AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Welcome to Yesteryear Ranch, where our narrator raises her children on a farm in Idaho. She drinks raw milk and eats farm fresh eggs. She has 5 million followers on Instagram.
CARO CLAIRE BURKE: (Reading) And who was I? A flawless Christian woman; the manic pixie American dream girl of this nation's deepest darkest fantasies; the mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to. Like a nun in a porno, it didn't make sense, but also, by God, it worked. My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
RASCOE: And then one morning, she wakes up cold and terrified. The year is 1855. Is it an elaborate hoax, a dream, or could it be much, much worse? "Yesteryear" is Caro Claire Burke's first novel, and she joins us now. Welcome.
BURKE: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: Tell us about the star of the novel, the person who's putting on this show, Natalie. She's very hard to like. I can't be the first person to tell you this.
BURKE: No, you are certainly not. I like to think of her as an antihero, but she is certainly a very, very difficult woman. She is ambitious and acidic and rude, and sometimes the things that she thinks are things that none of us want to admit that we think. And she's a little bit cold with her children, cold with her husband. But there's a lot that she wants from the world, and she has a hard time reconciling that with what she thinks she should be doing.
RASCOE: Natalie sees herself as someone who is living this lifestyle that is upholding traditional Christian values. But you don't make explicit what her religion is. Was that intentional?
BURKE: I think I was interested in the fundamentalist nature of Natalie's interests, and that kind of transcends any specific religion. So, you know, the fundamentalist values that she upholds are about subservience. They're about adhering to certain power dynamics. And it was important to me not to be focusing on any one religion so much as focusing on those power hierarchies, which I think are very consistent across a number of religions.
RASCOE: Is that Natalie's values? Is that what drives her? She's not really subservient. She's the leader of the household.
BURKE: Right. I think that's the contradiction that I found so satisfying when I was writing it - this woman who might claim to believe in those values or, at the very least, has been raised in a community that espouses those values, but she herself really doesn't act them out. She has so much ambition, and like you said, she ends up very quickly being the breadwinner for her family. So it's very ironic, and I think that that type of tension is what kind of leads to her psychological distress.
RASCOE: And then one morning, she wakes up under a comforter that is not her comforter, and she thinks to herself, this frigid, knotted, lumpy floor is not your Brazilian-imported hardwood. Tell us about what is happening in the year of our Lord, 1855.
BURKE: That was one of my favorite scenes to write. So that's the moment where the reader is basically immersed into the 1800s for the first time. And Natalie wakes up, and she's in her house, but it is not her house. And as she kind of ventures farther and farther, she comes across children who look like her children but are not her children, and she steps outside, and she recognizes her property, but, you know, there's no lighting. And the chicken coop is falling apart, and the barn looks old. And she finds herself in this very uncanny reality of a time period that she has been fetishizing for so long. And it's really terrifying, and it was really, really exciting for me to write as a kind of scene-setter for this novel.
RASCOE: We don't want to do any spoilers, but while Natalie is in the 1800s or in this time period, she does find what appears to be a broken piece of, like, a plastic lapel microphone in the yard. What's going on in her head as she's starting to find these inconsistencies?
BURKE: Yeah, well, Natalie is very paranoid and very savvy, and she has spent a lot of time online. And so I think that one of the ongoing paranoias she has is that she's being filmed, that this is some sort of reality television hoax. And so stumbling upon that really kind of lights her up. Surveillance and performance is a very, very consistent thread throughout the book, and I think it starts for her at the earliest age 'cause she's taught that she is surveilled by a very patriarchal sort of form of religious authority. And so she becomes very comfortable with that. But then when you amplify that with social media followers and thinking, you know, at any given moment in a grocery store, someone might know who you are, I think that that can really change your relationship to reality.
RASCOE: One of the questions that Natalie has to confront is, what is real and what's not real, and what's real and what's performance? Do you want the reader to ask some of those same questions?
BURKE: I don't like putting any homework on the reader, but it's certainly been the topic that I have the most fun when I'm talking to other people is, you know, how you can take these threads about influencers and apply them to your own life. Like, do I act differently with my coworkers than I do with my husband?
RASCOE: Probably, right? Most people do (laughter).
BURKE: Yeah. And then you think about, you know, how you try to get the right angle when you're taking a picture for Instagram.
RASCOE: Yeah, put on a show.
BURKE: Yeah, it's all a performance. Totally. For me, I mean, I have a fraction of Natalie's fame, but it certainly makes it harder for me to retain my own identity. And I would be lying if I had any answers to that, unfortunately, but it is certainly something that animates my hours, is trying to figure out how I can retain my understanding of myself, regardless of what someone online might think of me.
RASCOE: We often romanticize the olden days. Turns out, the food sucks, and Natalie immediately injures her foot in an animal trap. Is this book a bit of wish fulfillment because, you know, a lot of people may see these tradwife TikToks and think, you wouldn't love making Oreos from scratch if you didn't have the double oven and central heat and central air, you know?
BURKE: I think a lot of people have kind of characterized this novel as a, be careful what you wish for. And I think that's, you know, a totally correct characterization. I think a little bit of what I was thinking about when I was writing the novel is almost like pushing a theory to its final conclusions. I think we have such an obsession right now with moving backwards in time, and that's true with tradwives, but it's true across the board. And so it was really fun for me as a writer to kind of think, OK, well, let's take that argument and that theory that people are pushing to one another online. And let's carry it out all the way and see what happens when we get to the end.
RASCOE: That's Caro Claire Burke. "Yesteryear" is her debut novel. Thank you so much for joining us.
BURKE: Thank you so much for having me.
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