Yesteryear Fell Short

[00:00:00]If you have not yet heard of Yesteryear, that's unusual at this point, but I'll let you know what this book is about before I get into my opinions on the discourse surrounding this book, as well as the book. Yesteryear is about Natalie, who is a woman who over time becomes a tradwife influencer, where it's basically all a facade. She has a bunch of videos she posts online that depict a dream of her and her husband going out, buying a farm, and working the land, and she, you know, makes bread and does all that sort of tradwife content. And then, the gimmick to get people to read the book is she is forced back in time to the 1850s, where she is forced to live the life of a real tradwife, not just one for the cameras. And I thought that, you know, general synopsis of what the book was going to be was really interesting, and that's why a lot of people probably read the book, as well as a lot of marketing efforts for the book, and it was optioned for a movie.

[00:01:01]So, with all of that storm in place, tons of people picked this up, and I will be completely honest, at first I had no interest in reading and talking about this book, because it just felt like it was one of those hype storms that always lead to disappointment in my life. But, I decided to join this one anyway, albeit late, because of the discourse I saw happening online. I am always fascinated when a book causes people to have a lot of discussion.

[00:01:32]Unfortunately, I realized that this book caused a lot of people to have a lot of unproductive discussions, and that's why I want to show up.

[00:01:41]The two sides of this book were, that I noticed a lot, where there was a lot of women who were upset that Natalie was not portrayed authentically as a Christian woman. They said that she was basically too unbelievable for any of this to have any weight for the story to really mean anything for it to work as a cultural commentary because if I didn't know mention before, this is meant to not just be a popcorn thriller, but it's meant to be a social commentary. We're supposed to actually have something to talk about after reading the book. And then on the other end of the aisle, we have people saying, "Well, there are people who are this unlikable and if you don't like how the main character was portrayed, that's probably hitting too close to home." Very uncharitable representations about how people are viewing this character is perhaps a little bit inauthentic to what she is meant to be. They're basically saying, "She's not meant to be likable. She's meant to make you hate her. So, if you hate her, that's good." I think that there's a lot of nuance missing from that conversation.

[00:02:46]And I'll tell you my own opinion right now, but first I want to mention that I am ex-Mormon and that is relevant to this discussion and I have to bring up because I do have a lot of experience being on the inside of a high-demand religion and what it would probably look like even for an unlikable character, but I also uniquely have left that religion and I have many years now living a lifestyle that happens to be a lot more secular. So, because of that, I think that my viewpoints on the authenticity of Natalie, the tradwife, is useful enough to bring into a discussion that's already oversaturated.

[00:03:24]What I would like to say is if we're going to talk about her being an authentic tradwife and sounding and acting like an authentic tradwife, I tend to agree with the religious ladies who were upset that she was depicted so inauthentically. Now, at the same time, I had no desire to like Natalie going into the book. I wanted her to be an anti-hero. I wanted her to be someone that we're following that we don't actively like, that we even very much dislike. In my own personal case, I couldn't actually dislike the character like the book wanted me to because I didn't believe the character long enough to actually feel any strong emotion one way or the other. And I want to talk about how this book is actually lazy in depicting someone who would be from a high-demand religion, even if she's meant to be extremely unlikable because you can have someone be extremely unlikable and still be authentic. I have a couple notes here. I said that the internal monologue that Natalie expresses as she goes throughout her life, as she thinks about things as she goes through college because the book has her go to Harvard, has her drop out to marry a rich conservative man that is from another sort of traditional conservative religious family, and then over time they try to figure out what to do, how to basically spend their time because they have a lot of money, but she wants to have the ideal image. And because her husband is very resistant to taking on traditional masculine jobs, she has to come up with something that fits their idea of gender roles, and the only thing that she can really come up with over time is buying this farm and having him sort of play as a farmer.

[00:05:08]That's that's sort of the gimmick, right? But when we hear the internal monologue of Natalie throughout the entire book from her being in college to her being a mom to her sort of running this Instagram account, it doesn't match what I would imagine at all.

[00:05:26]We have a lot of cussing. We have a lot of taking the Lord's name in vain. We have a lot of terms that just wouldn't be very common with this demographic. And the way the book does it is really interesting because sometimes she will say things out loud that sounds kind of like someone that is a tradwife from this demographic, and then inside she'll be saying a lot of cuss words.

