a mountain of pressure on Burke, who was then living in Virginia and working as an associate editor at Katie Couric Media, a fast-churning life-style site that traffics primarily in wellness and shopping content. On the one hand, Burke was able to quit her job immediately to focus on editing her manuscript and working on “Diabolical Lies,” a politics and culture podcast that she runs with her friend Katie Gatti Tassin. On the other hand, Burke was thrown directly into the cultural crucible. Many wondered, given the amount of speculative cash poured into “Yesteryear,” whether it would succeed or become a cautionary tale. We now have the answer: “Yesteryear,” which came out on April 7th, has spent seventeen straight weeks on the New York Times’ best-seller list, peaking at No. 1. The book has proved to be one of the most successful—and most hotly debated—in years.
Burke, who was raised in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, as the daughter of a doctor and a nurse, grew up with conservative beliefs. (She voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.) But she began to question them when she and her husband, whom she married at twenty-six, spent two years living out of an Airstream trailer and reading Marxist theory. She became passionate about feminism and leftism, and she found, on TikTok, an outlet to speak freely about topics such as toxic masculinity and her support for Palestinians. I started following her there shortly after she sold her novel, and found her to be a preternaturally confident presence—someone unafraid to wade into the morass, even when her opinions were met with a flood of angry comments. Burke has since deleted most of her TikTok history, but her experience on the platform prepared her for the much greater scrutiny that came next.
“Yesteryear” follows Natalie Heller Mills, a woman from a devout Christian background who lives on an idyllic Idaho ranch with her husband, Caleb, the scion of a powerful political dynasty, and their brood of apple-cheeked children. Natalie has built an empire out of baking bread and tending to chickens, becoming mega-famous (and mega-wealthy) in the process. Then, one cold morning, she wakes up to find herself trapped in the year 1855. Gone are her luxury linens and marble countertops; she must learn how to live the “traditional” life style she promoted online, this time without electricity or working plumbing. Burke teases out the mystery of what’s truly happened, and why, until the very end, when a twist spins the entire book on its axis. We spoke this week about her experience of these past few hectic months, her current thoughts on trad wives and feminism, and her conversations with Hathaway about what a “Yesteryear” adaptation might look like. Burke, who is pregnant with her first child, is taking a much-needed break from her worldwide book tour to regroup and start working on her second novel—which, she assures me, will have no trad wives in it at all. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
To begin with, the publisher let me know that you’re now at about 1.4 million copies sold. Does that compute?
It’s a number that I think is too abstract for me to really understand at this point. I get weekly sales updates, so I’ve known that we were moving toward that. But, no, it’s insane. It’s bizarre.
I do think that it helps me, in a way, because obviously there has been a lot of noise around this book, and I can tend to fixate on one person’s reaction to it. When there are moments like “a million copies sold,” that actually has a very grounding effect, of me realizing, Oh, my God, there are so many different opinions about this book. It helps me couch it in a way that gives me some perspective. Does that make sense?
Yes. Obviously, you haven’t gotten a million angry e-mails.
Yeah, I’ve only gotten nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, so we’re doing well.
We’re in a strange cycle with the book right now. Initially, it really took off, and then there was the backlash, and then there’s the backlash to the backlash, and now we’re in some miasmic fourth phase where it’s all mixed up together. But, currently, at this moment, what is your thinking about how the public is receiving the work?
I think you probably have a better understanding at this point of the discourse than I do. I’m pretty tapped out. But I do think that there was a period of time, probably right after I hit No. 1 on the New York Times list, where it felt to me like the discourse around the book was veering in a direction that I wasn’t excited about. I don’t feel that way right now. I feel right now that there has been a little bit of a balancing effect in terms of how people talk about it.
Can you talk more about that moment you felt the discourse was going a bit off the rails?
When we hit No. 1, that was, I think, three weeks in. I was in London at the time, and immediately, I was, like, This is too much. I’m a début novelist. No one knows who I am. And that was when the stuff with Anne Hathaway started to really pick up, and I felt a palpable shift from critics and readers alike, where it was, like, “No book is worth this.” It went from “What is this book? Is this book good?” to “Is it worth the hype? Is it worth being on ‘Seth Meyers?’ ”
We’ll definitely dig into that. But I want to go back for a bit. Can you walk me through the backstory of the book, and how you came up with the idea? Why was this a story you felt you had to tell?
