‘Yesteryear’ Author Caro Claire Burke on Her Bestselling Tradwife Novel, Writing an ‘Acidic’ Influencer and How the Anne Hathaway-Backed Film Adaptation Will Be ‘Faithful’ to the Material
SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers for the novel “Yesteryear.”
It’s safe to say that Caro Claire Burke’s delightfully horrifying novel “Yesteryear” — in which the fictional tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills winds up transported back to the days of, well, yesteryear — is the book of the moment.
Since its April 7 release, it feels as though everyone has either read it, wants to read it or is figuring out how to get their hands on it (If you’re a part of the latter two groups, I’d hold off on reading much more of this story if you’d like to ensure a spoiler-free experience.) “Yesteryear” is a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and a “Good Morning America” book club pick, badges of honor that are all the more impressive for a debut novel. And, good news for fans, it’s already getting the big screen treatment (the film rights were sold to Amazon MGM back in 2024), with Anne Hathaway set to star and produce.
While Burke has been focused on fiction writing for what she describes as “her entire adult life,” along the way, she’s dabbled in social media too, gaining a following on TikTok when she began uploading conversational videos tackling everything from feminism to, naturally, tradwives. She also co-hosts the culture and politics podcast “Diabolic Lies” alongside author Katie Gatti Tassin, on which the two discuss topics like the Texasification of America; Scott Galloway vs. “Heated Rivalry”; Evie Magazine; and, recently, Gen Z’s new “anti-woke” voice.
In the midst of a book tour that has so far included a trip across the pond to the U.K. and a month-long journey across the U.S. to spots like Waco, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah in addition to New York and Boston, Burke spoke to Variety about what it’s been like to see the response to her debut novel, her thoughts on Natalie’s ending and the forthcoming film adaptation.
Ask me in 10 years. It has truly been nuts and I still have about three weeks to go. I mean, the events themselves are really fun. I’ve gone to a ton of red states — we really wanted to go to areas where these topics were more in tension, so that’s been amazing. I’ve had so many exciting conversations with people, but it’s definitely a grind, and I’m just [taking it] one day at a time over here, so I’m not really aware of the online chatter. I just wake up each day and I’m like, “Okay, I need coffee and some yogurt, and to make sure I’m wherever I [need to be] on time.”
I was in London for 10 days and now I’m back in New York, and then I’m back on the road. We’re going to Florida and California and Chicago.
I think what I got from her was like, “This is something. We’re gonna sell this and it’s going to start your career in a really exciting way.” But that can mean a lot of things in publishing. I had no expectation of making the New York Times bestseller list at all. I was really hopeful that this would be a book that a number of people read and that it would be enough for me to sell another book — that’s kind of the hope you have as a debut. I mean, I sold the book two years ago, and interests can change. A lot of books people think are going to work out don’t, and I’m very aware of that, so I went into the last month just being prepared for anything. But truly, there was never an expectation that it was going to reach the level that it reached in the last week.
Totally dissociative. I still haven’t processed it. I genuinely think that I will wake up and cry 10 years from now. It’s a completely out of body [experience] and unbelievable.
I’ve heard it from time to time, not even in religious settings, but like, “The days of yesteryear.” When I had the idea for the novel, the title came with the idea. I’d been talking about tradwives on TikTok and I’d been writing about them for my media job at the time, so I’d been thinking about it a lot. I thought of the title first, and I feel like it led me into the book because it just felt so big and expansive. It’s a phrase we use all the time, but it also felt kind of “Westworld”-y to me — it’s almost like an amusement park or a place that’s a fun house. I always have to name my projects at the beginning, and sometimes it changes. But with “Yesteryear,” it stuck.
It’s funny. I sold the book in the spring of 2024, and by that point I had a full first draft, but I was going to be doing another year and a half of work on it. Right after I sold it was when Joe Biden had that debate and then stepped down, so there was a four month period where I was continuing to work on the novel where I thought this book was going to come out under the first woman president. That was such a crazy summer that I think, in a positive way, I really turned my blinders on and was just like, “This is the book.” I already had the plot, and I just wanted to make it a book that if someone reads it 20 years from now they can still find it propulsive. That was the priority. And any anxieties I had about it not meeting the moment I just kind of ignored until I was finished and then that was when I could have all my anxiety attacks.