[00:05:48]And it's it's this idea that people have that when people are unlikable characters, when they are the extreme level of unlikability on the tradwife side, that they are fake. And I do think that there can be a level of fakiness, 100%, but the dialect tends to be consistent for people who have lived this way for a long time. You can be a really really terrible awful person that no one can like with no redemption and still be talking the dialect that you were raised with, which means that you wouldn't be saying "Jesus Christ" in your head. She's like she shouts "Jesus Christ" like 10 times in the book. "Oh God" multiple times in her head in the book. She says "Just every single cuss word you could think of" and even someone who left Mormonism years later, I still don't cuss very often because it wasn't natural for me to do for years.

[00:06:36]So, for that to be part of her internal monologue constantly as she is actively a member of some sort of religion that we is un- un- claimed. I'll talk about that in a second. Just seems lazy. It's It's Sometimes the devil is in the details. When you have a book that doesn't get the details right, you can't imagine that they might not have the the whole character right, either. Now, I will also say she uses a lot of terms like manic pixie dream girl and pick me girl and a lot of internet coded terms throughout the book.

[00:07:10]I will give a little bit of nuance here because at one point some of these terms are used in a period of time where she's looking back on her life, so it could be that she sort of deconstructed her previous life and is now talking differently in those particular chapters, except we don't actually actively see that in the book, so that's being very very generous on my end. But, when we're seeing a lot of these internet coded terms that come a lot from the side of the internet that Natalie likely wouldn't be on, it just let it leaves an added layer of inauthenticity. And dialect does matter.

[00:07:43]I think of situations or stories where dialect has been kept in place, but the religious person being depicted is still very, very unlikable. The first thing that comes to my mind is Under the Banner of Heaven, which was a book, but also turned into a TV show starring Andrew Garfield, by the way. And this story depicts the Lafferty family who is Mormon and some of the characters end up going to towards the more fundamentalist route where they become really terrible people. It's linked to a murder case. It's like a crime drama sort of thing. It's a very good show if you ever want to watch it, to be honest.

[00:08:19]But the way that the Lafferty family is depicted is correct because the dialect they use is similar to what you would expect from 1980s Utah, maybe a couple small inaccuracies, but overall the way they speak, the way they act, the way they hold themselves, even if they are extremely likable people, is still extremely Mormon. And it matters because it creates a character that you can believe in. And with Natalie not having any of those details right, she turns into a character that you don't really understand and you don't even really understand what the point of the book is. Another end of this, other than just the actual words and the actual dialect being utilized by the character, is that she tends to be very aggressive and that tends to not be very normal for women that are in this situation from this environment. It's much more normal for them to be passive-aggressive.

[00:09:11]And not to say that they are good. I'm not saying that they're all kind or sweet, but they are going to try to appear that way while being very mean.