It was two years ago, the winter of 2024. I’d been writing for about a decade. That previous summer, I’d gone on submission for another manuscript, and it got rejected. My agent was very supportive about future projects, but I just said, “I need some time off.” So I downloaded TikTok. I think I was just bored. It was the first time in my adult life that I wasn’t working on a fiction project. Part of it was just timing. I downloaded TikTok exactly as the “trad wife” conversation took off.
Your TikTok videos were how I first learned of you, actually. I was surprised at how fearless you were just to hop on and share your opinions about everything, even when you were wading into choppy waters like, say, debating whether or not Taylor Swift is good for feminism.
I think, because I was in my late twenties at the time, and none of my friends were really on TikTok, it felt, ironically, very private. It just felt like a back door to have the types of conversations that I had wanted to have for a long time, but that I had never had the credibility to talk about. I had been pitching essays forever, but I’m a terrible pitcher, so I never got the essays approved. I am a person who has opinions. And I think, quite frankly, that I was at a point in my life where what I had done so far didn’t match my expectations for myself. I didn’t have the type of credibility that you or Jia Tolentino or Andrea Long Chu or any of these cultural critics get to have, where you have an opinion and it matters because you said it. It felt like I hadn’t done the right things. I hadn’t gotten the right résumé. Then I was out there sharing my thoughts about feminism and media literacy, and all of a sudden I have Tressie McMillan Cottom in my comments.
I think that when I saw that I could find traction on TikTok, and that I actually did have some level of a knack for breaking through the noise, the excitement of that outweighed any of the fear. But I also do think that I was moving quite recklessly at the time, and I wouldn’t do it the same way now. Now I’m much more careful about what I give my opinions on, which I guess is just the life cycle of any person. But TikTok changed my life. I wouldn’t have written “Yesteryear” without it, and I certainly wouldn’t have started “Diabolical Lies.” And now I’m a full-time novelist and cultural critic, which are the two things I thought I had missed the boat on.
Also, I had started doing research on the trad-wife movement, for work—I was working at Katie Couric Media at the time. Before long, I had the idea for “Yesteryear.” I had the title, I had the pitch, and I knew how I wanted it to end. I reached out to my agent, and I was, like, “Do you think we could sell this on a partial manuscript?” And she said, “No, obviously. Of course not. You’re a nobody. You can’t sell this on a partial.” And so I wrote a first draft very quickly. We sold it, I quit my job, and then everything changed.
How long did it take you to write that first draft?
It took me probably eight or nine weeks. I felt in many ways like I was writing for my life. The spirit moved me. Also, at the time I was very burnt out. I think I had a desire to get to the end because I was not in the space to work on something quietly for years, the way that I just had. I had just worked on a different manuscript for four and a half years, the one that didn’t sell.
Was that first book a similar concept?
No, it was a campus novel. I mean, I loved that novel.
Well, I’m sure you can sell it now.
Eh. It wouldn’t be a good follow-up to “Yesteryear.” But I believed in that one the same way I believed in “Yesteryear.” You must always believe in what you’re writing.
Let’s talk process, because I’m always pruriently interested in that. What was your day-to-day life like, during those eight or nine weeks when you were writing? Tell me your schedule.
I was working my day job from 11 A.M. to 7 P.M. So I would wake up at four or five in the morning, and I would try to write two or three thousand words. I was a rower in college, and so I always like writing in the morning. You make a coffee and bang your head against a wall and then hopefully something happens. It was very stream of consciousness. It was, like, Don’t slow down, just get to the end. And then I would edit what I’d done, and then I would do it all again the next day. I sent my agent fifty- to sixty-page chunks at a time. She would send notes like, “This works, this doesn’t. Keep going. Thumbs-up. Quick pause here. We need to fix this.” And it was truly just a baton pass to the finish. Of course, at the end, I had a million things I wanted to work on, but that first draft was just a mad dash.
What was your day job like then?
