Yesteryear
Yesteryear
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Caro Claire Burke on Yesteryear
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A burnt-out writer downloads TikTokThe book did not begin as a project. Burke had deliberately stepped away from fiction after years of writing unpublished novels, and was working as an editor at Katie Couric Media when a casual decision in 2024 dropped her into the exact cultural argument the novel would later excavate.
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. 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.
What made the tradwife phenomenon feel like fiction’s territory rather than a critic’s was the concept’s constitutive dishonesty. Tradwife culture, the domestic-femininity-as-lifestyle brand that surged across social media in the early 2020s, was already a constructed narrative before Burke arrived, and that prior fictionality made a novel feel like the only honest container for it.
The idea of a tradwife is a fantasy. It’s a propaganda campaign.
She had spent over a decade in fiction before this book, including two unpublished novels, and her choice of form for a story saturated with cultural politics was less a strategic calculation than a conviction about what stories do that arguments cannot. She made this case most directly when asked why she hadn’t written nonfiction instead.
There is something about a story that hits you in a way that has always been singular. It’s also where you have those truly powerful moments of empathy, because you’re allowing people to relax their guard and not feel like they’re deciding the whole way through whether they agree or not. They’re just listening to a story.
The MFA she earned at the Bennington Writing Seminars had trained her for exactly this kind of long-game persuasion, and she trusted it over the more direct tools available to her as a journalist and podcaster.
How she wrote it
Eight weeks, a mean protagonist, and Gone GirlBurke had planned a more conventionally sympathetic heroine. The character she actually found when she started writing was Natalie, a tradwife influencer whose worst qualities kept reasserting themselves no matter how many ordinary scenes Burke placed her in. The discovery forced a structural rethink of everyone around her.
I knew the pitch I wanted for the book, I knew the twist I wanted at the ending, but I really didn’t know who Natalie was going to be. I think I imagined her to be a little bit more pliable. I thought she would be more plucky and just more of a traditional victim.
The repeated test Burke ran on Natalie across different settings was not a metaphor-building exercise but a diagnostic one. Each new scene was an attempt to find the version of Natalie who could pass, and each time she failed the test in a new location, Burke had to accept what kind of novel she was writing. The Barnes & Noble interview captures what that process looked like in practice.
She was mean to her children, and she was mean to the people who worked for her, and so then I centered a Target. And then she was mean to the people at Target [paraphrased from audio]
Accepting that Natalie was this person, not the pliant victim of the original conception, radically changed the book and required Burke to rebuild the power dynamics around her from scratch.
The novel splits between two timelines: Natalie’s contemporary life as a tradwife influencer and a strand set in 1855, in which she wakes up as a woman living under the actual domestic conditions she has been performing online. Burke kept the historical section deliberately confined, resisting the pull toward broad world-building in favor of a specific and wearing texture of daily life.
I wanted to cultivate this reality of what it was like to live back then, but also focus on the events that I think would be the most affronting to a modern woman, and a lot of that is drudgery and boredom.
With a claustrophobic premise and no external plot machinery to propel it, Burke needed a structural engine. She turned to Gillian Flynn’s 2012 thriller as a technical model, rereading it specifically to study how chapter length and narrative velocity interact, at a moment when she needed a draft that moved faster than her self-doubt.
I definitely spent a lot of time looking at how Gone Girl functions, because it has such short chapters, and it’s so plot-driven. It just moves like a freight train. I reread it for the first time in a decade, and I was blown away at the speed with which you move.
The strategy of writing fast was not just practical but psychological. Burke had shelved two novels before this one, and she understood that extended time with a draft left her vulnerable to the kind of second-guessing that had derailed earlier projects.
I tried to get Yesteryear out as quickly as I could. I had to get it out before I had time to second guess or doubt myself.
The personal thread
Knowing the rot and staying anywayBurke’s account of performance in the novel draws on her own position as someone who built a significant TikTok presence while writing a book about the dangers of TikTok performance. That contradiction is not something she resolves in interviews so much as names with precision.
The reason why all of us are so uncomfortable with social media is because it takes these fears of performance and really amplifies them — in a way we’re always performing all the time, different versions of ourselves. And that is one of the deeply uncomfortable realities of being a human. Like you’re always performing even for yourself. [paraphrased from audio]
The discomfort she describes is not hypothetical. She participates in the same ecosystem she critiques, and she is direct about what it feels like to hold that awareness without resolving it.
I know on a fundamental level that social media is a mass form of performative rot, and yet I stick around anyways. It’s quite a mindfuck.
The practice of fiction itself sits outside this logic for her. Where social media demands performance, writing operates differently: it absorbs rather than projects. She describes it in terms that have nothing to do with craft ambition or publication.
Fiction is very meditative for me. It’s like prayer.
What she wants us to sit with
No redemption arc, but one daughterNatalie is a difficult character to spend a novel with: bigoted, neglectful, corrosive in her relationships. Burke was asked more than once in the publication period why she chose such a protagonist, and her answer locates exactly the quality she finds worth attending to.
She is acidic and bigoted and neglectful of children — she has all these terrible qualities — but she is also ambitious, and she wants so much from the world. That is a quality that I admire in everyone, but that I always admire in women.
The novel refuses to adjudicate how much of Natalie’s situation she selected for herself and how much was constructed around her. Burke didn’t resolve that question before writing, and she hasn’t resolved it since. She names this unresolved state not as a failure of the book’s moral vision but as the condition she wanted readers to inhabit.
I don’t really know how much agency Natalie has in the book. I’m still working through that myself, where almost every scene, it felt like there was a moment where she was in full control. And then the next scene, I would think, oh, she had no control at all.
The novel also refuses the standard contemporary arc in which a protagonist’s suffering teaches her something. Burke made a structural choice, not just a character choice, in keeping Natalie static, and she wanted readers to feel the friction of that refusal against their expectations.
I think that there is redemption with her daughters. You’re able to see that generational healing, but I just don’t think that Natalie grows. That’s the hard thing. We often expect that in contemporary literature for our protagonist to learn something or get better, and she just doesn’t.
The book’s acknowledgments end with a line addressed to a future daughter Burke may have, written with that ending in mind. The generational bet the novel makes on the children is also, on the evidence of that note, a personal one.