[00:09:19]So if you're going to come up with a very unlikable character, rather have than having her scream at another college student calling her a which is not something that would be normal or likely to occur if you're going more towards the stereotype, you should come up with a dialogue that shows that same disdain, but in a way that's a lot more passive-aggressive, because that's going to be the norm. I I remember I mean I've just been around so many women in my life that have been unlikeable, but it's not been through direct aggression. It's been through subtle passive-aggressive ways that add up over time and get their point across. I do understand why the author of this book might not wanted to have picked a religion, because I think she wanted it to not be focused on if this girl was an evangelical or if she was Mormon or if she was any other uh sect that would sort of make sense for this sort of thing, because she didn't want the conversation to be derailed into any sort of discussion of the particular religion she chose. I actually think that that was a good goal and was completely fine, and I think a great model for how she could have done this while making the character feel more realistic coming from an outsider view, which I imagine she is, is to follow the model that Isabel Allende used when she depicted Latin American countries in her novels. Her most famous novel is The House of the Spirits, but in most of Isabel Allende's novels, she depicts a Latin American country that she doesn't name. However, if you go deep into her story, look at the details, most people can understand that her inspiration came from Chile. And that is something I think is valid. She uses inspiration from a specific country to create a story, but she doesn't explicitly name it in the book, so it doesn't get derailed into the politics of a particular country. I think the book could have probably been a lot better if the author decided to actually really study one of the religions that she was sort of kind of throwing into the book as a religion salad, and basing the character off that religion without stating the religion. I think that could have been a way to to make it a little bit more um believable. It's funny, because you I could see that she means to do this because in conversation when Natalie is in college with right before she's about to drop out of Harvard to to marry the richer man, she overhears a conversation from the other girls in the dorm room. And it says, "As I walked away, the beginning of a new overlapping conversation unfolded. She's Amish, right? I think Orthodox Jewish. Mormons are totally, but have you ever met an evangelical?" So, it's it's clear that she doesn't want it to be clear. I get that. But if you're going to assume that all of those things can just be sort of thrown into a bowl to make like that that religion salad, you're not going to have a character that feels real in my opinion. You cannot portray someone that doesn't have any sort of basis in reality and it's just a lot of things mixed together unless you actually do some deep work to understand what each of those people would sort of be thinking and how they would think and you would try to make something that sounded like it could be one of them without having to explicitly say it. I don't know. That's my opinion on it, but it's it's kind of how it what it read to me. And I And a lot of people will go on to say, "Well, it doesn't need to be this to this level of realism because the book was somewhat meant to be a satire." And my response to that is a satire has to be rooted in reality. A satire has to make you think, "Oh, that is such a great point because it's an over exaggerated version of what already exists." If you're over exaggerating something that doesn't exist, it's not going to feel like a satire because you're no longer using any sort of basis in reality. So, that's my That's my sort of belief with the satire angle. And then the other thing, as far as we're going to get into the influencer side of this and the other stuff because I do think that I'm focusing a lot on this because my background is sort of in this, but I do also understand that some people are like, "It's a lot more about being an influencer than it is about being religious." We'll get to that, too. But before we get to that, I want to talk about the other thing that made it really hard for me to understand the character that Natalie is. I couldn't understand if she was meant to be 100% a grifter or if she had deep-rooted beliefs underneath what she was doing.

[00:13:42]And it's possible. It is possible and there could be a story written about someone who was 100% a grifter, doesn't believe any of it, doesn't really have a background that would make them actually think these things or maybe they're pretending and so it's a complete to put the facade on for the camera and pretend a certain role. That's that's actually something that would be really interesting to explore. This book doesn't seem to explore that though.

[00:14:06]Natalie, it's never really clear how much of a believer she is but she does seem to be a believer. She is throughout the book doing prayers that do seem legitimate, that do address her actual concerns in her life. She talks to God as if he's real and if she believes that. When she's in bad situations, she goes maybe this is God's will but it seems like it's sort of tacked on as if it's not a real thing that is the basis of what she's doing or of her life. And although that is definitely possible for some people, I think it's less probable for someone who's supposed to be deeply inside of a high-demand religion.

[00:14:41]And so for it not to be clear whether she is 100% in and committed or whether it's just 100% a grift makes this a lot of a gray area to understanding what the book is trying to do. And I tend to think that the reason that that is how it came across is more so a craft issue than it is the message of the book. I saw so interesting here. The only time where it was talking about faith and doubting faith was after she has a baby.

[00:15:07]And one thing that this book does well is it does depict a sort of postpartum depression which is something that a lot of young religious women do go through legitimately. And I was happy that the book depicted how the thoughts can kind of get to a young mom after being really young, married young, dropping out of school, having a baby, and just how that can feel. I've known a lot of people who have been in that situation. So, for it to depict that is really good, but something that was weird with that is her mom comes over to help her take care of the baby. And her mom says when she's like talking about it being harder than she thought it was, her mom says, "I don't know why I looked it down on like I didn't know. Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith." Which, to be fair, is just to bring it up is 100% a Mormon term.

[00:15:54]>> Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith.

[00:15:58]>> That is a Mormon phrase through and through, just kind of thrown in there with a character that isn't Mormon.