My official title was “associate editor.” I wrote S.E.O. articles that were assigned to me—you can still go to the website and see what I did. Some of it was climate-change-related, some of it was branded articles. I loved my team, but obviously I wanted to be a novelist. So I was just burning the candle at both ends for those nine weeks. It was not sustainable, and I felt the unsustainability of it.
When in your life did you realize you wanted to write fiction?
I was, like all writers, a very intense reader, but I was very aware that becoming a novelist is kind of akin to going to the N.F.L. Combine. The odds are so, so against you. Emily Giffin was a lawyer before she was a novelist, and I remember reading her bio and that affecting me. It didn’t occur to me until my early twenties that I could just try to go for it. I actually remember, right after my college graduation, or maybe mid-college, I came across an article about Julia Pierpont, who sold her début, “Among the Ten Thousand Things,” for six figures. That was a clear light bulb for me. So I threw all my eggs in that basket for the next decade.
And what about your feminist education? Were you doing a lot of reading on theory? You have the podcast “Diabolical Lies,” where you are fluent in these subjects, so I want to know the trajectory.
It was very haphazard. Most of my feminist education at the beginning was just reading literature by smart women. I became more explicitly interested in it in my late twenties, after I had gone to Bennington for my M.F.A. and had started to develop an understanding of certain writers, like bell hooks and Toni Morrison. That was my gateway. But, even now, if I’m going to be honest, I don’t feel like I have a strong academic understanding of feminist theory. I feel like I’m constantly catching up with the podcast. I don’t feel like I have bona fides.
What would you say your bona fides are, in terms of thinking through the subject of Christian womanhood?
That’s a good question. I was raised Catholic. But, in terms of this book, a lot of it came from that winter two years ago, when I was researching trad wives and the history of the Christian-nationalist agenda for work. I had asked my superior at Katie Couric Media, “Can I write some essays about trad wives? Can I interview some people?” One woman I reached out to was Celeste Davis, who talks a lot about leaving fundamentalist communities. I read Tia Levings’s books. I mean, to a certain extent, there are instinctive elements of the conversation around this “Christian woman” archetype that I think become pretty obvious when you become interested in leftist politics. It all happened simultaneously. My husband was very interested in Marxist theory and academic theory. So we were kind of just thinking more through a systems lens—through the lens of power and class. A lot of these pieces, at least for me, started to come into place with this messaging around trad wives and Charlie Kirk amplifying them and everyone talking about how it’s so empowering.
How did your leftist political awakening happen for you? You’ve been really open online and on the podcast about your critiques of capitalism, for example. When did those convictions begin to take shape?
In my mid-twenties, largely because my husband was starting to explore it. The grand joke is that this feminist came from a man. My husband and I lived on the road off and on for two years, in an Airstream, and we spent a lot of time just talking about these topics. We listened to “The Dawn of Everything,” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. We watched the film “Captain Fantastic,” and they referenced Noam Chomsky Day, and I’m, like, Who’s Noam Chomsky? So, little things like that. Actually, “Captain Fantastic” has many parallels to “Yesteryear.” You have these children thinking that there are two options, and both are bad, and the ending of the movie—no spoilers, but it offers a third option. It’s them finding this hybrid third option of living out their values, but living in the world, and living with the reality that the world is imperfect. So, maybe I wrote my own “Captain Fantastic.”
I mean, I don’t view myself as having a thorough understanding of leftist theory. I think it’s more so that I have a very strong idea of the ways in which womanhood has been politicized and weaponized, and the ways in which liberal feminism has been a false solution to that. That’s what drives my interest and what drives my research.
Let’s get into the book itself. The voice of Natalie, your protagonist, is so singular. She’s acidic, judgmental, and often hateful, but also wounded in elemental ways. Did that voice come through you fully fledged?
Natalie’s voice was not the voice I intended. What happened was I knew I was going to have to write the majority of the book in short chapters that go back and forth. I was trying to figure out how to get into it, and I ended up writing what became Part One, which was a long day in the life of Natalie. I wrote that first sentence: “This is the last day of the life I imagined for myself.” It was supposed to just be a writing exercise—I didn’t even necessarily know that I was going to put that section in the book at all. It was just me trying to figure out her motivations and intentions. And she came out so different from what I had expected that it was quite jarring, because it forced me to reconsider a lot of the plans I had for the book. I didn’t expect the book to be explicitly political beyond the elevator pitch.
