Yesteryear is clickbait (& that’s why it’s genius).

[00:00:00]It's about time the tradwives had their comeuppants, if you ask me. Also, it feels like the internet is saying, and no more prominent is that conversation than in the discussions about the book yesterday year. This is a book about a trad wife, which doesn't just mean traditional wife, but is a social media subculture of women who are embracing traditional values, seemingly relying on their husband's income, and raising children in ultrraditional gender roles with a huge crossover of like homesteading core, cooking, and a ve into the antivaxing domain. a place to which I do not crawl. We don't go there.

[00:00:46]It's a room on the internet that I don't want to look in. This book yesterday follows a tradife influencer who after crafting the perfect life and the perfect body, the perfect children, the perfect husband, the perfect home farm, exporting its own perfect goods. She wakes up in the time that she was mimicking. the olden days that she yearns for have come to find her. And so the premise asks, "What happens next?"

[00:01:16]This is undeniably an incredible hook for a book. And I wasn't the only one who thought so. Anne Hatheraway is going to be starring and I think producing in the book, whose rights were sold before the book even came out or was finished, I think. But we're not here to talk today about like the celebrity gossip and the outer periphery cultural moment that the book finds itself in. I wanted to talk specifically about my experience of the book and what it made me reflect on in my own life. Cuz isn't that what books are about? And don't worry, my thoughts were really helpful. Actually, I found the experience of reading this book helpful and interesting and engaging. even if I can't say it's like the perfect book. So, if you just want to watch a video that shits on the book, I'm afraid that is not it. This book did not drive me to drink. No, this is not my alcohol. I'm staying in a friend's house right now. But I tell you what this heatwave has driven me to do, and that is buy a white t-shirt.

[00:02:19]I can't believe my morals folded like a red hot Mars bar the moment the UK became over 13°. But I now see finally the function of a white t-shirt. you don't have to put sun cream on your back and it does actually reflect the sun.

[00:02:34]So, now we've witnessed that I can admit when I am wrong. I would love to hear your thoughts on this book in the comments below as I share mine. And after all, isn't that what literature is about? But of course, keep it respectful. If you would like to persuade me of your opinion, act as such and be persuasive. I'm going to warn you now, I'm not somebody who changes their mind when somebody is rude to me or doesn't bring their point, evidence, and explanation game to the comment section.

[00:03:02]I am also going to keep the majority of this video spoilerfree or what I consider spoilers. So, I won't tell you how she got to be living in that time period or what the twist is at the end.

[00:03:15]I will include some stuff that happens in the book, but there it's stuff that I don't think would spoil your enjoyment of the book. If you haven't read the book right now and you go on to read the book in the future, also a quick plug, we have to plug the Gumption Club. If you are interested in discussing this book further with like-minded people, I am going to be running a readalong for the whole of August for this book. We're going to be chatting on Discord the whole way through the month about it.

[00:03:39]And at the end of the month, we're going to gather together in a little voice chat and talk about our feelings. So, if that sounds good to you and you end this video still wanting to chat, that will be happening on my Patreon. I will leave the links below. Now, if you have already read the book, there is going to be a small section at the end where I talk about how I feel about the ending, but that will be very clearly signposted and in the timestamps below, so you can avoid that if you would like to.

[00:04:03][sighs and gasps] Right, let's begin at the beginning. I picked up this book. I saw it in my local bookshop and I genuinely just thought that the cover was pretty. And like all of the best reading affairs, me and the books, start with that, a good premise and a nice cover and I was really excited to read it. Little did I know that it was also that probably the reason it ended up ended up in my local bookshop was because it was becoming such an internet phenomenon. And I think one of the problems when something becomes an internet phenomenon is that people don't pick up the book with the traditional wisdom of a reader which is only pick up books that you already are intrigued by and sound like the kind of book you would like to read and you feel like what the author is trying to do is something that you would like to hear.

