This summer we seem to be riding two cultural waves. Everyone is watching Christopher Nolan’s movie of The Odyssey and reading Caro Claire Burke’s novel, Yesteryear. Since Nolan’s film is three hours long, I’m waiting for the streamer, sort of, although I have trouble with the idea of Matt Damon as Odysseus. In most of his performances, Damon has struck me as a Dad type, dependable and virtuous, when Homer’s Odysseus really, really wasn’t.
However, I read Burke’s Yesteryear last weekend and came away wanting to write about it. I’m afraid I don’t like it much, and know that saying so will cause many people to pelt me. I’m in the minority. The novel is widely loved.
Yet Yesteryear ticks a number of the boxes that publishers and the marketplace like to see checked, and I thought it might be valuable to take a look at how Burke does it. Even what I see as failures in the book are instructive in the way they don’t seem to bother Burke’s fans.
Writers can get away with a lot in a novel that hits a few key targets. In fact, bestsellers probably can’t deliver everything. Write too subtly, get too nuanced, dive too deep, and your work becomes literary.
And as we all know, literary novels aren’t selling.
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You’ve heard about it, of course. Yesteryear centres on Natalie Heller Mills, a famous tradwife influencer. She lives on a ranch with her photogenic cowboy husband and their five (and counting) children—Clementine, Samuel, Stetson, Jessa and Junebug. Natalie bakes virtuous bread, home-schools the kids, at least on camera, and collects eggs from her flock of humanely-cooped chickens. (“The girls.”) As she wafts about Christianly, all of this goes out online to her millions of followers on social media.
At least, almost all of it. A walk-in fridge and industrial-strength ovens are hidden away in a pantry that’s never photographed. Left off camera as well are the two nannies who take care of the children. We know this from tell-alls about real tradwives, but it’s fun to read about it in heightened form. Natalie isn’t even sure she knows her youngest child. What’s little Junebug like, anyhow?
Meanwhile, Natalie’s husband, Caleb, proves to be a faux-cowboy: the fifth and least successful son of a rich and influential politician. Senator Doug has helped them renovate the ranch so he can link up with Christian voters. He and Natalie are wary allies in the tradwife business, which is increasingly lucrative. (Product placement.)
Handsome Caleb is useful to both, and a doofus. Hired hands do most of the work on the farm, also off-camera, and a resident videographer/producer named Shannon does what she’s told.
Until she doesn’t, and things fall apart.
That’s half the story, the part called The Past. In it, we not only visit the ranch, we learn about Natalie’s early life as a devout Christian. She’s raised by a single mother and swots away at school so hard she earns a full scholarship to Harvard. That’s where she meets little lost Caleb at a church group. Beautiful and rather feral—in her own words, “the manic pixie dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies”—Natalie sweeps Caleb off his feet. They marry and use his inheritance to buy an early iteration of the ranch.
In alternate sections, we also get The Present, which appears to take place in 19th century Idaho. Natalie wakes up one day in a primitive ranch with no electricity, an outhouse, and “1855” carved into the threshold. She doesn’t know how she got there or recognize the four children doing the kitchen chores. They look like her children in the other time period and call her Mother. Yet they’re also different, and far grubbier.
When he walks through the door, Caleb has changed as well, having become competent and borderline abusive. Once Natalie was a tradwife. Now she’s got a trad husband.
How did she get there? Time travel? Cosmic punishment? As the two story lines converge, we eventually learn what’s happened. I’m afraid I’m going to reveal it in a spoiler, so if you want to read the book, stop right here.
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Okay, if you’re still with me, here’s my first point, a big one that goes a long way toward making Yesteryear so successful.
Concept and Tagline
I first heard about the book this way: A tradwife influencer is transported back to the past, where she learns how awful life in the 19th century really was. It’s simple, it’s intriguing, it makes us want to find out how that happened. It’s also true that we open the book feeling gleeful about Natalie’s coming downfall. Schadenfreude sells.
In fact, the concept is so perfect, it’s hard not to feel intimidated. How can any of us write a novel so immediately appealing—so perfectly constructed—that we can sell it in one line?
Here’s one way to do it. First, draft your novel. Afterward, craft an eye-catching one-liner that sorta describes what goes on in the book without worrying too much about whether it actually happens. You can mislead in your one-liner. Over-simplify. Not quite lie, but tiptoe around the truth the way Burke and her publisher do.
In Yesteryear, Natalie isn’t transported back to the past. Instead, as the two story lines converge, we learn that video producer Shannon has had an affair with Natalie’s husband Caleb. Natalie attacks Shannon physically, and when Shannon goes public, the attack is painted as lesbian-esque. As Natalie’s Christian audience flees in horror, her oldest daughter takes the younger kids away, seeding further stories in the media about child abuse. A blindsided Senator Doug pulls his support, and, and, and…
Anyway, it turns out Natalie and Caleb are so destroyed by the bad publicity they retreat to a cabin without mod-cons, where they produce another slew of children. We never leave the 21st century, although Natalie doesn’t realize this. She’s developed deep psychological problems and Caleb keeps her drugged. Burke never writes that this second storyline takes place in 1855. She simply avoids mentioning particulars, carves the date into the threshold and adds wood smoke.