I think our cliché understanding of a trad wife is someone who is acted upon by the world, and Natalie exerts herself upon the world all the time. And so it really was this challenging thing to figure out how the shape of the book that I had imagined for myself was going to reconcile with her strong voice. But, as soon as I gave in to that, it was immediately so much more interesting to me.
It does posit the trad wife as less of a person who, as you said, is stripped of agency, and more as someone designing her life in this very purposeful way for a capitalistic end.
Right. I’m very interested in the conversation about free will, which probably makes me like one of those miserable dudes who reads “Infinite Jest” or something. [Laughs.]
O.K., let’s talk about free will.
Ha! I mean, I think the thing that was most interesting for me when I was writing the book was that I really don’t know the answer to how much free will she has. I still don’t know! That was what created so much tension for me. In almost every section, with every scene in college, or in the eighteen-hundreds, or when she’s getting married, I could argue that she is totally beholden to the circumstances that she was born into. And I could also argue that she architected everything for herself.
Natalie has this ire for what she calls “the angry women” on the internet, who comment on and critique her way of life. Do you see yourself as one of the angry women? Or more sympathetic to Natalie’s side?
When I was writing the book, I felt implicated on both ends. By the time I was writing “Yesteryear,” I had forty thousand followers on TikTok, which to me felt huge. If I had a video that blew up, it felt like the whole world was watching me. I felt like a “creator” in that way. And I would have all of those indignant moments and resentful moments and paranoid moments and defensive moments that have become much more familiar to me as time has gone by. But, then, I also felt like an angry woman, obviously.
It was cathartic for me to explore my own relationship to social media in that way, and also just to think about social media, which I think is a fundamentally rotten thing. And I do think that now that the book has come out, it has only become more of a meta-commentary in my life in both directions. I feel like an angry woman more often when I’m doing work for “Diabolical Lies,” because that’s when I get to put my own anonymous hat on and criticize the behavior of someone else or another group. But now I feel like Natalie all the time.
Is that because you feel like some people have not been reading the book in good faith?
I mean, people can argue about the book all they want. It’s art. That’s what should be happening. But there are moments where I very often will see someone saying something that’s just factually incorrect about me, or just flat out not true. And I have this instinctual knee-jerk reaction to say, “That time line’s incorrect,” or “It didn’t go that way,” or whatever, but I can’t. And so there is this kind of crazy feeling where you technically have more power than you’ve ever had, but you really can’t exert it at all.
I know that there are certain elements of it that are just what happens when a young woman succeeds. But it’s difficult to figure out how to move through. It’s strange to have someone say comfortably in a Substack review that they didn’t read the book, that they’re going to write a review anyways, and that they’re pretty certain that Anne Hathaway ghostwrote it. You just have to . . . I don’t know, you have to be farther into your therapy journey than I am, apparently, to not let it get to you.
I mean, the Anne Hathaway of it all—let’s get into it. I actually do want to talk about when she got involved, and what edits she made, if any, just because there has been a lot of chatter speculating about whether or not she had some input into the narrative of the book. When did you start talking to her during the process?
We sold the rights to her after I went to auction for the book. We sold it in the U.S.A., and then sold it to the U.K., and then we did film rights. In that time period, I spoke to her and her Amazon team, which is probably a group of roughly fifteen people, a number of times throughout the summer. Film rights take longer to finalize than book rights do. So it was during that time period that I already knew what the book was. We already had the ending. We already had Natalie. And the conversations that I was having—not just with her but with the Knopf team, with the 4th Estate team, and with my agent—were high-level conversations of “What are we trying to talk about here? What is this book? What genre is this book? What are the comps for books? What are the comps for films? What are we saying about capitalism and surveillance and performance?”
My conversations with Anne were largely about why she would be a good Natalie. In some ways, she was pitching to me, because there were other people who were vying at the time to have the rights. I mean, she’s phenomenal, but that was why we were talking about Natalie, because it was her sharing her vision for a film that will undoubtedly be different from the book. This book is so interior, and to make a transition to film, it would have to become more exterior. So a lot of what we spoke about was, How do you make that shift? How did David Fincher do that well with “Gone Girl”? And she’s very adept at talking about things like that. She’s clearly a student of cinema.