[00:04:47]Oh no. When something becomes a phenomenon, often people pick up the book who would were never going to like the book, aren't interested in the subject matter or the style of writing or the genre, and they just want to see what all the hype is about. And I feel like with books in particular, because it is such a in-depth but quite sparse art form in that you're not given any visuals or audio to your experience like you're literally inventing that yourself. If you don't come with the spirit of creativity to your reading experience and you want to be a passive audience member, it can be a bad time.

[00:05:22]And I really think that this is one of those books in particular that benefits from you also creating the world around you, which isn't like the sign of bad writing. I think it's sparse, intentional writing. And I could say the same for like a lot of classic books and a lot of modern-day bestsellers and prize winners. I also am going to have to discount the camp of people who don't like unlikable narrators. We simply don't have time to go in to that here.

[00:05:47]But unfortunately, like the unreliable or unlikable narrator is um a core tenant of like most of our ancient and present day storytelling. And if you don't like that, that's totally fine.

[00:06:00]You can avoid it. But you can't be mad when it comes up because it's literally the backbone of written storytelling.

[00:06:06]I'm so sorry, but I am simply too old and too sweaty right now to be entertaining and arguing such points.

[00:06:14]So, I'm if you just don't like unreliable narrators or unlikable people leading books, then this book was never going to be for you. And there were warning signs like literally surrounding the book, like embedded in the blurb, embedded in the concept of the book. So, we don't have time for that. I will accept though people that just didn't have a good time with it, and that's totally fine. and I often don't have a good time with books. That's why you probably see a lot more on my story graph of books that I have read rather than books I'm actually championing on the channel. That I can totally relate to. And for those people, I would love it if you stuck around because I don't want to persuade you that this was a good book. Um I I do think it was a good book and I would recommend it to people, but I do think there is an element of personal taste. However, I always find it interesting if I don't like a book or understand a book. Hearing somebody's perspective of what they got out of it, not because it makes me feel like I want to change my opinion, but because I understand more the role it plays in other people's lives and why I might not have liked it myself. I could talk about this book for quite some time. I had a lot of thoughts on it, but I've chosen to highlight three kind of main little earworms that I was getting as I was reading and what it made me reflect on when it comes to the subject of trades and honestly my own life. Okay, I've named this first section the angry women need an opposite. What differed in the actual book from my expectations of the book were particularly the circumstances under which Natalie, the main character, becomes a tradife. She isn't that involved in social media. Later she does go on to have a huge social media following. She's not somebody who's on social media and then chooses the tradife as like a theme with which to get famous from. She is really embedded in simple Christian traditional culture, but she also has real academic aspirations. She's lived a very limited sheltered life and her first interaction with the secular world is at university.

[00:08:12]And this is where it gets really interesting because while she is incredibly evil as a character and does and says some horrific things, her Genesis story isn't like she's still that when she's young. She's not like a nice person and she turns horrific. And this definitely isn't a wicked retelling or something like that either. Like she is kind of mean and selfish at all times anyway. But it is this moment at university that actually has its catalyst in the way left-wing women treat her that radicalizes her further into her little bubble of absurdity.

[00:08:48]Like she has a roommate that physically assaults her that has sex in front of her which really traumatizes her and generally because she has religious beliefs that they like don't know about.

[00:08:59]And I'm sure that some of her religious beliefs are really problematic but they don't really ask. They just assume that she's like beyond hope, beyond saving.

[00:09:07]That's kind of the pivot in her young life. And she makes the mistake that we also make maybe on the left in that the first few people that she interacts with from the other side, from the secular world, she takes as evidence that everybody is like that and decides she wants nothing to do with modern women.

