How did you become interested in the “tradwife” segment of social media/the internet?
In the winter of 2024, I was a very burnt-out writer who had been writing fiction for years and needed to take a break. On a whim, I downloaded TikTok. None of my friends or family was very active on the
platform, so it felt like a private place for me to explore creatively with no expectations (yes, I recognize the irony of describing TikTok, a public platform where millions of people have seen my face, as private). I ended up becoming involved in conversations about feminism and media literacy as they
pertained to the tradwife discourse, which incidentally entered the zeitgeist the same month I downloaded my account. TikTok is a wonderfully democratic platform: if you share a video and enough people resonate with it, then you’re in, so to speak. As a person who had spent years trying and failing to get a foot in the door at traditional cultural institutions (pitching culture essay ideas to magazines, for example), it was a shocking experience for me to find a side door, so to speak, with TikTok. In short order, I grew a following and become a major player in a large cultural conversation which spanned weeks — and one morning in that period, I woke up with the full synopsis for a novel in my head. I even had the title. I emailed my agent to make sure my idea sounded relatively coherent to someone else, got the green light from her, and got to work.
You co-host a culture podcast that, among other things, has covered tradwives. How did your work on one inform the other?
My work on Diabolical Lies is often jarringly interconnected with my work as a novelist, even though these are technically two extremely different projects: one is audio, and one is written; one exists
firmly in the world we live in, requiring me to abide by facts and a basic understanding of reality, and the other allows me to dip into another world entirely, empowering me to diverge from the rigid structure of “fact” in the pursuit of another kind of truth. But both, at the end of the day, come from
the same urge to better understand the world around me. Each job influences and fuels the other immensely. I’m lucky in that way.
You’ve talked about tradwives as a culture critic and now written about them as a debut author. What appealed to you about writing a novel vs a nonfiction book on the subject? What drew you to making it a thriller, specifically?
I don’t think any of these questions were ones I considered in any deliberate sense when I was writing Yesteryear. I suppose I chose a novel because that’s the field I trained in for years; I got my MFA in
fiction, and have been writing fiction, both published and unpublished, for over a decade now. It wasn’t a decision so much as a creative tic, one I’m sure another writer would recognize: once you have an idea for a story, you’re a dog with a bone. It’s not rational. It’s instinct. As for the question of genre:
when I was writing the first draft of the novel, I actually wasn’t certain how the book would be marketed if I could be lucky enough to sell it. It makes complete sense to me that people see it now as a thriller, but at the time I was focused on all kinds of things: how it operated as thriller, yes, but also how it operated as a black comedy of sorts, and a social satire, and in some ways a strange kind of coming of age. All those angles were, to me, equally important to making the novel sing.
Tell us about writing the book. What questions or feelings did you find yourself working through or exploring as you wrote Yesteryear?
Ha! How much time do you have? Let’s just say I see myself in every character in this novel. At this point in my career, it’s not clear to me if writing fiction about patriarchy, religious extremism, and
structurally enforced misogyny works as a crucial form of emotional catharsis for me, or if I’m slowly marching my way to the nearest asylum by spending so much time immersed in these topics. TBD, Iguess.
One of the most fascinating parts of the book was Natalie’s relationship to a few core ideas. How would you describe Natalie’s relationship to the very ideas of womanhood and motherhood? How does that relationship change based on whether she’s looking at or experiencing her own identity as a woman, versus looking at other women?
Natalie has a very transactional relationship with motherhood, womanhood, and spirituality. This relationship is also quite childlike. As such, she is constantly finding herself disappointed, shocked,
and/or outraged by the nuanced way in which each of these realms of identities appears in her adult life. I think her perspective of other women’s lives is equally limited. She has an almost pathological ability to misunderstand what another person is thinking or feeling, which means she essentially ends up living in a world of absurdity. I didn’t intend to write her this way, it just happened, but it ended up being a wonderful word for a writer to live in: every scene that involves Natalie becomes hysterical, mysterious, or terrifying. All good options for a writer!
What about her relationship to patriarchy, as both a system and individual men?
This might be because I’m married to a man studying to be an architect, but I often end up thinking about novels as houses, especially when I’m in the middle of a draft, and in Yesteryear, I view patriarchy as the scaffolding for Natalie as a character. She has built an entire worldview out of patriarchal assumptions, assuming these would hold steady for her entire life — but as everyone knows, scaffolding is a definitionally temporary support system, one you remove when the real work
of building something that will last forever is completed. Unfortunately for Natalie, she leans on the flimsy thought structures of patriarchal thinking too hard, thinking they’ll hold her. They don’t.
The question of choice feels so central to this novel—how much of what happens is Natalie’s choice, and how much isn’t, for example. Another crucial element is the concept of performance, which is first verbalized by Natalie’s mother as a coping mechanism she used to get through daily life while raising her kids. How do those concepts—choice and performance—intersect?
FREE WILL! Now I feel like we’re talking on my podcast, where we joke that every conversation always ends up with me with my hands thrown up in the air, gesturing vaguely at the notion of free will. The
question of performance is equally dizzying as the question of choice — once you start to think about it, you run the risk of overthinking every element of your life. It’s true that we perform versions of ourselves online; that kind of performance is one people tend to feel the most comfortable admitting and discussing with others. But it’s also true that we perform at work, and in fitness classes, and at home with the people we cherish most in the world. I’m not convinced anyone has a choice in any of it, but I tend to be a free will pessimist. This reminds me of a line Natalie thinks at one point, one that came to me early and was critical in unlocking the rest of the novel: “Motherhood is its own kind of
curation. Which is to say: every woman I know lied to me about what it would be like, before I became one myself.”
What role do you think non-supportive spectators (The Angry Women) play in the perpetuation of tradwife performance and popularity?
Oh, I think they play a massive role. Every performance demands an audience.
This novel feels like it’s written to be talked about by a female friend group over dinner, in a group chat, or via DM. It both feeds cultural fascination with tradwives (particularly among women outside of that group) and comments on it through Natalie’s POV. What are you hoping readers take away from that interplay?
So far, I’ve been able to talk about Natalie, and the world of Yesteryear, with a few dozen people in the book and film community, and every single person has had something different to say to me —
which is to say, I have no expectations or hopes for how readers react to this novel. On a personal note, there’s nothing more interesting to me as a writer or a person than the grand performance ofwomanhood. I plan to talk about that for the rest of my life.