I am aware that the reason people think that there is editorial involvement is because I thanked her in my acknowledgements. I thanked probably forty people for impacting the book, but in retrospect, I probably wouldn’t do acknowledgements. I’ve seen the extent to which people search for Easter eggs there. I also think the strange thing is that, from the jump, the Anne involvement was a part of the narrative in a way I didn’t have control over. Deadline leaked it, and then they did another article about it, and there were A.I. bots for whatever reason who started pushing these false visuals of her as a trad wife. It just became a social-media thing very quickly.
I mean, it is an ideal character for her to play. I cannot wait to watch her slowly break down her own reality.
Yeah. I agree. I don’t think it can be a one-to-one, and that is my favorite type of adaptation. What we talked about a lot is that you have to take creative liberties. And those were the people that I wanted to work with—people who were not pretending that it was going to be a page-by-page faithful reimagining, where someone’s just talking in their head for seven hours.
How involved are you going to be in the film?
I’m an executive producer, so I’m in good touch with the screenwriter, Hannah Friedman. I think she’s brilliant, and I’ve kept in touch with her over the last two years as she works on the script.
I just hope it’s going to get made. I don’t see how it wouldn’t now, given that the book is such a huge success and Anne’s involved, but you never know . . . so many projects languish in development limbo.
I’m glad that that’s your perspective, because that has also been my perspective throughout. My agents warned me that most things don’t get made. It’s not uncommon at all for actors and actresses to pick up film rights! I think people who aren’t familiar with that really think that this was a “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” golden-ticket situation. Film rights don’t mean it’s being made. It just means that someone optioned it.
So, back to the actual book: I want to talk a little bit about the way you structured it, in terms of knowing where it was going to end and teasing out the surprise. You are able to keep the reader in a sense of suspended animation about what’s actually going on when Natalie is transported to the eighteen-hundreds.
The structure was what came first. I decided to have two bookends, where Part One and Part Three are each one day in Natalie’s life, and they’re arguably the two most important days of her life. I thought that would be a fun way to break up what is otherwise a very boilerplate way to write a thriller. I had no clue how I was going to get to the end. At some point in an early stage, I came up with the idea of moving through red herrings. She has her own theories—she thinks she is in a reality show, or that she’s receiving a test from God. It was really trying to come up with a few mini-plots to get me through and to move through the word count. Then, from there, I was able to come up with smaller twists. For example, her realizing that she’s pregnant. That was an exciting moment for me because it was, like, O.K., cool. We’ve got a countdown. She’s got to get out of here quickly. We’ve got the big twist. How can I write little feints and jabs that take you in different directions?
What was the hardest part of the book for you to write?
I think the biggest intellectual challenge was when I realized that she was just going to be in a house in the eighteen-hundreds for most of it. It was, like, how in the fuck are we going to keep this interesting? That freaked me out.
Which parts came easiest?
Part One was written the first time exactly as it is now, start to finish. The section where she does the monologue about I.V.F. and Reena’s future, that came easily. The section about the way that we treat women on reality TV also came quickly. Really, all the rants came fast. During the time period that I wrote “Yesteryear,” I was just coming off the heels of learning how to talk on TikTok, where you have to communicate an argument and sell it well and come up with the ways in which people would disagree with you and dispute those and then come up with a conclusion—and you’ve got to do it in three minutes or less, and you’ve got to hook them in five seconds or less. If anything, it’s almost like Natalie was giving her own little TikTok rants. And so I wonder if a part of that is a mirror of how I was training myself to communicate during that time period.
How are you weathering the sense that people want you to opine on the “trad-wife discourse”? Just recently, Nara Smith was in the news for going on “Call Her Daddy” and denying that she is a trad wife. And there was that period earlier this year when everybody was speculating about whether Natalie was based on Hannah Neeleman, who runs Ballerina Farm.
