About a month before I read Trad Wife, I read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. The books have similar themes and I don’t think I would have read Trad Wife if I hadn’t picked up Yesteryear first. Yesteryear was very good and I’d recommend it for its commentary on the world of influencer culture and the rise of conservative populism. Looked at objectively, I think it’s a better written book than Trad Wife. But I enjoyed Trad Wife a lot more than I enjoyed Yesteryear.
Natalie, the main character in Yesteryear, cynically makes use of the Trad Wife trend as a means to create an additional income stream when her wealthy father-in-law reduces their monthly allowance. She has a perfectly curated online world displaying her beautiful farmhouse on a working ranch, with a brood of perfectly behaved children. It’s all staged – she hides the nannies, the farm hands and the video producer from her audience, she feels contempt for her fans and for her husband and is not interested in her children except as props. Her channel is used purely to make money and to sell her exclusive range of handcrafted homestead essentials, a task that mainly involves removing the ‘Made in China’ labels from the mass produced products she peddles to her gullible followers. Natalie is ostensibly smart, she earned a full scholarship to Harvard, but rather than use this opportunity to learn and expand her world, she maintains her narrow fundamentalist Christian viewpoint and drops out after her first year to marry the youngest son from an extremely wealthy family.
Camille from Trad Wife is different. She has been raised with the message that her only role in the world is to be a homemaker and to please her man. She is a much more appealing character than Natalie. Everything that happens to Natalie is because her carefully constructed world is inherently fake. When it starts to fall apart, she tries everything to keep it as it was. But Camille, even though she seems shallow at the beginning, genuinely tries to live as a traditional wife, and because of how she was raised, it is a logical choice. And once she becomes a mother, her child becomes her world.
The one memory Camille has of her mother is the lesson that she should smile whenever she feels like frowning, to avoid wrinkles on her forehead. Her father later reinforces this, warning her to avoid creases and to always stay serene. Her mother dies when she is eight. After that Camille takes on the role of homemaker for her father, cooking and cleaning for him. She wants to be a biologist and is accepted into a competitive academic program but is forced by her father to give this up, as it is unsuitable for a woman to be interested in science, in his eyes. When she marries Graham, she leaves her job at a wholesale growing centre to be a fulltime housewife. She embraces the trad wife world: to be the perfect embodiment of what she had been raised to believe is her position. And to build up her social media channel to be something that her idol, the perfect Mara Shoemaker, Trad Wife extraordinaire, would think worthy of following, she knows she needs a child. Without a child, her channel has become stagnate.
And that’s where Camille’s problems start. She and Graham have recently moved into a remote farmhouse where Camille is basically isolated from other people. Tech-bro Graham works long hours away from home during the week and plays golf with his buddies on the weekend. He has been increasingly disinterested in sex, making falling pregnant difficult. After another failed pregnancy test in the opening chapters, Camille is getting desperate.
So, Camille takes matters into her own hands. It starts out innocently. She finds an old well on the boundary of the woods and drops a coin into it, wishing for a baby. Whatever she thinks will happen from this is unclear. She definitely isn’t expecting horrific dreams every night, or for a demon (she keeps telling herself it’s an angel) to keep showing up. Eventually, her desire for a baby outweighs any caution she feels and she has the best sex of her life with her angel/demon. Within a day her abdomen swells with a kicking baby. The pregnancy lasts around two to three months. Camille has her baby. The response on social media is swift. Camille’s follower count increases and Mara Shoemaker finally follows her after Camille posts her carefully photoshopped photo of her baby. All should be perfect in her world.
Except, of course, it isn’t. There’s no disguising that the baby, called Sweetheart by the doting Camille, is not human. Not that Graham notices. He’s too self-centred to notice anything odd about the baby. That doesn’t matter to Camille. She loves Sweetheart and will do anything for her, anything to keep her heathy and safe, and to delay Graham noticing anything odd.
The husband character is another aspect of the two books that is better in Trad Wife. Caleb, Natalie’s husband, is essentially harmless to begin with. Although he attends Harvard, he’s there solely because of family money and influence (his father is a conservative State Senator with presidential ambitions). Caleb has no ambitions for himself and is happy to just play video games all day. Natalie sells him on the idea of a cattle ranch where he can play at being a cowboy, to keep him occupied. She uses a few conspiracy theories to manipulate him, then is shocked to find he has whole-heartedly embraced the manosphere. Caleb isn’t a nice person but if he was in a good relationship with someone who cared for him, he would have had a chance at being a decent person, albeit an easily manipulated one.
Camille’s Graham, in contrast, is a hateable character. He doesn’t change throughout the book, except to become even more hateable. He’s a misogynistic, conservative Catholic, inattentive of Camille and her needs, wanting Camille only to be decorative and to cook and clean for him. He tells Camille to not use weights when she works out, as muscles are unfeminine. He expects freshly brewed coffee and a freshly cooked breakfast to be ready when he comes down in the mornings, and an ornate dinner to be waiting for him every night. But frequently he’ll message to say he’ll be late because he’s having drinks with the team. He still expects that meal to be waiting for him though, in case he’s hungry when he gets in. He expects his clothes to be clean and laid out for him every morning. He expects the house to be spotless. And he maintains these expectation even after the baby arrives: he criticises Camille in front of other people for not keeping the house as clean as she used to. This is despite him never doing a single thing to help with the baby or anything else around the house. It comes as no surprise when we find out he’s been having an affair.
It really says something about Graham and Camille’s relationship that a demon turns out to be a better choice. In contrast to Graham’s indifference to Camille as a person, the demon is caring and considerate. Their relationship is fully consensual, with the demon being there whenever Camille needs him. And at the end, he offers to solve all her problems, but accepts that what needs doing is something that she has to do for herself. He is the first ‘man’ who allows her control over her own life. Camille has slowly learned over the course of the book that Graham has held all the power in their relationship. The house is his, the income to maintain the house and lifestyle is his, she has no savings and no job. She has been isolated, following a set of rules that keep her in a box. Even the online community that she thought she was part of has offered no support when she has a real problem to deal with. If Graham decides to leave her, she will have nothing.
The part of this story that made the most impression on me is the bond between Camille and Sweetheart. Once she has her baby, Camille will do everything necessary to care for her. She starts listening more to the tiny voice in her head that warns her about Graham, and she questions the lifestyle choices of the Trad Wife community. Schaefer manages to capture that feeling you have when you are breastfeeding, that the baby is consuming you. You accept it, even if you are drained and in pain from cracked nipples, because you love your child and will do anything to ensure they are fed with the nutrients they need. It’s completely primal, but that’s motherhood. It is difficult and it can be all consuming.
This book is bloody and gory and I loved it. I’m normally fairly squeamish, so my reaction to this book surprised me. There might be a lot of blood and viscera, but it was definitely satisfying.