[00:09:27]She says in the book, and I quote, "When she, that's Natalie's mother, had talked about my future, it had always been as Natalie the professor, Natalie the academic." Of course, the assumption of children and [clears throat] homemaking was always there, too, hovering in the white space between all those hypothetical careers. My mother, a bread winner herself, was lopsidedly progressive in that way. She didn't believe in divorce, but she did genuinely believe in her smartest daughter having it all. A good job, a good family. In Jesus' name, amen. If you marry this man, she said to me now with her blinking eyes, you'll become his smiling shadow. A year ago, I wouldn't have wanted that. But the last 6 months had changed me. I blinked back and answer. I thought I wanted the world, mama, but I've seen the world now, and I want no part in it. So, because the other women around her aren't treating her like their academic intellectual equal and being curious about her beliefs, and perhaps she isn't returning the favor either, let's be clear. But there's definitely some of the assault and the actual abuse is from the left-wing women. And because she feels like the alternative she is being offered to like the other doppelganger counterpart, her roommate, like what her life is like and what she calls freedom doesn't look very appealing to her. She becomes disillusioned with her role as an academic and and to have that life at all. And she gets this marriage proposal from this boy who turns out to be incredibly privileged and rich. and she basically says like I've had the curiosity about another alternative shaken out of me. Now this is something that made me reflect on my own hashtag journey. [laughter] For those of you who don't know, I grew up very Christian and I still have a lot of Christian friends and family and I still attend a Christian festival every yearish called Green Belt, but I would consider myself aggressively agnostic at this point. And I stopped being a Christian when I was like 21ish, 22. And I'm like incredibly sincere about that decision. And I think when people who are on the left but have never interacted with religion at all or any kind of belief system that has like a basis in faith, they think that when I say I used to be a Christian and now I'm not, there they think that I've done a 180 on my belief system and I was a completely different person then and now I'm this person. What is uncomfortable about that is that I think a lot of the beliefs and the thought systems that you might like in my channel and like in my life if you're one of my friends come from the church. Like that's where I grew up with the most community and like left-wing values and anti- capitalist, anti-consumerous values. I learned that all from the church. Not from the Bible always, some parts of the Bible, but not all of them. But I did learn that from what some people might see look at from the outside as a much more traditional upbringing. things that almost feel like some pockets of the left are trying to reinvent like they were something from the past from yesterday year that we need to get back which is sometimes disconcerting for me in my timeline because I'm like I literally have lived like that and that was literally like my experience of life and there's hundreds of thousands of people in the UK living how you're describing like with community and third spaces and bartering system and shared values like people are literally living like that right now and in some ways when I think about what I felt like while I was a Christian, it's incredibly similar to how I feel now about the world. I just don't use a completely, in my opinion, absurd text to try and weave in those left-wing values because I don't I don't think that the Bible in its entirety backs up that way of life. And also, I come up against the slight problem that I don't think Jesus rose from the dead or was alive at all. Or if he was, he probably didn't say anything that was in the Bible. So, that's kind of a barrier to me being a Christian. And that's kind of a hard line for me. However, in some ways, and I think this is why I have I have this problem as well with loads of main characters that I relate to and then people are like, "She was so unrelatable and unlikable and blah blah blah." And I'm like, just because you don't relate to a character doesn't mean there isn't anything to relate to. And in some ways, in a [ __ ] up, scary, I don't agree with any of her actions after the fact kind of way. I I really identified with that part of Natalie's like that snapshot of Natalie's life because she kind of meets the secular world and she thinks you guys aren't having fun. You're actually immersed in capitalism which looks awful. You're not very nice to each other. You don't have community. You don't mix with people of different generations and class backgrounds. And you seem pretty miserable. like you're not selling. And not that it was her roommates or the people she met at uni's job to sell her a secular life, but like we have to think sometimes when we interact with religious people and for some reason we want them not to be religious, which I think is a little bit [ __ ] up anyway.

[00:14:16]But if we're really looking at the Christian traditional experience and wanting people to see outside of that, we can't come at it from the idea that they are having a bad time and they would be having a better time if they left it. Like I am currently coming to terms with the fact that even though I'll never return. A lot of the reasons I think I'm good at this job is because of Christianity. Like I was literally debating people and going to Bible studies from an incredibly young age. I was reading lots of literature and learning close reading and symbolism and interpretation from a young age. It's definitely what made me better at English, my English degree, and also probably working in publishing. And not that you can't get good at those things outside of it, but I'm like [snorts] all of that plus community building and public speaking and hang on. So, I feel like this kind of binary pity that I think is wrong on both sides where people like Natalie pity her roommate and have really patronizing thoughts about her because she perceives her life to be perverse and miserable and self-erving and her roommate perceives Natalie to be brainwashed and idiotic and traditional and subservient. It's a thread that goes throughout the book without spoiling too much. this polarizing opposite. And in the end, Natalie finds herself making a living off of being the polar opposite of the angry women. She says the angry women, the people in her comment section that are leftwing, are both her foil and the flesh that she feeds on. Like they are her main audience and she feels as sorry for them as they do for her. And it's like a [ __ ] up kind of like rancid judgment with also kind of like maybe a little bit of a sweet core where we're like both worried about each other and we don't and we then we start expressing that in really toxic ways.

