Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Kat Johnson: Hi, this is Audible Editor Kat Johnson, and I’m speaking with Caro Claire Burke, author of the debut novel Yesteryear, the mind-bending story of a tradwife influencer who finds herself inexplicably transported to the 1800s. With a compulsive dual timeline and a shocking ending guaranteed to get people talking, Yesteryear is a thrilling satire that reflects our contemporary moment, narrated in audio by acclaimed performer Rebecca Lowman.
I also want to note, we’ll be getting into some spoilers toward the end of our conversation, so if you haven’t had a chance to listen to Yesteryear, we'll warn you when those are coming. Caro, first I want to say thank you so much for being here and congratulations on your debut novel. I loved it.
Caro Claire Burke: Thank you so much. The pleasure is all mine. And you have done a better job describing it than I have so far, so I have to take that from you.
Well, it’s early on, so let’s see. I can be topped. But as we speak, it’s currently still Women’s History Month, which feels like a perfect time for us to talk. Because in addition to having written this novel, you co-host the incredible podcast Diabolical Lies, which explores culture through what I find to be a very necessary feminist lens. And we’re going to be talking about tradwives, which for anyone who might be unfamiliar, are quote-unquote traditional wives who promote their domestic lifestyles online, often with huge social followings. What drew you to writing a novel about a tradwife, and what do you think is so fascinating about them culturally?
Well, writing fiction is always kind of a subconscious experience for me. I don’t know if I ever intend to enter a project so much that an idea arrives for me, and I see if I can write it or not. I’ve had plenty of false starts. But in the winter of 2024, I was spending a lot of time, basically, in the discourse of the tradwife obsession. I was researching it for my then full-time job at Katie Couric Media, and I was also giving my own opinions on media literacy and feminism through the lens of the tradwife discourse on TikTok. So I was spending a lot of time thinking about it, and then one morning, I kind of woke up with what is essentially the elevator pitch of Yesteryear you just gave, this woman who wakes up in the time period that she has been fetishizing. I woke up with that elevator pitch as well as the title, Yesteryear, and from there, the novel flowed pretty smoothly.
Wow. I was wondering about which came first, the premise or this incredible character. And it’s all so spot-on in the details: we have this influencer, Natalie Heller Mills; her husband, Caleb; and their children, Clementine, Samuel, Stetson, Jessa, and Junebug. They’re living on the perfectly named Yesteryear Ranch in Idaho, where they churn butter, feed chickens, and promote their lifestyles to millions of followers. Then Natalie suddenly wakes up in the 1800s in this house that’s not her house, with a family that’s not her family. She’s trying to figure it out. I found Natalie to be so interesting. She’s alternately unlikeable but also so compelling. I just wonder, what inspired her and what was it like being in her head over the course of the book?
I had a blast being in Natalie’s head. It was a very wonderful two years. I didn’t intend to write her, though, the way that I wrote her. Kind of along the lines of fiction always ending up taking you somewhere that you never expected, I think I imagined a protagonist who was a more understandable victim. I think given the elevator pitch that I had, I went into this novel planning that she would be a woman who was acted upon by the world and who you really feel a great deal of sympathy towards. And as I was writing my way into the novel, I ended up writing this kind of long, sprawling day in the life, which ends up being part one of this book, and this woman was just so acidic.
“When I think about what I want to do as a writer, I am very, very interested in how humans behave, and I am very uninterested in morality policing.”
It wasn’t intentional, but I felt like I kept trying to push her into different interactions with different people, kind of hoping that I would get to a point where she would behave in a redeemable way. And with every additional interaction, her personality kind of cemented itself. I really fell in love with it, because it also showed this incredible series of bifurcations, both with how she thinks and how she talks, with how she presents online and how she presents to her family. It just seemed so rich, just as a character, but also there are so many metaphorical threads to pull with that, when you create all of these binaries of how someone is behaving. So, once I wrote that part one, I realized that a lot of the book had to change to fit this woman, who is still acted upon by the world, but who very much also acts upon the world. And that led to a really satisfying tension for me as a writer.
Yeah, that’s fascinating. She is definitely an unreliable narrator. All the things she would do, her presumption of superiority and her chronic misreading of other women, I just found so interesting, especially as you see her interacting with people and constantly being so unhinged. For the audiobook, I really love this choice of Rebecca Lowman, who’s narrated novels like Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me, Lily King’s Heart the Lover, and Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir. What was your involvement in her casting, and what do you hope listeners hear in her performance?