The first half of those conversations were at the beginning with Anne and with my book team, because it all happened simultaneously. I did the U.S. auction, and then the U.K. auction, and then I did the film auction. It was one long month. What I’m really lucky for, and what I got to do, is basically talk to a bunch of brilliant people about broader themes like performance and surveillance, and how to braid those in more, and what we’re talking about when we talk about the commercialization of religion. Like, I think Natalie has a very transactional relationship with her own religion. It’s very fraudulent to me. She’s not a very spiritual person.
[“Yesteryear”] is about a tradwife, but tradwives are an idea, too. So it’s like, “What is the idea of the tradwife?” Talking about Natalie and talking about it from that perspective was just really grounding, because I had written the first draft so quickly that I felt like I was still deciding what I wanted the book to be about, and I’d never written anything that was genre fluid in that way. I was also deciding, “What is Natalie doing here? What is it about her that I feel so drawn to?” It’s those bigger picture conversations.
It was always going to be this twist. I think it worked for the narrative structure I wanted, and it worked from a literary perspective to me. And I also think it just worked with what happens to Natalie. I think it was important to give her — I don’t want to say agency, because I don’t know if she has agency — but, like, I didn’t want an act of God, so to speak, to be the reveal. I wanted something to be more complicated.
The part where she steps into a trap was something that I added in the second or the third draft, because I wanted there to be more of a reason for why she wasn’t leaving the house. Like, why is she here? Because it’s very claustrophobic. A lot of time was spent trying to build out easter eggs, but the general plot was there from the jump.
So much. I mean, I feel like a lot of this book was a bit of a catharsis on both ends. Natalie’s relationship to social media, in many ways, is my relationship to social media, and I think that my relationship can be unhealthy — I can feel out of control, I can feel paranoid, I can feel defensive. And I also think that I often operate as the angry women. My relationship to social media and the Internet has changed a lot from writing this book, and the experience of having it out there and having that meta level of commentary… A lot of it just feels not real. And I have participated in it very heavily over the years — we all do. But yeah, I think that I’m both the Angry Women and Natalie and every other character, so it was cathartic to write that out.
I had an idea for who the protagonist was going to be and I thought it was going to be a more stereotypical woman — I thought she was going to be much more plucky and relatable. I didn’t expect to write someone who was so caustic, but it really did happen. I don’t really think that you have total control when you’re writing fiction. You’ll have your best idea and then you’re writing your way in. So I just kept writing part one, and I kept finding the same person. Natalie was so much more forceful than any of the protagonists that I had in mind. Slipping into her voice was really pretty easy. I feel like I found her and she felt very realized. As soon as I finished part one, which is the first thing I wrote for “Yesteryear,” I knew who she was, and then it was just a matter of making the book work for her and making all the characters work around her, because she really did change the novel by becoming so acidic and forceful and ambitious.
I thought a lot about the ending, and the epilogue was added at the end. I don’t think I did. 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. That is her character flaw, and a part of the novel that I found so interesting, and so I felt like giving her something at the end where she just learns the error of her ways would feel, to me, like a cop out. A lot of other characters do change their minds about things, and she has moments with Maeve and Mary where she feels this flickering warmth for them. But I don’t think that she’s able to get there in the end.
Getting into some specifics of the book — why does Caleb go along with the final renovation?
I have a few ideas. I don’t think it’s one thing. II think he’s always wanted a way to escape the pressure to succeed or to do anything. I think that he is a little bit lost in his own way by that point. I think that also Caleb doesn’t have to play along the way that everyone else does like Caleb does. This is up to interpretation, but Caleb does have access to the outside world. He hangs with his sons and he has access to a truck, so to a certain extent, I don’t think that he is as curbed as her. But I also think Caleb loses his mind a little bit in the end — he just isn’t punished to the same extent. The pressure of that final cancellation leads to a pretty intense mental implosion, and the idea that the world no longer offers anything for us. I will say, I think another book could be written on those years that we just skate through because I would imagine that a lot happens. I spent a lot of time thinking about that, because a decade unfolds that we don’t really get access to. I think that they are both forever spiraling further downward together.
Trust me, I’ve thought about it.
So much of this book is about generational trauma to me, and also about generational healing. Natalie doesn’t really get better, and there are characters in the book who do change their minds on things over the course of the story, like her mother and her sister. But massive ideological change or unlearning or deconstruction happens more effectively over generations, and I felt like Natalie is such a hard character — she’s very hard with the world and her children are more open to the world, but they’re kept from it from their mom.
