In Caro Claire Burke’s novel Yesteryear, influencer Natalie Heller Mills builds an idyllic online world based on deception. Yesteryear Ranch promotes an image of easy, authentic traditionalism that hides a chaotic and cynical home life. The book follows the widening gap between Natalie’s curated persona and the reality of her day-to-day life, showing how her performance of authenticity erodes her sense of self. She trades real experience for a marketable image, which distances her from her family, from the audience she cultivates, and eventually from her own identity. This slow drift ends in a psychological crisis that traps her inside the fantasy she created.

Natalie’s brand rests on a managed fiction supported by hidden labor and outright lies. “Online Natalie” appears to run a large family and a spotless farm through grit and grace, while “Offline Natalie” keeps her operation going with nannies and Shannon, a full-time producer. She hides this help to protect the brand; when asked about the support that her staff provides, she evades the question, citing her employees’ privacy. Even the content is staged. A holiday bread boule requires four hours of filming to create a thirty‑second time‑lapse, and a “Natural Dinner” supposedly sourced from the farm uses store‑bought beef (15). Later, when Natalie learns that the 1855 version of her life depends on grocery store vegetables with their stickers removed, the scale of the deceit comes into full view. Her supposed authenticity demands heavy, unseen labor to look effortless.

Behind her warm, maternal image, Natalie’s private thoughts reveal open contempt for the audience she depends on. She calls her followers “five million tiny fish” and “[l]ittle idiots” (8), treating them as a resource to shape and monetize. She thinks most people are “morons” (10) for embracing the minimalist aesthetic she sells. Her resentment reaches the “Angry Women” (7) who criticize her; she argues with them through anonymous burner accounts. This hidden side, full of irritation and superiority, drives the version of herself she shows online. The ongoing clash between these personas exposes the fracture in her identity, since the performance of motherhood and domestic calm never aligns with her actual feelings.

The pressure of maintaining this split self eventually breaks her sense of reality. Early signs appear inside her family, especially when her eldest daughter, Clementine, rejects the idea of being used as content. At Target, Clementine says, “Stop filming me” (24), and her refusal disrupts the image of a unified, curated household. Natalie’s collapse reaches its peak at the start of Part Two when she wakes inside the harsh 19th‑century world she once packaged for her followers. This shift grows out of her long-held habit of trading her real life for an imagined one. The “time machine” of her house becomes a trap that locks her inside the image she built and sold to people for years.