[00:16:12]She says, "If the angry woman found out about any of my children's failings, because she keeps a lot of her children's like bad parts offline or tantrums or whatever. If the angry woman found out about any of my child's failings, they'd go crazy with bloodthirst. They'd also be devastated.

[00:16:27]None of them realized it, of course, but they needed me as much as I needed them.

[00:16:31]It was a symbiotic relationship. I was a shark and they were the 5 million tiny fish nipping at the nutrients along my belly. They were desperate to eat me.

[00:16:39]They had no idea I was the one who was keeping them alive. The next section I have called gender and desire. Now, like I said, it wasn't Natalie's original plan. She wasn't like chronically online. She didn't want to become an influencer and or show [snorts] her stuff on the internet. She was intending to live this way anyway, like on a farm.

[00:16:59]That was one of the things she wanted to do. But the more manic and dystopian her inner world and her relationship with her husband and her husband's father, who is a Trumpianlike Senate guy high up in American politics and therefore a little bit mafiaesque. As that becomes more insane, basically what was quite a simple dream start like she starts turning up the saturation and the volume on those things and then broadcasting them to the world as a means of making them financially independent from their insanely cryptically dangerous father/father-in-law.

[00:17:37]It's basically a way for her to keep his talents out of their lives and to sedate her husband into doing something vaguely manly and acceptable and not get into any trouble. But influencing is also a duty just like motherhood and child rearing. She sees it as a chore. She said that's the thing about being a mother and a wife and an influencer all at the same time. It's basically like breastfeeding three babies simultaneously, like seducing three lovers at once. Gender in general actually is just a chore for Natalie.

[00:18:08]And I think that's also like a really interesting discussion topic and it comes up again and again in the book.

[00:18:13]Which is why sometimes when people are like, "Oh, it was really rushed or it was really just gimmicky." I'm like, "Are we doing some close reading?"

[00:18:19]Because I'm seeing a lot of like really clever ways that these themes are seeded throughout the book. And gender as a chore is one of them. She presumably struggles with some kind of post-natal depression and generally doesn't connect with the uh role of mother or any of her children really that much and really struggles with that with her first few children. And she finds that that role, that traditional female role comes really naturally to her husband. I wish there was a job for playing with babies, Caleb whispered. I'd be great at that.

[00:18:52]Caleb is her quite silly, stupid kind of husband. and he's portrayed as like very intellectually challenged. Um, I didn't say anything. The panic I'd felt earlier in the kitchen was gone now, replaced by a dull, sweet throbbing in my chest. He was good at playing with babies. He never grew bored or irritated by Clementine. He found her endlessly entertaining. In fact, that was the problem, wasn't it? He had no desire to do anything else. My husband wanted too little from his life. I wanted too much.

[00:19:20]Suddenly it was obvious Caleb should have been born a woman and I should have been born a man. A sad sickness turned my stomach. We were equally broken in that way. And then later she says, "I would help Caleb become a better man and he would help me become a better woman.

[00:19:36]Through my example, Caleb would grow stronger, more ambitious, and through his example, I'd grow softer, more loving with our children. Like a balancing of liquids, he would take and I would give until we met each other in the middle. It would be the job of a lifetime for both of us. And this is where why when people are like, "Oh, I don't feel sorry for the main character." [laughter] I'm like, "Are you like I parts like that really broke my heart because I was like, they're so close. They're so close to cracking it.

