{"id":497908,"date":"2026-06-13T14:53:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T14:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/497908\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T14:53:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T14:53:19","slug":"what-is-yesteryear-and-why-is-everyone-talking-about-it-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/497908\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Yesteryear and why is everyone talking about it? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What is Yesteryear?<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">It\u2019s the knockout debut <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/culture\/books\/review\/2026\/05\/16\/books-in-brief-the-pythons-kiss-runaway-joe-and-yesteryear\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/culture\/books\/review\/2026\/05\/16\/books-in-brief-the-pythons-kiss-runaway-joe-and-yesteryear\/\">novel<\/a> by Caro Claire Burke \u2013 the book of the summer, and quite possibly the year. The title is both the name of the farm where the main character, Natalie, lives, and an allusion to times of yore when men were men and slapped their wives, and women stayed home, had babies, cooked, cleaned and repeated. <\/p>\n<p>Who is Caro Claire Burke?<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">She\u2019s an American writer living in Virginia, and you can bet her bank account is a whole lot bigger than it was before she sold Yesteryear. She\u2019s also the co-host of a bitingly good podcast on politics and culture, Diabolical Lies. <\/p>\n<p>Why is everyone talking about Yesteryear?<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The premises is genius. Natalie is a social media influencer who earns megabucks from her millions of followers, and who posts about her many children, her \u201csweet little organic farm\u201d in Idaho, her baking, and her cowboy husband \u2013 she\u2019s a true <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/life-style\/people\/2024\/06\/15\/the-dark-side-of-the-tradwife-trend-that-sees-women-return-to-domestic-bliss\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/life-style\/people\/2024\/06\/15\/the-dark-side-of-the-tradwife-trend-that-sees-women-return-to-domestic-bliss\/\">tradwife<\/a>. What her followers don\u2019t see is the infrastructure holding the fantasy together \u2013 the nannies, the farm workers, the state-of-the-art kitchen, the crop pesticides, the producer who edits the videos. Then one day Natalie wakes up in the year 1855, minus all the help, modern gadgets, internet, her cashmere sweaters, and her millions of followers. How did she get there, how will she cope, and how does she get back to her other life?<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s a tradwife?<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">It\u2019s a fairly recently coined term for women who choose to live their lives on organic farms, have multiple babies, wear long dresses, home-school their children, and make all meals from scratch. Hannah Neeleman, Utah mother to nine, and herself an influencer under the name Ballerina Farm, is perhaps the best-known example, with 20 million social media followers. <\/p>\n<p>Why does the actor Anne Hathaway get thanked in the book\u2019s acknowledgments?<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">When Yesteryear was still in draft mode, Burke\u2019s agents went sniffing out movie options. Anne Hathaway loved the idea so much that she bought the rights, and will star in and produce the movie. She actually even had some input into \u201cbringing Natalie to life\u201d according to the acknowledgments, as Burke worked on the novel. <\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve heard there is some kind of twist at the end?<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Yes, Burke weaves in a stunning twist. Did I see it coming? I did not \u2013 but maybe you\u2019re smarter than me. Where was my jaw when I had finished reading this book? Firmly embedded in the ground. Ever since I removed it, I haven\u2019t stopped talking about Yesteryear. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What is Yesteryear? It\u2019s the knockout debut novel by Caro Claire Burke \u2013 the book of the summer,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,90,976],"class_list":["post-497908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-us","tag-weekendreview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}