And, of course, this is a story about social media and influencers, so I had to include the children. But I wanted the children to have an opportunity to make different choices than their mother, so I really wanted to end the book with them stepping beyond the world that they’ve been caught up in. That was where I personally found my hope when I was writing the book: children don’t have to have the same outcome as their mother. I think that’s true, always.
I have thoughts about that, but I want to keep them off the record. I want the reader to choose.
I had a lot of fun with their sex lives. I don’t want to give too many of my thoughts there because it’s intentionally left vague, but I think that both Natalie and Caleb are engaged with their own relationship to power through their sex lives, and that changes in their intimacy with one another.
I actually don’t know if it was a conscious decision at first to make her have trouble with her fertility. I mean, she gets pregnant with Clementine quickly, but it’s such a conversation right now in my own life — I’m in my early 30s, and it’s such a conversation with friends that I think maybe filtered through. From a narrative perspective, a woman who feels like it’s her number one job to get pregnant, but who doesn’t necessarily have the easiest time getting pregnant, was important to depict because it’s very common and it gives a lot of narrative propulsion to her desperation.
I wonder if there’s a cycle here, because I do think that we are forever obsessed with the cowboy thing. I do think we’re going through this resurgence. I mean, we’re going through a reactionary time period, and it’s very Americana — very looking backwards instead of looking forwards. We see that in our politics. There’s also been a little bit of leaning into it on some ends in entertainment, and an inversion or subversion of it in other ends. I actually was also thinking it’s funny that “Yesteryear” came out within the same week as “The Testaments.” We’re just cycling through these ideas about American nostalgia, also pitted up against these ideas of female subservience, because they’re so relevant right now.
I feel like Caleb would have to be someone who isn’t a household name. Someone with a Jesse Plemons vibe could be a good Caleb — he’s so good at being harmless at times and also unbelievably terrifying. He will have to be able to behave in that way to channel Caleb. For the father in law, I’ve always imagined someone with a Woody Harrelson sensibility. I feel like Woody Harrelson has a crackling energy to him, where, again, he can be really friendly in one moment and then really scary in the next. Those are really the only people I’ve thought about. The children will just have to look relatively like Anne.
Here is what I will say so far — and things are changing all the time — I believe the film is going to be faithful to the book in that way.
I’m an executive producer, so I get to stay in touch with big script updates. We have an amazing screenwriter, Hannah Friedman, and she’s doing an incredible job.
I am working on something already, but I can’t give any details. I am writing, and it’s been really nice to have a separate thing that I’m just keeping quiet.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It’s safe to say that Caro Claire Burke’s delightfully horrifying novel “Yesteryear” — in which the fictional tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills winds up transported back to the days of, well, yesteryear — is the book of the moment.
Since its April 7 release, it feels as though everyone has either read it, wants to read it or is figuring out how to get their hands on it (If you’re a part of the latter two groups, I’d hold off on reading much more of this story if you’d like to ensure a spoiler-free experience.) “Yesteryear” is a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and a “Good Morning America” book club pick, badges of honor that are all the more impressive for a debut novel. And, good news for fans, it’s already getting the big screen treatment (the film rights were sold to Amazon MGM back in 2024), with Anne Hathaway set to star and produce.
While Burke has been focused on fiction writing for what she describes as “her entire adult life,” along the way, she’s dabbled in social media too, gaining a following on TikTok when she began uploading conversational videos tackling everything from feminism to, naturally, tradwives. She also co-hosts the culture and politics podcast “Diabolic Lies” alongside author Katie Gatti Tassin, on which the two discuss topics like the Texasification of America; Scott Galloway vs. “Heated Rivalry”; Evie Magazine; and, recently, Gen Z’s new “anti-woke” voice.
In the midst of a book tour that has so far included a trip across the pond to the U.K. and a month-long journey across the U.S. to spots like Waco, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah in addition to New York and Boston, Burke spoke to Variety about what it’s been like to see the response to her debut novel, her thoughts on Natalie’s ending and the forthcoming film adaptation.
Ask me in 10 years. It has truly been nuts and I still have about three weeks to go. I mean, the events themselves are really fun. I’ve gone to a ton of red states — we really wanted to go to areas where these topics were more in tension, so that’s been amazing. I’ve had so many exciting conversations with people, but it’s definitely a grind, and I’m just [taking it] one day at a time over here, so I’m not really aware of the online chatter. I just wake up each day and I’m like, “Okay, I need coffee and some yogurt, and to make sure I’m wherever I [need to be] on time.”
I was in London for 10 days and now I’m back in New York, and then I’m back on the road. We’re going to Florida and California and Chicago.