[00:20:07]They're so close to realizing that gender is a construct and that personality traits aren't tied to genetics in the way that they think, but they don't see a way to subvert that or they don't want to. So they end up painfully doubling doubling down on it and hurting everyone. So I think as well like a clever thing in the book is that you start to at the very beginning when you first meet Caleb, you start to root for her husband. And if you are coming from a stereotypical left-wing feminist background, you open a book like this wanting to root for a woman, maybe not the main woman, but at least a woman in general, and you start rooting for Caleb, a privileged, quite ignorant, silly nepo baby man who doesn't do anything or any chores or anything, but you still feel sorry for him, which becomes a more complicated feeling to feel as the book goes on. That is again something that I haven't read about or thought about that much when I've brushed past the tradife discourse on the internet. Like the energy and vervver and stubbornness that some of these trad communities double down on their gender performance and their traditional values. Like where does that come from? Does that come from a place of real insecurity and questioning? And of course, their ideas deserve ridicule and vigorous questioning, but there has to be some kind of compassion there because I think when you worry when you wonder where the energy behind those kind of beliefs come from, it's probably a really dark place. So, it made me think a lot about that as well. And that's something that I wasn't I think that was a really clever way to flip it.

[00:21:41]And the third section is, are you ready?

[00:21:44]God as an audience member. And this is something that I haven't seen people talk about online. And if you have seen people talk about it online uh already, let me know where. But I've been waiting for people to bring this this up and they haven't. And I'm like, this is like the core of the book for me. And this is what I have enjoyed or at least found useful to ruminate on in the weeks after I read the book. When Natalie becomes a parent and she realizes how hard and awful it is, she feels betrayed because her mother encouraged her to have children and she didn't feel adequately warned about the horrific side of it and how hard it would be. And her mother says, "Whenever I was reaching my wits end, I would pause for a moment and do you know what I'd do?" Her voice lowered in a conspiratorial register. I would imagine I was being watched. I opened my eyes and frowned at the tiles on the bathroom floor. watched. It's lonely, you know, house work. But it felt a bit less lonely when I pretended I had a little audience sitting on the couch with me, watching me vacuum or taking out the trash, cheering me on. I didn't say anything. I felt suddenly nauseous.

[00:22:47]And that was the secret. All those years I'd spent watching my mother and the other women in our community, marveling at how effortlessly they performed their roles as mother, homemaker, wife. All the moments I thought of them as co at college, summoning their easy joy. It was a lie, wasn't it? And the Lord is fine with this, with you needing to pretend. My mother didn't skip a beat.

[00:23:08]She locked into her argument and was on a roll now. Oh, I wouldn't call it pretending. It's more like a form of remembering, don't you think? After all, who do you think encouraged me to come up with that little idea to begin with?

[00:23:19]Who is our Lord and Savior if not the original audience member of our lives?

[00:23:24]And I have thought about that [laughter] every freaking day since I finished the book because do you know what year I started questioning my faith and the year I started university? 2009.

[00:23:36][laughter] Do you want to know the year that I started putting my videos on the internet for people to watch me and observe me? That very same year.

[00:23:49][laughter] >> [snorts] >> So that's something that I'm going to have to sit with for quite some time.

[00:23:56]Now I think again if you grow up in a secular way this might be hard to understand but I think there are positive ways to grow up with the idea that you are like under an allseeing all knowing God and negative ways to grow up with that and I'd say in general I think I grew up with a positive feeling about that. I grew up being told that there was all caring presence that was always looking out for me and I could talk to them whenever I wanted and that even when stuff was going wrong in my life, don't worry, there was a plan. I think in general that's quite a nice thought.

[00:24:29]I don't believe that it's true, but it's not particularly a troubling thought. I would say the other side of that, I think as you become older, you like there is like an element of surveillance. And I think this also depends on what kind of church you grew up in, what kind of doctrine you followed, and which denomination you are, and which translation of the Bible.

[00:24:47]Like, there's so much variation that as I get older, I I struggle to think that there's any responsible way to make any kind of sweeping statement about a whole religion like Christianity or equally Islam or Judaism or anything like that.

