A fine line can exist between developing a good attitude and pretending happiness or religious devotion to outright lying.
In the remarkable and thought-provoking debut novel by Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear, Natalie Heller grows up with a mother who regularly lies about the basic foundations of their family. The daughter attends Harvard, but goes through life both settling for dreams, manipulating how others might view her, overcoming social awkwardness, battling to become likable. She leaves college to marry the spoiled son of a wealthy US Senator, and encourages the father to buy the couple a large ranch in Idaho. She promises the man a large family that no average woman could easily handle, and become a social media influencer about organic farming, a simple lifestyle, the growing family and their faith. Natalie likes to think that she hears the voice of God, and becomes famous for “tradwife” messaging – attracting both devout women striving for an idyllic family life and angry liberals who view the quest as impossible, with all the makings of a cult.
The family's image a charade as Natalie hires help, lots of help, and Yesteryear ranch is entirely performance, her children illiterate and ignorant about the world at large who become as they age virtual props and slaves around the home and ranch. “Those homesteading folks over at Yesteryear Ranch, with the tired young mother and the grinning doltish cowboy? They were, as it turned out, not rotten at all, but a perfectly fermented vision of America.”
Natalie releases a stream of curated images and videos, with no public interviews or spontaneous clips, and dedicates time to disciplined messaging and not letting others know her true self. “The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.”
Her upbringing provided perfect training. Natalie’s mother was positive but not quite trustworthy, and Natalie reflects on the woman's life lessons, including assurances around childbirth, as a “long, golden string of insincerity that threads together the entire human race: a shared agreement between women to insist back and forth in endless conversations that this thing we spend our whole lives preparing for – this thing we were here for – is anywhere close to what we thought it would be.” Similar patterns unfold in Natalie’s life. “You never age out of it. Your mother lies to you, an then you lie to your children, and then your children lie to their children, and then you an old woman, looking back at your own life, lying to yourself. “
Everyone lies, Natalie concludes, and her online world falls apart as her angry interior monologues, including critical observations and labels for others, are voiced aloud.
A staff member goes public with the true story of Natalie’s family, just as the father-in-law launches a presidential campaign. Transformed from social media darling to pariah, Natalie endures destitution, isolation and mental breakdown – waking up one day in what seems to be a filthy and bare frontier cabin from 1855 with a strange new husband and another set of children.