Some readers can feel betrayed by the disconnect between promise and delivery, although they’re a minority. On Goodreads, where the book already has about 775,000 ratings and reviews, the majority of readers give the novel four or five stars. Yet thousands of other Goodreaders write at length about their disappointment, including a reviewer named domsbookden who gives the book two stars in a review with more than 5,000 likes.
“Yesteryear has one of the most compelling premises I’ve come across,” she begins, “a wildly successful tradwife influencer is forced to actually live the life she sells to millions. It promises satire and a biting critique of gender roles and performance. But despite that strong setup, the novel is underdeveloped, structurally uneven, and thematically hesitant, especially once the full picture comes into focus.”
As a writer myself, I have an idea that Caro Claire Burke couldn’t figure out how to meld the two story lines and get out of her book. Toward the end, she starts piling on incidents—reversals—to keep people reading, or perhaps to distract them. Myself, I thought the novel grew so overwrought it got silly, and I started to skim.
Yet three-quarters of a million people on Goodreads feel so strongly about the book they’ve chosen to either rate or review it, whether they like it or not. Actor Anne Hathaway bought the film rights when the novel was still in draft. It’s already sold mega numbers of copies and earned Burke a small fortune.
So, since this piece is about crafting a bestseller, I’ll more or less repeat myself:
Draft your book. Come up with a killer tagline, maybe do a final rewrite to try to fit the story into its description. But if you can’t, don’t worry. The majority of readers will like it anyway.
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Finding the perfect tagline is one step in creating a best-seller, but it’s not all.
You also need to heighten, heighten, heighten.
Natalie doesn’t go to a state university, she goes to Harvard. As a Canadian, I’m usually annoyed by American writers with brand-new MFAs who drop the names of Ivy League universities into their novels as a way to characterize their protagonists. This one’s a Yalie—oh, we know him—while that one went to Brown, so of course she’s arty, liberal and self-righteous.
Yet Burke is up to something different. She’s heightening the drama in her novel, throwing in Harvard, making Natalie not just an occasional church-goer but a hard-core, true-believing evangelical Christian. She gives her not just two or three but five young kids, a growing baby bump and two full-time nannies. The novel opens as Natalie picks up follower number 5,000,000, and we quickly learn that Caleb’s father is both rich and a senator. Actually, the latest in a long line of senators. Now that you mention it, a presidential candidate.
Heightening characters’ status not only adds glitz, it means they have farther to fall—at least theoretically. In real life, someone with almost nothing can lose more than any rich and well-connected Yalie.
But we’re straying into pathos here, and literary fiction. If you want to write a best-seller, sprinkle status over your story like fairy dust. It will make readers’ eyes sparkle.
Then there’s this:
Secondary characters don’t need to be developed
In Yesteryear, Natalie’s family, her employees and Harvard classmates are there to propel the story forward. They don’t have personalities, they have functions.
Caleb starts out as a limp and malleable character because Natalie needs to marry up. Since she comes from zero money herself, that’s the only way she can launch herself as a tradwife. Caleb goes on to have an affair when the plot asks him to, and grows more competent when he’s forced to run the ranch in so-called 1855. (It’s never clear why he doesn’t just move his family to the city and get Natalie into therapy.)
Meanwhile, the children don’t need to be anything other than cute, watchful and exploited. Natalie isn’t the only one who can’t remember which is which; I couldn’t keep them straight. And of course Senator Doug is supportive until the plot requires him to check out.
Adding individuality to any of these secondary characters would slow things down. It might also make the book better. One time, I worked as a story editor on a script by a very talented writer/director, and we discussed the fact the protagonist’s bestie lacked an agenda. When the w/d gave her one, the character started challenging the protagonist, forcing her to act, and adding an unpredictable X factor to the plot. (They were also able to cast a better actress in the role.)
But if you want to move things along in your potential best-seller, you don’t really need to worry about the secondary characters. I did, but your readers won’t. Burke’s don’t.
Instead…
Concentrate on your protagonist
More Goodreads, this time a five-star review from historical fiction writer Kate Quinn:
“Tradwife culture meets ‘Shutter Island’ with a dash of Amy from ‘Gone Girl.’ The protagonist (heroine is the wrong word) is frankly despicable but that doesn’t mean her cutting observations on the pressure of being female and living up under the weight of expectation on women doesn’t have a bite of wince-inducing truth. Toxic and mesmerizing—I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.”
In other words, your main character needs to be memorable, but readers don’t have to like her. Quiet characters risk being boring, although they can also move us deeply. Think of the butler, Stevens, in Kazuo Ishiguru’s The Remains of the Day.
I’m not saying this is easy. In fact, it’s beyond difficult to craft a compelling main character—and kudos to Caro Claire Burke for pleasing so many readers. But it’s doable, especially if you don’t waste your creative juices on secondary characters, forget about being plausible and spend your energy creating a strong protagonist who looms over all. Give her a loud voice and a raucous sense of humour, equip her with ambition, sketch in multiple contradictions, throw in a dash of bitch, and you’re on your way to the bestseller list.
Especially if Anne Hathaway options your book.