Show notes
Natalie is a tradwife influencer with a farm called Yesteryear, an audience across America, and a hired staff quietly doing the work she’s filmed doing. Then she wakes up with no electricity, no plumbing, and a husband and children who seem wrong. Full spoilers throughout, including the twist. Content note: child abuse and sexual assault.
Alex and Lindsey get into Natalie as a woman who refuses, over and over, to learn the one thing the book keeps trying to teach her, and they disagree about whether she ever actually believed the faith she used to justify it. They work through the cost of an ideology that tells you not to trust your own gut, the tradwife boom as a response to an economy that makes real choice expensive, and what patriarchy does to Caleb, a man who might have made a good kindergarten teacher if anyone had let him.
Plus whether Natalie deserves pity, why the ending is really the beginning of someone else’s story, and a surprise phone call from Alex’s dad; who has strong opinions despite not having read the book.
Cry count and ratings at the end.