I mean, I find Nara Smith’s tonal shift interesting. I find it worthy of consideration. I think it’s great that people are talking about it. And I was shocked and flattered that “Yesteryear” had reached a level of cultural interest that someone would ask Hannah Neeleman about it. But—and I am not quite sure of the right way to say this—I am not on the “trad-wife beat.” I think that’s something that I will just have to prove to people over time. I don’t even think “Yesteryear” is fully a novel about a trad wife.
I do want to know what you think the book is about, if it is not about trad wives.
I mean, I think that “Yesteryear” is about trad wives the way that “Moby-Dick” is about a whale. There’s a very clear symbol, and it’s not wrong. There is a literal story about a trad-wife influencer. But, to me, “Yesteryear” was my exploration about American fantasy and misinformation. Every character in this novel suffers from misinformation. There is so much distortion in this book, intentional distortion—intentional distortion of history, intentional distortion of current culture. There is a misquoted Oprah quote. There are so many Easter eggs about people who share facts that aren’t facts, but do so confidently. That is how Natalie’s religion works. That is how her relationship to intellectualism works. That is how her relationship to feminism works. I feel like that was me trying to process what it feels like to be moving through this moment in American culture right now.
My editor, Jenny Jackson, came up with this phrase that is my core preoccupation in life, which is “the grand performance of womanhood.” That is a fundamental theme within “Yesteryear” that will carry forward in my fiction. I don’t think it’s accidental that this performance of womanhood is now being merged so seamlessly with the surveillance state and with artificial intelligence and with body augmentation. This accelerated late-stage moment that we’re in is taking advantage of women as a commodity. It’s a really exhausting time period to be living in as any gender, frankly.
One thing I haven’t heard you talk about much is just how the book has been received in different places, because you’ve gone all over the world and also all over the country with it.
The majority of my tour was spent in middle America and in red America—with the caveat that if you go to a bookstore in any state, you’re probably going into the more liberal audience of that state. Salt Lake City was actually one of my favorite stops. I think there were six hundred people there, which felt massive. And I think the big distinction with Salt Lake City, versus a coastal place, was the intensity of the emotion that people felt and communicated to me in the signing line. These conversations were not theoretical to them. These were a lot of people who were ex-Mormon, who were current Mormons, who were coming from fundamentalist backgrounds, who had lost family members due to their relationship with religious fundamentalism, or who were in one of the progressive groups fighting to combat the rising Christian nationalism in the state. It was very emotional and very moving. And that doesn’t mean that every person thought the book was perfect, but it felt really exciting for me to feel like I had gained access, even, to these moments of connection with other people. I probably hugged more people in Salt Lake City than I did in other stops. And then, in the U.K., there is an abject bemusement with America.
Like an “Oh, so this is what they’re up to over there” type thing.
Totally. Just, like, “What the fuck is going on with you guys? Why are you so nuts?” Of course they’re dealing with their own issues with extremism and gendered regression. But there was a kind of bemusement with our fascination with the Wild West and our fixation on cowboys, and a sense that America has gone off the rails. And I take the point.
Have you had any particularly contentious experiences at a reading?
No, never. I mean, people disagree. People will stand up and say they wish the book had talked about something more, or they will ask me questions that are very pointed. That happens all the time. But the internet is fake, and people communicate to one another there in a way that is wholly unnatural. That is something that I knew before the book came out, but it has been really reinforced to me: that there is just an entirely different social etiquette online that does not map over into human reality. When I’m in person at events, plenty of people will say, “I didn’t get this,” or “This made me uncomfortable.” Or, for example, “It upset me that you set a book in the eighteen-hundreds without talking about the Civil War and without talking about racism more.” And that’s a conversation I’m more than happy to have while out on tour. But the internet operates on an entirely different moral framework.
I mean, psychosis brought along by the internet and the opinions of others is sort of the theme of the book.
Totally. And there’s no irony held by the people who then operate in that. I’m, like, you are literally operating under the rules that were set out in the book that I wrote, but, fine, no worries.
Obviously, this book has received a ton of praise, and deservedly so. But one of the criticisms that I see levelled against the book, particularly online, is that you somehow share Natalie’s ingrained misogyny. Do you want to speak to that?