[00:25:01]But the one I stumble across most often is is Christianity. And I think it's just like I don't know irresponsible and like intellectually a little bit flat to do that. And I know that I've done it in the past even knowing how varied it is.

[00:25:14]But Natalie grew up with and I think probably some of this resonates with me.

[00:25:19]This idea that you are always being watched anyway that your life kind of is a performance. And like my upbringing didn't emphasize this, but it is I guess in the Bible and it is like a big part of other people's Christian lives. And at some point there will be an assessment of your performance and you will be treated accordingly. And so because of that, is it that weird for trades to be sharing their whole lives on the internet when they already believe that they are being surveiled anyway? That there is not a moment where they are not watched anyway. Like if you're already being watched by the almighty, what is a couple of thousand or a couple of million tiny little mortals like to throw into the bag? Now, I don't know how true that causation like was it correlation or causation. Like it was the same year that I started the YouTube channel cuz it was also the first time I had like private access to a computer in general was when I was 19 or 20. So, I think that that could have played a part as well. I wouldn't have been uploading YouTube videos before that anyway. But I do think there's something really interesting about the premise of this book and it's like our hunger to read it and then our excitement when it turns out that we don't think it's good enough or we don't think it's worth the hype.

[00:26:33]And I think there is in some real this might not be true for you but some people I've seen on the internet there feels like a real bloodlust for the premise at least because we almost want to like that's why it works is cuz we there's a part of us that really wants to watch a trad wife suffer or get her comeuppance or see what it was really like back then and that would change the tides on whether she wanted it or not as if it wasn't her actual belief systems that had led her there however [ __ ] up rather than like just this fantasy of it. Like in the book, Natalie acknowledges that she knows that she wants the best of both worlds. She knows that she's building a farm that has all of the modern advantages and none of the yester a year discomforts. And that's something she knows when she's going into it. And the book's premise, I think, quite cleverly bait us into being interested in this concept of like a woman finally understanding what it was like in the past. and when we're kind of given that, but also that's withheld from us a little bit because her story is more complicated. And not only does she get some of her comeuppants, but it also happens to her children and that's pretty horrific. It makes you as the audience member, as one of her audience members think, why did I want to watch this play out? Like, what was it about this premise that drew me in? And did I really want to watch this many people suffer in this way? And am I one of the angry women? Okay, I can't hold it in anymore. We have to go to the spoiler section. If you want to turn off now, you can or you can skip to the outro.

[00:28:09]Um, I'll see you later. Now, oh my god, the conclusion. We need to talk about it. I was guessing the whole way through the book, which it was. I didn't think that it was a reality TV show. Like the character Natalie suspects at the beginning, like she's she is actually in the real world, but it's actually reality. I didn't think that that's what was happening, but I also didn't get the vibe just from the general writing of the book. And I don't know, I just didn't I didn't quite get the vibe that it was going to be a time slip about time, like Groundhog Day moment where we were really going to go back in time. Of course, what we find out instead, if you're somebody who's just stayed around for the spoilers, but hasn't actually finished the book, is that the reason that she's woken up in this other timeline with like different children and the same husband, but he looks a little bit different and seemingly she's back in the 1800s or whatever, is because she is on her second batch of children and her first batch of children who were on the farm with her at the beginning of the book where she was filming them as like little influencers.

[00:29:10]and stuff and having her trad wife viral moment. The reason that she's no longer performing that and online and that she has different children is that she's on her second batch of children and the older children have grown up mostly have flown the nest flown far away apart from the boys who have stuck around to conspire with their father who has been sucked into the manosphere to run the farm as a right-wing social experiment slash perverse voyeristic show for them.

[00:29:39]And so she is in the modern world, but that this is no longer public. This is a private prison of her own making because she kind of voluntarily gets into it.

