The reality of a tradwife influencer life

Natalie Heller Mills is our protagonist and she declares right at the opening of the book that “I am perfect at being alive” (p4). She starts out as being smug and self-congratulatory, but very quickly, the book reveals the much less palatable truths. Natalie is a influencer, who records her picture perfect bucolic farm life with 5 children and a new pregnancy, with Caleb her handsome and very rich husband, with two nannies to help, and a producer, all in her gorgeous and film-able farm house which has been specially redecorated and designed at considerable expense with

“all the aesthetics of the olden times and all the amenities of modernity” (p46), where “the dishwasher and microwave and all modern kitchen appliances [are] to be hidden from view” (p45).

Natalie has herself filmed making sour dough bread, collecting eggs from her own chicken, making a ‘natural dinner’, etc. She has five million followers and also a lot of what she calls Angry Women, whose hate Natalie delights in, crowing over their animosity as envy she has provoked; their angst against her she reads as evidence of failure on their part to live triumphant lives like her own.

This novel is essentially about misogyny in America. “America hates women” (p116). Even when Natalie tells us the self she projects as an influencer, she is sarcastic about what identity she is projecting:

“A flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to. Like a nun in a porno, it didn’t make sense, but also, by God: it worked” (p4).

Natalie constantly compares herself to Reena, her roommate at Harvard – Natalie herself dropped out to get married – and she is gleeful when she hears Reena secured an internship at McKinsey.

“It was exactly the kind of opportunity that girls like Reena said they wanted: competitive and respectful and well paid” (p91)

Natalie then draws up a vivid even if somewhat simplistic picture of “the desperate plight of those uppity working women” where according to Natalie, the likes of Reena may think she is living the dream working 80 hours a week, eating badly and being discriminated against for being a woman.

“From here on out, Reena’s life was going to be hard. She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted, and any promotion she received would lead only to more work, more responsibilities, more hours in the office, and in the meantime she would have to squeeze out a few free hours a week to do everything else: date, stay fit, buy groceries, see friends” (p91)

Natalie then foresees even if Reena can fall in love and get married, she would have to use IVF, and when she gets her child,

“she was at the top of the mountain, she had it all! – the landscape would be like this: Her husband no longer wanted to touch her, and her boss no longer wanted to promote her, and her childless friends no longer wanted to spend time with her…”

and so the dismal litany goes on, concluding,

“It was clear Reena was dreading it, not just the internship but the rest of her own life. As if she’d be shot through by some fairy-tale curse” (p93).

And of course, Natalie is positing that her own choice of life, is the antidote and opposite to all that women like Reena have been told to strive for and sacrifice for. She suggests that her life and lifestyle, is the way forward, the ‘Divine Christian Feminine,’ and she introduces the concept of a ‘thirst trap’ post:

“thirst trap (noun, slang): a social media post, especially a selfie or other photo, intended to elicit sexual attention, appreciation of one’s attractiveness, or other positive feedback. Example: A photo of a proud, thin, youthful-looking Christian woman standing with her growing litter in front of a five-million-dollar barn. Cheese!” (p217)

If this all sounds incredibly toxic, then that is exactly what the author is depicting, that the influencer’s life is nothing like what she is projecting.

“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” (p247)

Understandably, her job is to rack up followers, so she must take a controversial stand, in order that she has loyal fans and loyal haters, those Angry Women as audience whom she constantly imagines.

Angry Women, Natalie tells us, are suckers in the system, those lost in ‘the maze’. They are overworked and underpaid,

“nearly all these women had crappy jobs and snotty kids and loser husbands. Alternatively, they were single and whiny and depressed. Either way: these women wanted their content to be every bit as mindless and pleasurable as their lives were not. These women wanted – no, they needed – perfection from me. Afterall, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.

At the same time, the Angry Woman claimed to want honesty, or at least a working illusion of it.” (p247)

 It is curious how Natalie feeds the system, gives herself up to the very system she criticises. She strikes devilish deals with her patriarchal father-in-law, she lives up to the stereotypes while thinking she is subverting the stereotypes and beating the system at its own game. This tension is then solidified by the author who has the story running on two parallel lines. In her influencer world, Natalie seems to have everything under her perfect control:

“Sometimes it actually made me sick, how perfect my life was, and how good I was at living it” (p5).

Then everything changes, Natalie wakes one day to find herself in a parallel reality, where she has a different version of her life, where her farm house is genuinely old and hard to run and without modcons, where her life is abrasive, painful, dismal; where I guess the novel is implying this is the authentic version of the carefully curated life Natalie used for her posts. Natalie wonders if she is in a reality TV program. The suspense of the novel is how the two parallel lives will be resolved, and for the reader to find out what is really happening, and what did happen for this 2nd life to occur.

It is quite an easy read, interesting and amusing, but the author holds back information from the reader perhaps not entirely fairly, just to create that suspense.  Personally, I did not mind much, because for me, the novel’s social commentary was the important thing, rather than plotline. It was about the comments the author was making about the lifestyles made available to American women of today, which are apparently only 2, and binary – those uppity working career women gunning for internships in consulting or media, and those self-sacrificing white Christian women who have ‘litters’ – her word, not mine! – of children, live off the land, work hard, love their husbands, pray a lot to God. It is an entertaining binary the way Burke plays it out, and she demonstrates a lot of its hypocrisies, especially how the deck is stacked against women. But ye gods…there are so many other kinds of women, other classes, other aspirations, other lifestyles…but this book is not about all those. Neither should we as readers ask the book to be about something else, but a nod to acknowledge that those exist, may not go amiss. That said, Burke wanted to depict a certain trap for women of a certain type and class and demographic, and her book paints this particular portrait with many interesting details.

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