I actually think that that one bothers me less than others, only because a person who reads literature voraciously would never have that confusion. I do think it is much more common to accuse women of writing autobiographically, because people don’t think we can come up with things. I have received a number of accusations which amount to “She couldn’t come up with this,” which is related to how I write about motherhood, or to the decisions I made very intentionally about religion. It’s related to the success of the book and whether that belongs to me—it had to have come from somewhere else, or it had to be rushed, or it had to be unintentional or accidental. That’s something that I knew was coming, because I’ve been watching débuts from women for a decade. I’ve been studying the industry. If a book by a woman who’s a début novelist does well, it will be assumed that it’s an autobiography. I think it’s a shame that the conversation has to be so reductive and that I feel an instinct to shut it down immediately, because I actually think that there’s quite a bit of interesting ground to be covered in terms of how work is made. Like, it all did come from me. I would like to explore that.
How has being pregnant affected your sense of this work? So much of the book is about motherhood, and what being a good mother is.
I do feel like I’ve had a five-year gestation. I wasn’t pregnant when I started writing “Yesteryear,” but I was thinking about being a mother. I was thirty. It wasn’t a surprise. I’m not a teen-age mom. I do think my relationship to being pregnant has radically changed my experience of overexposure and of becoming a public figure. Where it’s been hard is having to travel and being away from my partner and not going to doctor’s appointments. I didn’t go to doctor’s appointments for ten weeks, because I wasn’t going to go into a random red-state hospital to see if my baby was O.K.
I can’t even imagine your life right now, Caro. You’re having the craziest year.
Yeah, it’s been fucking nuts. I’m exhausted.
Are you going to take some time off?
Yes and no. There are certain elements of this that aren’t slowing down, and that’s a privilege. This book has created a level of opportunity and stability in my life that I am aware of. It gave me the right to take maternity leave. It gave me the ability to pay for health insurance, and it also has given me the opportunity to feel pretty free to try some crazy shit in future novels. I’ve cashed in some good will, and that’s awesome. Even as there are elements of this that I feel pretty beaten down by, I’m also very aware that this has opened so many doors. My life has changed materially in every single way. Before I sold “Yesteryear,” I was constantly playing the game of Tetris, like, how much time do I invest in my fiction writing, because it’s not going anywhere? Do I get the right to rent an Airbnb and go write alone for three days? It shouldn’t be this way, but there is a feeling now that I’ve written “Yesteryear” that I can finally invest in myself as an artist.
Have you talked to or consulted anyone else who had such a crazy début-novel experience? Has anyone been helpful in navigating this time?
It’s a rare group. And of that small group, an even smaller number of women have actively reached out to me, which has made me very eager to reach out to other women. That was genuinely something that kept me alive at moments when I felt like I was burning alive. One writer that I’ll just mention is Chloe Benjamin. She had a huge, huge book with “The Immortalists,” and she has a book coming out this fall, which I think is an immaculate novel. She reached out, and that was a moment of incredible kindness that I’m very grateful for.
O.K., without spoiling too much, let’s talk about the ending. It’s such a wild twist. What was the gut punch for you of it ending that way?
I think that had it ended in a metaphysical or fantastical way, it would’ve been not just a cop-out but a total deflation of everything that the book is about. I didn’t want it to be a coma or a bad postpartum dream or an actual alien space invasion. But, again, the big question is: Is she in control? The ending doesn’t resolve that. If anything, it only further twists that knife. Is she mentally ill? Is she a product of her circumstances? What is Caleb’s culpability in this? He’s been kind of drugging her, but also he’s off in the woods. She knew how to get out the whole time.
I also really wanted the story to end with some element of accountability, which is a word I tend to hate. But I did want to show her living out the consequences of her actions. I think Ruby Franke is obviously the parallel here, but I also wanted to end with the children. That was a really important decision for me. Throughout, you have this infuriating main character who is not going to change. She’s not going to grow, and she’s not going to learn to the extent that you would want—but the children can.
I think what’s really satisfying about the full circle of the book is how the daughters of the family do end up having control. Clementine, the oldest daughter, takes control to help break out the other children, and Mary, in telling her story publicly, has agency in rectifying the familial curse.
