Was Nara Smith Lying to You The Whole Time?

Hellllllo from a car ferry on the Long Island Sound. Car ferries are truly a civilized way to travel and I wish I had more of them in my life.

I have my second to last stop of the summer leg of the Parisian tour tonight in Plainville, Mass at An Unlikely Story.

Come see me!!!!

I’ll sign all the things. If you don’t see me in person then I can’t write something absurd or filthy in your book! And I want to.

And keep sharing the word about Parisian Heist with friends. Tell them they can get this substack free for a year and hear all of my mad ramblings about life and motherhood and wife-ing and writing and tradwives and social media.

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Now onto Nara Smith. Oh Nara Smith!

I got a call the other day from a reporter with the New York Post who was asking me about the tradwife trend in publishing. I told her, in no uncertain terms, that the tradwife trend is over on social media for sure and that we need books that reflect what is happening NOW. That’s not to say everyone shouldn’t be picking up Everyone is Lying to You if they want tradwife books. They should. Literally everyone eho read Yesteryear.

Here is what I said in the interview and what I have been saying for nearly a year now: the women who became the faces of the tradwife trend are actively saying it was all bullshit. They are now telling us they’re businesswomen.

First Hannah Neeleman wanted everyone to understand that she’s the CEO of Ballerina Farm. Now Nara Smith has gone on Call Her Daddy to explain that she’s not a tradwife.

I believe her. I don’t think she ever was.

Everyone also needs to read my friend Tia Leving’s (author of the glorious memoir A Well-Trained Wife) wonderful take on this.

In the podcast Nara rewrites her narrative and says her content creation career grew out of being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. She started researching how to make everything from scratch. During COVID, she couldn’t wear her favorite clothes anywhere, so she started wearing the now-famous frilly, baby doll, June Cleavery dresses around the house. And when she was pregnant she says those were the only thing that fit her so she just didn’t have a choice. It had nothing to do with the Internet infantalizing women in dresses meant for dolls.

She admits she was working every day. She says her husband Lucky Blue is the one who encouraged her to turn it into a business.

When Alex Cooper asks if she remembers the conversation where she told her husband she wanted to do this professionally, Nara rejects the premise.

“It happened because I am an ambitious and driven and hardworking woman.”

She says she wasn’t asking permission. She was telling her husband he needed to watch the kids while she filmed. “I don’t prioritize being a homemaker.”

“Do I like cooking? Yes. But that’s a passion of mine. A hobby,” she said.

She says they split parenting 50/50 and they have help. Lucky Blue does the dishes and cleans the house because he is better at it. To be fair Nick Aster also does the dishes in our house because I am crap at it.

I liked the words coming out of her mouth and they also pissed me off. And here is why.

I like hearing a young woman talk openly about ambition. I like hearing about a marriage where parenting is split evenly. I like hearing that both partners provide for the family and I like hearing her ask why she can’t be a working mom who loves cooking, loves taking care of her kids, and also gets on a plane to meet with business executives.

I’ve been saying this for years. I have been shouting about it. WOMEN SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO ALL THE THINGS.

The problem is that most women don’t have that choice. We don’t have affordable childcare, women’s labor is still undervalued, too many men are still uncomfortable with female breadwinners.

I liked what Nara had to say about how we keep forcing women into tiny little boxes where you’re either the perfect mother or the career woman, the homemaker or the CEO. Nara claims she is all of the things. Amazing. Love to hear it.

But if it is true and I think that it is, then I wish we had seen more of that over the last two years.

Show us the childcare handoff before the shoot, the meetings, the man caring for kids and scrubbing toilets. You can wear a pretty dress and a full face of makeup. I would love if you did and found a way to make the juggle and the struggle aspirational. Because we fucking need that. My brain is breaking over here. Let me tell you why.