I was given a short list of speakers, essentially, to read the book. It was very hard because I’ve never imagined what Natalie looks like, and I’ve never really imagined her voice. When I read, I don’t imagine voices or faces. That’s just not part of my experience. We were really just trying to find someone who we thought could best embody the serious challenge of this novel, which is how much interiority takes place, how many thoughts are scattered throughout a physical scene. When I listened to her samples, it seemed like she was more than up to the task. So, I haven’t listened to it myself yet, but I am very eager and excited to see what she does with Natalie, and I’m very confident that it's going to be incredible.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, some people I’ve talked to find Natalie so unlikeable. And she is deeply problematic. She does some terrible things in the book. But I also found her so compelling. I wondered what you think about the idea that some people sort of insist on likeable characters, and how does this interact with feminism? One, is it more so for female characters? And two, it also feels related to tradwives as a phenomenon, because I think a lot of people, as happens in the book, follow them even though they don't like them or their lifestyles, but they still cannot look away.
Yeah, well, when men behave in bad ways, they are antiheroes. So, for me, that was the word I always used to describe Natalie. I knew that other people would describe her as unlikeable or a villain, but she is my antihero. She is the antihero of this book, to me. I got my master’s in fine arts before I wrote this novel, and that was an excellent prepper for this, because you realize very quickly that there is no female character you can write who is an honest representation of a human who is not described as unlikeable. It’s actually remarkably consistent.
What readers like is really none of my business, but when I think about what I want to do as a writer, I am very, very interested in how humans behave, and I am very uninterested in morality policing. So, Natalie, of course, is a pretty egregious case. She’s a very extreme person with extreme beliefs. But every character in this book really has opinions that might be perceived as immoral or behaves in ways that I think would be perceived as immoral. Her mother, her husband, her in-laws, everyone just really behaves as humans to me. That was what was important to me as a writer. I think that that is where the best art lies.
I think of this film The Zone of Interest, which embodies this perfectly. If you want to expose something, you have to show humans as they are. So, again, I think that people have their own reading preferences, and that's none of my business, but it is my business to represent women as they are and represent people as they are, and that is extremely messy, and that is the type of stuff that I like to consume.
That's interesting. I need to watch The Zone of Interest. I have not seen that.
Oh, you would love it. I already know.
I believe you. I trust you. What you just said relates to a question I wanted to ask. I think the performance and the burdens of womanhood are reflected in the book really well, especially the way they get passed down from mothers to daughters. When Natalie is reeling from the birth of her first child and the realization that, and I’m quoting you because I love this, “she’d unknowingly married and been impregnated by a toddler,” the advice that Caleb’s mom, Amelia, gives is that she gets through with bright lipstick and pills that she calls “mother’s little helper.” Natalie’s mom, on the other hand, reminds her that, “It’s a woman’s job to encourage her husband to be normal and that a woman’s work is never done.”
So there’s this idea that women kind of hide the truth of marriage and motherhood from their own daughters until it’s too late, and their daughters in turn do the same to their own daughters. This really hit home for me as a mom myself, and I just wanted to know what informed your thinking here? How might we break this cycle? And maybe, if you want, in your answer, you might want to talk a little about a book that you turned me onto in your podcast, which is Jane Ward’s incredible The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.
Oh, absolutely. Okay. You are listening. Wow. It’s, again, one of those threads that I didn’t intend to write but that, once I did, became very important to me. There’s a point later on in the novel where Natalie describes this kind of act of generational lying as the great thread of insincerity that keeps the human race going. The idea that women wouldn’t have children if you didn’t lie to one another. We wouldn’t consent to marriage and consent to all of these things where many women end up in positions of subordination. I think that so much of this novel is about the anger that comes from realizing that you have been given a bum deal, and realizing that too late.
That is something that the academic that you’ve described, she’s a queer theorist, Jane Ward, talks about this idea that heterosexuality and the concept of man and wife as marriage, man and wife as being designed to be monogamous, designed to give one another exclusive pleasure, designed to give each other everything that they need, is a social construct. And that it is something that is constantly reinforced in the films that we watch, in the books that we read, in the clothing that we buy, in the makeup that we wear, in the jobs that we get, and that the end outcome of that is not necessarily either individual's happiness, the man or the woman. And that it often ends in supreme unhappiness because men and women are also not given the tools to understand one another, to respect one another.
“So much of this novel is about the anger that comes from realizing that you have been given a bum deal, and realizing that too late.”
This is, as Ward describes it, the tragedy of heterosexuality. That a queer person might look at heterosexuality and go, “That looks so sad to me.” There’s a perception that heterosexuals are meant to feel bad for queer people for the suffering they endure, and there is truth to that, but Ward kind of flips that on her head and she says, “No, no, no. Queerness is a decision to free yourself from a lot of the subjugation and repression that comes from heterosexual norms.”
Of course, this doesn't apply to every marriage, but I think when I wrote Yesteryear, I expected there to be much more contention—and I'm sure there will be—but I have been so struck by how many deeply liberal women really resonated with Natalie. I think a lot of that comes down to something that is consistent across political beliefs, and a lot of that comes down to marital norms, norms of motherhood, the things that—I am a secular woman, I might think, “Well, it's not going to happen to me because I'm very modern.” Then you find that there are so many elements of childcare and domestic labor and division of assets and division of resources, and who controls what, that ends up being very consistent.