I think what I got from her was like, “This is something. We’re gonna sell this and it’s going to start your career in a really exciting way.” But that can mean a lot of things in publishing. I had no expectation of making the New York Times bestseller list at all. I was really hopeful that this would be a book that a number of people read and that it would be enough for me to sell another book — that’s kind of the hope you have as a debut. I mean, I sold the book two years ago, and interests can change. A lot of books people think are going to work out don’t, and I’m very aware of that, so I went into the last month just being prepared for anything. But truly, there was never an expectation that it was going to reach the level that it reached in the last week.
Totally dissociative. I still haven’t processed it. I genuinely think that I will wake up and cry 10 years from now. It’s a completely out of body [experience] and unbelievable.
I’ve heard it from time to time, not even in religious settings, but like, “The days of yesteryear.” When I had the idea for the novel, the title came with the idea. I’d been talking about tradwives on TikTok and I’d been writing about them for my media job at the time, so I’d been thinking about it a lot. I thought of the title first, and I feel like it led me into the book because it just felt so big and expansive. It’s a phrase we use all the time, but it also felt kind of “Westworld”-y to me — it’s almost like an amusement park or a place that’s a fun house. I always have to name my projects at the beginning, and sometimes it changes. But with “Yesteryear,” it stuck.
It’s funny. I sold the book in the spring of 2024, and by that point I had a full first draft, but I was going to be doing another year and a half of work on it. Right after I sold it was when Joe Biden had that debate and then stepped down, so there was a four month period where I was continuing to work on the novel where I thought this book was going to come out under the first woman president. That was such a crazy summer that I think, in a positive way, I really turned my blinders on and was just like, “This is the book.” I already had the plot, and I just wanted to make it a book that if someone reads it 20 years from now they can still find it propulsive. That was the priority. And any anxieties I had about it not meeting the moment I just kind of ignored until I was finished and then that was when I could have all my anxiety attacks.
The first half of those conversations were at the beginning with Anne and with my book team, because it all happened simultaneously. I did the U.S. auction, and then the U.K. auction, and then I did the film auction. It was one long month. What I’m really lucky for, and what I got to do, is basically talk to a bunch of brilliant people about broader themes like performance and surveillance, and how to braid those in more, and what we’re talking about when we talk about the commercialization of religion. Like, I think Natalie has a very transactional relationship with her own religion. It’s very fraudulent to me. She’s not a very spiritual person.
[“Yesteryear”] is about a tradwife, but tradwives are an idea, too. So it’s like, “What is the idea of the tradwife?” Talking about Natalie and talking about it from that perspective was just really grounding, because I had written the first draft so quickly that I felt like I was still deciding what I wanted the book to be about, and I’d never written anything that was genre fluid in that way. I was also deciding, “What is Natalie doing here? What is it about her that I feel so drawn to?” It’s those bigger picture conversations.
It was always going to be this twist. I think it worked for the narrative structure I wanted, and it worked from a literary perspective to me. And I also think it just worked with what happens to Natalie. I think it was important to give her — I don’t want to say agency, because I don’t know if she has agency — but, like, I didn’t want an act of God, so to speak, to be the reveal. I wanted something to be more complicated.
The part where she steps into a trap was something that I added in the second or the third draft, because I wanted there to be more of a reason for why she wasn’t leaving the house. Like, why is she here? Because it’s very claustrophobic. A lot of time was spent trying to build out easter eggs, but the general plot was there from the jump.
So much. I mean, I feel like a lot of this book was a bit of a catharsis on both ends. Natalie’s relationship to social media, in many ways, is my relationship to social media, and I think that my relationship can be unhealthy — I can feel out of control, I can feel paranoid, I can feel defensive. And I also think that I often operate as the angry women. My relationship to social media and the Internet has changed a lot from writing this book, and the experience of having it out there and having that meta level of commentary… A lot of it just feels not real. And I have participated in it very heavily over the years — we all do. But yeah, I think that I’m both the Angry Women and Natalie and every other character, so it was cathartic to write that out.
I had an idea for who the protagonist was going to be and I thought it was going to be a more stereotypical woman — I thought she was going to be much more plucky and relatable. I didn’t expect to write someone who was so caustic, but it really did happen. I don’t really think that you have total control when you’re writing fiction. You’ll have your best idea and then you’re writing your way in. So I just kept writing part one, and I kept finding the same person. Natalie was so much more forceful than any of the protagonists that I had in mind. Slipping into her voice was really pretty easy. I feel like I found her and she felt very realized. As soon as I finished part one, which is the first thing I wrote for “Yesteryear,” I knew who she was, and then it was just a matter of making the book work for her and making all the characters work around her, because she really did change the novel by becoming so acidic and forceful and ambitious.
