After shaking up the internet with it’s relevant and polemic discussions about the “tradewife” culture, the book “Yesteryear” has finally arrived at the Brazilian bookstores this month (September)
Imagine waking up one day without electricity, a nanny, a production team, or an editing crew — the only things left are you, reality, and manual labor that, until yesterday, existed solely for the purpose of decorating your feed. Natalie Heller Mills, the protagonist of Yesteryear, lives exactly this in American journalist Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, which became one of the most talked-about books on BookTok in 2026.
The phenomenon
Natalie is a tradwife influencer with millions of followers, living on a “perfect” ranch in Idaho — what no one imagined was that, behind the cameras, the perfect life depended on a not-so-“perfect” production. One day, she wakes up and seems to have been transported to 1855, leaving behind any romanticization of rural life and luxury, which are now nonexistent in her world. Throughout the story, the line between “this is real” and “this is a breakdown” becomes increasingly blurred — and that is where the central question of the novel lies: what is left of the so-called “perfect life” when it stops being edited content and becomes real life?
Hannah Neeleman, better known as Ballerina Farm, is one of the names most closely associated with this aesthetic. Nara Smith, another major figure in the genre, has publicly rejected the label. In July 2026, on the Call Her Daddy podcast (Nara Smith: Stop Calling Me a Tradwife), she said, “I don’t prioritize being a homemaker, I’m a working mom,” stating that she and her husband share household responsibilities equally. The public response was harsh — many people accused her of “rewriting history” precisely as the tradewife label began to lose popularity.
The aesthetic of nostalgia
Farmhouses, long dresses, homemade bread, perfect children, “simple living”: all of this makes up an aesthetic that sells — and sells very well. The problem is that defending old-fashioned practices can also mean defending outdated values. Research points to the contradiction: the most successful tradewife influencers make money documenting an “anti-modern lifestyle” through very modern tools and with freedoms that would have been unthinkable for women of that era.
Romanticizing the past is easy when we only look at the aesthetics. What disappears from the equation is everything else: lack of rights, medicine, autonomy, and choice. And what is most interesting is that, in the book, Burke sheds light on an inequality that remains very much alive today. A study by Ipea estimates that unpaid domestic work accounts for around 11% of Brazil’s GDP. In other words, the “double shift” has never disappeared — it has simply gained a pretty filter.
The book dismantles this fantasy
Throughout the narrative, Burke contrasts domestic work as content (beautiful, edited, with a soundtrack) with domestic work as survival; the romanticized motherhood of social media posts with real motherhood, without a nanny or editing; and the autonomy we have today with the limitations women actually faced in the 19th century.
One of the book’s most interesting points is that Natalie does not simply sell an opinion about how women should live: she sells a practically dystopian lifestyle. It is an exact portrait of what researchers call an “online commercialized brand” — the paradox of the “traditional” homemaker who, in practice, is a media entrepreneur. The book questions what goes on behind the scenes of this “authentic life” and reopens a discussion: what does authenticity on social media actually mean?
The debate on BookTok
Not everyone agrees on the book’s value, and that is part of the phenomenon. Some readers consider the satire “electrifying”; others find the tone mean-spirited and the protagonist too shallow to build a deeper social critique. In reality, this divide is the very engine behind its success: BookTok has become a space for debate about tradewives, femininity, and nostalgia, not just a sales showcase. But this kind of discourse is not limited to fiction — it is also part of a strong resurgence of conservative rhetoric.
A 2025 study from the University of Hawaiʻi already pointed out that tradewife content can promote patriarchal gender roles and anti-feminist ideas behind cute images of domestic life. In Brazil, research by social scientists Ane Caroline Andrade and Ariana de Oliveira Melo (Unifor/Uece) mapped more than 90,000 posts using the hashtag #tradwife on TikTok alone, showing how the algorithm promotes this aesthetic as an ideal model. Psychologist Rachael Robnett (UNLV) also links male support for the movement to forms of benevolent and hostile sexism.
From book to film
The adaptation rights were negotiated with Amazon MGM Studios even before the book was published — a sign of how much buzz the novel was already generating behind the scenes. Anne Hathaway will star in and produce the film, with a screenplay by Hannah Friedman. The actress said she read a version of the manuscript “two years ago” and described having an “intense feeling” about the story — according to her, her friends simply could not stop rereading the book as soon as they finished it. Caro Claire Burke, who is also an executive producer, has already said that the film will not be a faithful copy of the novel: “the book is very internal, and for it to become a movie, it needs to become more external,” she told Variety.
In the end, one good question remains: if the story of an influencer who turns her own life into content has itself become a content phenomenon — book, review, meme, TikTok duet, film starring Anne Hathaway — what does that say about the way we consume stories on social media today?
The article above was edited by Maitê Olyntho.
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