I think that there is a lot of anger that women feel when they realize that it happened to you, too. I think that that has been my experience with Yesteryear, is having a lot of women that I would think would not relate to Natalie tell me that they relate very much. Which is wonderful for me, but also a little bit terrifying.
Also a little bit sad. Thank you for talking about Jane Ward’s book, because I think it’s so important. It’s also very funny and just so eye-opening in so many ways. Another theme I loved in Yesteryear was this idea of authenticity and how Natalie’s search for it drives a huge part of the book, which we’re going to get into the spoilers soon. But in the age of social media and AI, authenticity feels more important than ever. It’s held up almost as a moral good; it has so much currency in our culture. In Natalie’s case, it’s also tied to religion for her. How important is authenticity to you and do you think that it deserves this pedestal we’ve placed it on culturally?
No, I don’t. I think there are certain words that just feel very of a certain era, and authenticity is one. Accountability is one that I think about quite a bit. We go, “We’ve got to hold them accountable.” And I’m like, “What does that mean?”
It's a very interesting time period that we’re moving through. I think I understand the impulse to want people to be quote-unquote authentic, but the reality is that none of us are ever authentic and the performances we deliver online are really just emblematic of how humans also behave in real life. We are always performing. I might give a version of myself to my husband that is slightly different than the version of myself I give to my podcast co-host. That is different than the version of myself that I’m giving to you right now. I curled my hair for you. I would never curl my hair for my husband [laughs]. And I think that that’s the real tragedy of heterosexuality.
I think I have this balance in my own mind, personally, where I am very interested in and concerned about the level of warp between reality and non-reality that exists online, and that is a huge concern, I think. We just exist in an age of everything is misinformation now because you can't determine fact from fiction. But that is very different than expecting humans to quote-unquote “show up authentic.” That’s like a very buzzy term that feels very silly to me. I do think it's associated with morality, and I think that we do it to women. We only do it to women. We don’t ever do it to men. We never say Tom Brady should show up as his authentic self. But we are certain that Alix Earle should show up as her authentic self.
It’s just one of the many ways in which we expect women not to show up as their authentic selves, but to show up as the version of women that we want to represent, which is like the morality police. We want women to serve as role models. We don’t want anyone to actually be themselves because that would be confusing and messy and politically incorrect and uncomfortable. We want women to serve as role models. I think that that’s what we’re really asking for. Which is ironic, again, because most influencers are already doing some version of that. It’s just not always the one that we want.
Speaking of the morality police, to say a last thing on tradwives, where do you stand on it? Is it anti-feminist for women to be promoting this kind of regressive lifestyle of really domestic pursuits, or is it more anti-feminist to police women's wanting to do that and police what women choose to pay attention to?
I mean, I’m sure that you will get a different answer with every person you ask, whether they are a tradwife expert or a self-proclaimed feminist. I am very much in the camp of, I do not agree with the idea that any choice a woman makes is feminist because she chose to make it; any way to make money is feminist because then a woman gets to make money. Feminism is a set of political beliefs about liberation. I don’t make feminist decisions every step of the day. Some of the things I do are aligned with feminism and some of them are not. I have no expectation for any person to behave in accordance with their political beliefs all day long. That’s, again, silly, a silly expectation. But it is a clear one. So, I think it is very clearly not feminist to be performing subjugation online. The fact that these women are also getting their bag, so to speak, it’s kind of irrelevant to me.
“There is no female character you can write who is an honest representation of a human who is not described as unlikeable.”
I will say, I do think it’s also anti-feminist to focus on these women and not acknowledge that they're operating within a system where a lot of men also get their bag for deeply anti-feminist reasons. And again, no one ever calls them out. That's like the Yesteryear paradox, which is like, how much control do any of these women have? Is Natalie in control? Is she being puppeted by her father-in-law or her husband or the patriarchal voice of God in her head? I think you really do get into a point where you're kind of going up and down the ladder of, well, who’s in control? Because I think you have to know that in order to properly assign responsibility, and it's a hard conversation to have. I don’t think that there's one correct answer.
We are now going to segue into the spoilers, so if you have not listened to Yesteryear or have not read it yet, this is your cue: you might want to tune out. But having finished this novel, there were things I had to ask you, so I have to do it.
This is so fun. I’ve never done a spoilers conversation yet. I’m so excited.
I never do them for Audible either. I just felt Yesteryear demanded it of me.
It does.