[00:29:49]But then she starts to experience psychosis and doesn't really always remember what happened and why she's in this situation. But it's essentially an extension of living an authentic yestery year kind of life that she has intentionally designed for herself. But she doesn't know everything about what's going on. and the sons turn up occasionally as characters but really live in the woods with all of the luxuries and like watching her on TV cameras and like just vibing. [laughter] I guess I think that that was a really interesting uh middle ground between it being reality TV and like a real life time travel thing because it kind of mimics the [ __ ] up historical nature of patriarchy in that it was a show for one like you were performing womanhood but not for the masses just for the other adult living in your house. And it's interesting that the sons grow up to adopt the surveillance of her because whilst the girls either also are subjugated to it or grow up to liberate them from it because gender always trumps age when it comes to power in this [ __ ] up world. They are male therefore more powerful even though they are her inferior and she has raised them. There is no allegiance earned from the sacrifice of motherhood in the nuclear family. you are birthing your next captives. And I can't think of anything darker than that. What I thought was interesting about the very end of it in which social services get involved and they take the children out of the situation and and like the older children who had moved on come back to take the younger children away to a safer place and Natalie is implicated in all of the child neglect and is essentially like we think that she's going to go to prison. is that while she has been more than adequately punished, if we're trying to make it like that, for her part in this regime, mainly through the physical violence from her now older husband who is not the sweet man who wanted to be a primary school teacher and like stay at home and look after the children, but is now somebody who sexually assaults her and beats her.

[00:32:00]There is some kind of weird peace on the way for her, I think, because of this God surveillance situation. She says at the end of the book that she's stopped hearing God talk back to her and you can see her faith faltering and she's going to be completely separated from her husband and all of that situation and her sons who are abusing her as well. So weirdly, whilst prison might be the place that most of us would be the most surveiled they have ever been in their lives, is her heading to prison actually a break from being surveiled in the way that she had been before? Is this the least watched she's ever going to be now that she doesn't believe that she's being watched by God and she is not being watched by her older pervy sons and her husband? There is like a poetic irony to that that I think was really clever as well. Well, and that's why when people like, I was disappointed by the ending, I was like, how are you disappointed by the ending? I thought it was really interesting. I think it was a little bit perfect that her roommate ended up being like the journalist that came to interview her in the like and there was like a part where she does turn up on TV before she goes to prison and is interviewed about her experience.

[00:33:05]And I think that was a little bit I can believe it because the world is absurd and that might be the only way that a journalist would get in and get that interview is if they had also been their roommate all those years ago. But I did think that was a little bit but but I can allow it. It was it was very pleasing and I wonder if they'll do that in the in the adaptation. But yes, generally as a reader I felt satiated by the ending and I think it probably had to land because you're constantly flicking between these two extremes.

[00:33:31]Like is she in a reality show or has she actually traveled back in time? It kind of had to land somewhere in between the two for it to be believable because she's stringing you along on both of those hypothesises. Hypothesis. she's stringing you along on both of those theories throughout the book. So the in like for that to be possible the truth had to be somewhere in the middle, you know. In conclusion, welcome back people who have skipped to this part cuz they didn't want to get the spoilers. I think whether through word of mouth or an actual marketing flaw, a lot of people went to this book thinking that it was going to be a feminist thriller. I think I kind of went into it like that as well. But instead, what I found was a really sad, reflective book that made me reflect on my own relationship to surveillance, to women who don't agree with me, and how do I act towards them as a feminist? Like, do I still want the best for them even if they don't want the best for themselves? And do I act like that when I'm online or in person?

[00:34:29]And while we're inspecting gender as a performance and trying to explain that to people who don't think gender is a performance, how am I performing other roles as like savior or intellectual or mediator when I'm engaging with this kind of like material and this this kind of lifestyle and like to what extent can I make that more authentic rather than performative and not be Reena her roommate in college? Like I just want to be the opposite of whatever she was because there's no danger of me becoming Natalie. There's no I don't need to think about oh my god like I need to make sure I don't become Natalie. But I'm like everybody in the book was a little bit awful. So who am I most in danger of becoming? She talks about her experience of being baptized which is one of the final things that I've written down. She said right before the pastor dunk my head into the warm pool of water. My knees buckled in fright.