[00:16:04]Like, that's a real-life phrase. Kind of building my idea even more that this is just religion salad where you just sprinkle something from one and another and you hope that it creates a coherent character. That's not even That's not even a inspired by a Mormon phrase. That is a Mormon phrase. But, it for it being used for something so real and tangible like having a baby and having a hard time with that rather than any sort of faith crisis or any sort of having a hard time with a religion in general just shows a misunderstanding of how a lot of these things are utilized with people because the author doesn't seem to understand how deep-rooted faith can be for someone and how big of a driver it could be because she only uses these phrases in situations where they don't kind of make sense to be used. Having a baby is hard, sure, but that's not a faith crisis of any way. So, the fact that I could not discern how much of it was belief on the side of Natalie and how much of everything she did was just a complete grift left me confused as to what the message of the book is. Before I go to the influencer angle, I want to address the internet idea that it's possible that there's a woman like this. It's possible that there is a conservative Christian grifter who kind of believes in God but uses a lot of liberal terminology in her head and cusses and takes the Lord's name in vain and is unlikable in that way.

[00:17:20]I would like to agree that yes, it's possible, but when it comes down to it, it feels improbable. And if this is not supposed to be a character study of one really particular unique person, but it's supposed to be a cultural commentary, I think it's more useful to create a character that is more representative rather than create a character that can be defended because she is merely possible. So, that's kind of my reaction to that. I think that the characterization of a really religious woman was done poorly in my opinion as someone who was religious and is now not religious. I want to go into the influencer angle of the book because I think that this angle could be where it sort of picks up meaning since the meaning didn't come from conservativism or from the trad wife side or from the religion because that just wasn't done very well. And I heard a lot of people say, "Well, we shouldn't be focusing on that at all when it comes to this book because it's all about being an influencer. It's not about religion. It's not about Christianity.

[00:18:15]It's not about conservativism or what that does uh in the scope of a family or in the scope of one's life. It's about being an influencer and how that makes you depict something that's impossible to people who might believe that you're being sincere. And I was totally willing for that to be the takeaway of the book.

[00:18:34]But when it comes down to it, I don't think that the book did that either. When I read the book, and of course, I'm talking about the book and and spoiling little things that happen, I I will let you know before I get to the ending ending cuz there is a twist with that. But when she becomes an influencer, she starts she starts an account. She doesn't know what she's doing. She's not picking up any followers on Instagram. She even goes to like one of those classes online where someone gives asks you to give them a ton of money for them to give you very generic advice with a bunch of other women who are trying to become influencers. And she doesn't really pick up any knowledge that she uses from that. She becomes an influencer when she gets a shout-out from a manosphere podcast, and then she gets a bunch of basically viewers and audience handed to her. She doesn't actually have to ever craft something that would have gotten that organically because it's handed to her from a shout-out, which definitely sort of softens the influencer side of this book. She sort of starts to figure out what people want. There are a couple paragraphs in the book where she talks about what performs well and what doesn't in a very surface-level vague sense. In the book, she also hires someone who helps her with her content, and later she sort of speculates about how she can never fire this person because she wouldn't have the eye to be able to make content that was good without her. Meaning that Natalie herself doesn't have a really good understanding of what it is to be an influencer, what works. We hear nothing about the details behind the life of an influencer, just like we hear nothing about the details behind the life of a religious person. We don't hear about click-through rate, we don't hear about average view duration, we don't hear about like the back of the dashboard, we don't hear about what she's doing to double down on what works or what she is scrapping because it doesn't work. We don't We don't see the process of her becoming more and more of a caricature as she goes through and looks at what the internet is responding to, which is very vital to have a commentary on influence and being an influencer.