I think the spin cycle of misinformation ends with children getting to make up their minds for themselves. The part that always really moves me is Clementine seeing the ocean. There are certain elements of our world that are just real. And you forget that because people will actually contest them and try to convince you that the world is flat. There is something really satisfying about being, like, “I am looking with my own eyes, and you were wrong, and you lied to me, and now I know what this is.” Writing that felt like an exhalation, because with Natalie, it felt like my muscles were tight the whole time. I felt like I was holding my breath, and then there’s just this great exhale. There was no other ending that would accomplish that feeling for me.
What did your family think of the book?
They’ve been more supportive than I would’ve even expected, because of how intense this process has been. This is a lot, to suddenly go from not existing in a public way to there being an article in the Boston Globe where Harvard University was, like, “Should we rethink our brand because of ‘Yesteryear’?” My parents were, like, What is happening? I certainly feel a desire to protect them, because it wasn’t a decision that any of them made for me to become someone who’s an outspoken feminist or—according to Louise Perry—a woman-hater. It’s been an adjustment for all of us.
Have you felt like your relationships with your peers have remained the same? I mean, writers can be the pettiest people on earth.
Yeah, I’m still working that out. My close friends have all been unbelievably supportive. Katie [Gatti Tassin], my podcast co-host, has been a huge source of stability for me. But there have certainly been women who I was friendly with online, who I thought I had a collegial relationship with, who very quickly went for the biggest possible knife on their highest and most viable platform to be, like, This book sucks and this is why. That was surprising.
We’re apparently in a literacy crisis in America. But people are reading your book. How has this made you feel about the reading public?
This is relatively biased because it’s based on my in-person interactions, but I have been surprised and honestly delighted by how many people at my signing line say, completely comfortably, “I don’t read, but I love this book,” or, “I don’t enjoy fiction anymore, but I really enjoyed this, so thank you.” When you’re a writer, you’re a reader, and you think everyone’s a reader. But, to be a writer now, you’re not competing with literature; you’re competing with social media. There is a lot of doomerism in that, but I think that people tend to be overly rosy about the past as well. Ironically, even in these liberal circles, we tend to look towards this bygone era where everyone read Bret Easton Ellis and was, like, “Jonathan Franzen was my President,” and most people weren’t reading then, either. It’s not surprising to me that as people become increasingly crunched for time, and as social media takes over their lives, most people don’t have six hours to dedicate to a book in the afternoon.
We are also very quick to dismiss any book that does succeed. A number of people who I would’ve thought, even if they didn’t like my book, would think that it’s a great win for literature, are very quick to say, “Well, this isn’t actually literature,” or, “Actually this book sucks,” or, “Actually, this book only did well because Anne Hathaway is famous,” and it’s, like, what do you want? Do you want books to break through, or do you want to immediately condemn them when they do? I think that’s something that the literary community maybe needs to decide. I don’t think a book is good or bad based on its sales.
Once a book reaches a certain level of cultural penetration, it is easy to critique it as the downfall of mass literary taste.
I’ve literally seen people say “Yesteryear” is “evidence of our literacy crisis.” And I’m, like, “Let me guess, you don’t like ‘A Court of Thorns and Roses,’ either, and you also don’t like Sally Rooney, or any of these books that reach people.” I think romantasy is awesome. If people want to read it, I think that’s fucking rad. It doesn’t matter if it’s my cup of tea. And I think Sally Rooney is one of the greatest living writers.
A lot of people want to write a best-selling book, but it seems to me that they don’t understand what that actually means, at least nowadays. It puts you directly in the crosshairs of the cultural discourse. Not that many people, I’d imagine, are prepared to weather it.
I felt pretty underwater in the beginning. I had a writer say to me, “The first time your book comes out, if you get any attention, you’re going to feel every single bump of turbulence and think that the plane is crashing—and then eventually your plane gets bigger.” There was a period of overthinking and of feeling like every small moment was going to ruin me. But this summer it has felt like my plane has finally been getting bigger.
And you’re already working on a new book . . .
There are no trad wives in my new novel. It’s not “Yesteryear Two: Natalie in Space.” But it will touch on the grand performance of womanhood, and be a book that exists across multiple genres. I’m kind of addicted to that now. ♦