I thought a lot about the ending, and the epilogue was added at the end. I don’t think I did. 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. That is her character flaw, and a part of the novel that I found so interesting, and so I felt like giving her something at the end where she just learns the error of her ways would feel, to me, like a cop out. A lot of other characters do change their minds about things, and she has moments with Maeve and Mary where she feels this flickering warmth for them. But I don’t think that she’s able to get there in the end.
Getting into some specifics of the book — why does Caleb go along with the final renovation?
I have a few ideas. I don’t think it’s one thing. II think he’s always wanted a way to escape the pressure to succeed or to do anything. I think that he is a little bit lost in his own way by that point. I think that also Caleb doesn’t have to play along the way that everyone else does like Caleb does. This is up to interpretation, but Caleb does have access to the outside world. He hangs with his sons and he has access to a truck, so to a certain extent, I don’t think that he is as curbed as her. But I also think Caleb loses his mind a little bit in the end — he just isn’t punished to the same extent. The pressure of that final cancellation leads to a pretty intense mental implosion, and the idea that the world no longer offers anything for us. I will say, I think another book could be written on those years that we just skate through because I would imagine that a lot happens. I spent a lot of time thinking about that, because a decade unfolds that we don’t really get access to. I think that they are both forever spiraling further downward together.
Trust me, I’ve thought about it.
So much of this book is about generational trauma to me, and also about generational healing. Natalie doesn’t really get better, and there are characters in the book who do change their minds on things over the course of the story, like her mother and her sister. But massive ideological change or unlearning or deconstruction happens more effectively over generations, and I felt like Natalie is such a hard character — she’s very hard with the world and her children are more open to the world, but they’re kept from it from their mom.
And, of course, this is a story about social media and influencers, so I had to include the children. But I wanted the children to have an opportunity to make different choices than their mother, so I really wanted to end the book with them stepping beyond the world that they’ve been caught up in. That was where I personally found my hope when I was writing the book: children don’t have to have the same outcome as their mother. I think that’s true, always.
I have thoughts about that, but I want to keep them off the record. I want the reader to choose.
I had a lot of fun with their sex lives. I don’t want to give too many of my thoughts there because it’s intentionally left vague, but I think that both Natalie and Caleb are engaged with their own relationship to power through their sex lives, and that changes in their intimacy with one another.
I actually don’t know if it was a conscious decision at first to make her have trouble with her fertility. I mean, she gets pregnant with Clementine quickly, but it’s such a conversation right now in my own life — I’m in my early 30s, and it’s such a conversation with friends that I think maybe filtered through. From a narrative perspective, a woman who feels like it’s her number one job to get pregnant, but who doesn’t necessarily have the easiest time getting pregnant, was important to depict because it’s very common and it gives a lot of narrative propulsion to her desperation.
I wonder if there’s a cycle here, because I do think that we are forever obsessed with the cowboy thing. I do think we’re going through this resurgence. I mean, we’re going through a reactionary time period, and it’s very Americana — very looking backwards instead of looking forwards. We see that in our politics. There’s also been a little bit of leaning into it on some ends in entertainment, and an inversion or subversion of it in other ends. I actually was also thinking it’s funny that “Yesteryear” came out within the same week as “The Testaments.” We’re just cycling through these ideas about American nostalgia, also pitted up against these ideas of female subservience, because they’re so relevant right now.
I feel like Caleb would have to be someone who isn’t a household name. Someone with a Jesse Plemons vibe could be a good Caleb — he’s so good at being harmless at times and also unbelievably terrifying. He will have to be able to behave in that way to channel Caleb. For the father in law, I’ve always imagined someone with a Woody Harrelson sensibility. I feel like Woody Harrelson has a crackling energy to him, where, again, he can be really friendly in one moment and then really scary in the next. Those are really the only people I’ve thought about. The children will just have to look relatively like Anne.
Here is what I will say so far — and things are changing all the time — I believe the film is going to be faithful to the book in that way.
I’m an executive producer, so I get to stay in touch with big script updates. We have an amazing screenwriter, Hannah Friedman, and she’s doing an incredible job.
I am working on something already, but I can’t give any details. I am writing, and it’s been really nice to have a separate thing that I’m just keeping quiet.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.