[00:20:36]It's just very, very surface-level. It's an outsider looking in on what it might look like without giving any details and without because there's no details, there's not a lot of added meaning, in my opinion. I read this comment on another YouTube video, and I thought that I would share it from the person who commented it because it's exactly how I feel, and I read it from them, so I want to give them credit. They said, "Yesteryear had an incredible premise, but for me it never fully delivered what it promised. I expected a sharper and deeper exploration of tradwife culture, influencer performance, gender roles, and the fantasy of returning to traditional femininity. Instead, it stayed surprisingly surface level while hinting at bigger ideas it never fully committed to. The atmosphere and setup were strong, and there were moments that were funny and some genuinely unsettled me, but the story felt more interested in ambiguity and aesthetic than actually portraying the tradwife and right-wing Christian way of life. By the end, I was left feeling like the book wanted credit for complexity without doing the work to earn it. I completely agree with her take on that. I think this book is asking for us to give it a lot of credit and unpacking ideas and concepts that it doesn't actually get that deep into and doesn't actually do very much to add anything new to the discussion. It just rehashes the conversation that's already happening because it doesn't add that much new to it. Before we get to the twist ending, because I'll give you a few thoughts on that, I want to kind of do a silver lining section because I will completely admit that 100% of the reason why I'm being harsher on this book than I otherwise would be is because it's popular and because it's created a huge cultural conversation. If this was a book I just randomly read that was not so popular and was just something I picked up from the thriller section, I would say that it was okay and that there were some good things that happened in this book. One, I kind of want to say that it was generally sort of fun to read. Like I said, if this was marketed as a popcorn thriller, I probably would have said that it was a decent book. I don't think it would have been my favorite even then, but it would have been okay. And I think that that is definitely something to bring up when this review, or whatever I'm doing, is somewhat negative to the author's authenticity of the character. I want to mention that if it was just something to read for fun, this is fine. And And to be fair, this is a debut novel, and she's getting a lot of attention because it's a big book, but we still need to understand that this is a debut novel and the author could do a much better job in authentically portraying people in the future. One thing that I think she does really well is she makes the husband of our main character, Natalie, Caleb, be a man that struggles to fit into the roles that he is expected to fit into.

[00:23:03]He wants to be a kindergarten teacher.

[00:23:05]He wants to do yoga outside where people can see him. He wants to have a deep emotional connection with a woman that isn't just about his dominance and power at first and over time as none of those things are basically allowed and people keep trying to shave that away from him, he becomes a lot of a he becomes a very unhealthy version of himself and I think that is definitely something that's real. I do think that as much as these sort of environments create expectations for women, they also create expectations for men and having Caleb sort of show that I think was a good thing to add to the discussion and I like that the author did that.

[00:23:44]I also like that we see a little bit of the experiences of the kids. It's very limited, but obviously we see a daughter who has a hard time sort of getting away from the influencer culture of her mother and how she sort of struggles with that over time and how she sort of becomes a protector for her siblings as her mother goes deeper and deeper into it and can't get out of it.

[00:24:06]I also think that was a good portrayal and like I mentioned before, another thing that I think is a silver lining to this book is it does a really good job to picking depicting postpartum depression, which I do think is a thing that a lot of religious women who are young and have babies go through. So, the fact that they took the time to sit with that for a minute was positive. The twist ending now. So, honestly, I don't have very much to say about the twist ending and all. It's In the end, if this is obviously a spoiler, she never went back into the 1850s and in reality, she went through this period of being canceled because she said some pretty terrible things that got caught on camera and they didn't know what to do with her and because it wasn't something that was easy for her father-in-law who was rich to patch up because it had something to do with her having lesbian tendencies as well, they don't know what to do and they decide to actually live in the past without cameras. So, they decide to live like it's 1850 just to be away from the world after going through a period of cancellation and not understanding what they could do. And then she goes into a psychotic episode where she's crazy now and we we see her decades later after she's been living this way with new kids and a husband and she's confused and she's crazy and I I kind of just makes me wonder the number one question with this book is what is the point? It was marketed as a book about a woman who portrays an unachievable life and gets her just desserts and realizes just how sort of of an evil mastermind she has been and what she in reality she can't do the life that she sells. But, that's not what the book does. We don't actually focus on her doing hard chores that often. She does like wash clothes and complain about her hands at some point. But, we spend so little time in the past that it's not really doing anything there.

[00:25:54]And I think that it just ultimately portrays a picture of a unusual religious woman who falls into a lot of bad situations where she is sort of the victim of her situation rather than the mastermind of any sort of online thing that is hurting other people. And it just turns into a situation where you sit there for a long time confused about what the message of the book is supposed to be and I don't know if we are supposed to actually be able to figure out or if the book is actually just throwing a bunch of random things in it in the book, twists and turns, internet terminology, things that could be quoted out of context to sound like it's more profound than it actually is. And that's where I would probably leave this book at is it's pretending to be more than it is and that's unfortunate. It might be considered the book of 2026 by very many people, but I don't think we'll be talking about it in 2027.

[00:26:50]Thanks for watching.