[00:35:20]There it was flooding through my body as the priest held me limply up by the armpits. a drowning sense of human inadequacy, a blank terror at what this world would become if not for the saving grace he offered us. For those three seconds before I went underwater, I felt a complete and total clarity of how broken everything was. My life, my family, my country, my planet. We, all of humanity, were alone, weren't we? Was he even coming to save us? Or were we being abandoned, stuck on this forsaken rock, spinning dizzily through the black towards nothing? Because in that moment, I was like, "We got the same fears, girly. I also fear that." And what if the fears of the Trades are similar to our fears? It's just that we're both running in different directions. Their direction might be more damaging and less logically sound, but we're both still running, right? We buy this book and read this book maybe partially because we want to see the stakes raised on what trades say is a good life. We want to see that at its extremity and as a way to explain why it might be bad. We want to watch her suffer this fictional person uh that's like harmless and doesn't hurt anyone to prove a point almost. But like maybe that's why some people are walking away from this book feeling unsatisfied or annoyed is because they don't get that the book doesn't give you that moment to gloat.

[00:36:48]Her theory is that she's in a reality TV show for a while and then her husband hits her and she thinks they wouldn't allow that. And then she says, "I decided that it's entirely possible that a reality show premiering in the next few years would allow a man to hit a woman and knock her out. equally possible that they would allow the same woman to wander through a minefield of archaic booby traps and nearly blow her foot off in the process, which also happens. In fact, this really perks me up. It's more than possible. It's likely, arguably inevitable, practically necessary. The angry women, after all, are defined by their own infinite capacity for restlessness. If you want to keep them entertained, you must be willing to constantly raise the stakes.

[00:37:27]And I think the book does a really good job of reminding us that we are the audience members of the trades. We in some ways make it possible. We go on and on about the attention economy and how bad it is. But when the offer of a woman suffering um because she wouldn't defend other women and call herself a feminist, we're sad. We want to see that. And that is why I think the book for me was a really interesting reading perspective because it's an unsatisfying narrative.

[00:37:56]because it doesn't give you what you want and because the premise makes you feel like you know what you want by buying the book and then it questions your role as customer like I didn't get what I wanted versus your role as participant in the art in listening and interrogating the ideas that are presented in somebody else's life however fictional and whether that's something you can grow and farm and cut up and make sourdough with or something insert metaphor here. Anyway, a lot of you asked for this video, so I hope that you enjoyed what you got cuz it's all that I had to offer. Of course, like I said, I am very open to being persuaded and I think there's loads of valid ways that this book could have not been a good journey for you or not a favorite book of yours. And while it's not perfect, I can totally see why it's a bestseller and so many people are enjoying reading it. A similar book that I read in some ways is Sarah Wang's New Skin, which is about a woman who is an incredibly bad mother and not very nice person who is also addicted to plastic surgery and the daughter who keeps trying to be estranged from her but won't be let go. And like you can't really root for for the mother Fanny because she's like diabolical as a parent. But then you also can't help but want to see her stop sabotaging her own life and the people around her. And you start understanding a bit more the relationship between addiction and plastic surgery and also whiteness and plastic surgery because she is a Chinese immigrant. And it's just again I think if you liked yesterday year I think you would enjoy New Skin. It again g isn't the perfect book but did give me lots to think about. And isn't that the damn point to keep thinking to keep this noggin going? [gasps] Anyway, s for the long video, but if I had more time, I'd have made you a shorter one. As Charles Dickens said, somebody said something like that. If I had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter. As I said, if you would like to discuss this further with like-minded people in a smaller, more closed community that isn't like publicly online for all of the absolute strange characters to find you, then we will be hanging out on my Patreon Discord, chatting about yester year for the whole of August. Um, and I would love to see you there. And of course, it is thanks to the Gumption Club that I can make videos like this and chat for as long as we need to about whatever we like and we're not even interrupted by a sponsor. Thank God because that would have been like too ironic for me. like an influencer making a video about an influencer but also shilling a product [laughter] in the middle of Imagine if I done like a sourdough maker advert in the middle of this or some weird supplement that was supposed to give you a cleaner more #natural drad wife kind of life. Oh god, it's meta enough as it is. We must we must stop. Oh my frog dog