So, this reveal that Natalie was living in contemporary times all along—she had ripped apart her own house and structured her life to remove all traces of contemporary comfort, but had blocked out that she’d done so because she had had this traumatic fall from grace, and she has mental issues that we learn over the course of the novel—I didn’t see it coming. But it also made a lot of sense to me. You mentioned that this kind of came to you with the premise, but how hard was it to write it? What was the trickiest part of making it work?
It was so hard. Oh, my God, it was so hard. I knew the twist. It was only ever going to be that. The first challenge was just getting there. That’s why there are so many little twists along the way, and that was just me trying to get there. I had never written a thriller before. I had never written a mystery before, anything along these lines. It truly felt like I was stumbling around in a forest in the pitch black. I would just give myself these little markers, and so each little surprise along the way was really me just trying to figure out, “How can I get an inch closer to this?”
The real click for me of trying to make this as believable and enjoyable as possible was seeding these Easter eggs so that you realize she's moving in and out of lucidity. So, when you go back, if you read it again, you’ll realize there are certain scenes where she actually knows what’s going on and she actually is pretty aware of what's going on. She's kind of moving in and out of these kind of psychological breaks. The hope is that if someone reads it again, they will kind of see that and see how people are moving around her in response to the fact that she's been like this, that she's had these breaks. She's had realizations. It goes in this kind of forever cycle of what I, from my small amount of research, understand is common for psychological distress, is just moving in and out of full awareness.
So, that was the big edit I did after we sold the book, that I worked with my editor on. As opposed to [Natalie] really consciously thinking, “What’s going on here?” all the way through and then being like, “Oh, this is where I am,” it was more so the good days and the bad days of it all, of trying to figure that out. But again, doing it really quietly. So, it was really hard. I know that any twist is going to be very, you either love it or you don’t, but this was only ever it for me. This is the only way to end the book.
It was very important to me that it’s structured past, present, and future, and that was very important to me also because it gives an opportunity to have an ending where Natalie doesn’t get better, but there is a happy ending with the next generation. It was very important to me that Natalie doesn’t grow. She is not someone who realizes that she was a bad person. Again, some readers might hate that. That was always the plan, it wasn’t accidental. She is not someone who was going to realize the error of her ways and become a better person, because she’s a human and a lot of humans don’t. So, I had a task of like, well, it can’t be that depressing. So, figuring out to end with the daughters and end with this idea of, that’s how things often get fixed, is through generational healing and through the next generation getting a little bit farther than the ones who came before. So, that kind of felt like a way out for me, too.
Wow. I loved the epilogue, and we’ll talk about that, but first of all, you said “old Caleb” throughout, and I was like, she told me and I still didn’t see it coming!
I know. It’s, yeah, I feel the same way.
But I found the character of Caleb so depressingly believable. The irony that in this patriarchal, conservative, religious milieu that Caleb and Natalie endorse, actually it’s always her who’s calling the shots and directing his behavior. He just goes along with it, so long as he’s got his family’s approval and money and he has his affairs. And then in this 1800s timeline, he’s literally just going along with it for beer and TV in his secret cabin, which is literally called The Manosphere. We see so much conversation today about the manosphere and about this “crisis of men.” What do you think is Caleb’s specific damage within this system of patriarchy and the toxic political polarization that's going on in the novel, and out in the world? How do you see him functioning here?
Yeah, Caleb is probably one of my favorite characters in the book. I love him. I think he’s so tragic. He’s such a tragic soul for me because he starts out very soft. He’s a very soft person. His Achilles’ heel, his critical flaw, is that he’s not ambitious. But he doesn’t have to be, right? He has money and there's a certain logic to the arguments he poses to Natalie, which is, “Well, why can’t we just buy a house? Why can’t I sit at home?” And I enjoyed that.
He’s very anti-capitalist in that way, you know? He doesn’t care about making a name for himself. He really is quite soft and, again, a little bit lazy. But in another life, if he had married someone else, I think he could have ended up wearing a pussy hat at the Women’s March, so to speak.
He’s very pliable.
He’s so pliable. He’s such a little Play-Doh man. I think he was such a perfect foil for Natalie, because something I realized so quickly about Natalie is she has so many traits that we associate with masculinity. That’s something that I think she recognizes at one point, is that she and Caleb are both broken, from her perspective, and that she wants things that men want and he wants things that women want, from her perspective.
In that sense, it was just such a satisfying foil that both people are kind of fighting against their gender norms without realizing it and without having the language for it. Neither of them have the language to understand that that’s what they’re doing. And then I think he becomes who she always wanted him to be over time, through, I guess you could argue, is it through free will because he starts to see that they’re making a lot of money and then he starts to feel pressured? Or is it through just the claustrophobia that he feels?
“I think it is very clearly not feminist to be performing subjugation online. The fact that these women are also getting their bag, so to speak, it’s kind of irrelevant to me.”
I think both of them feel, as time goes on, that the walls are closing in on them. Of course, you spend much less time in Caleb’s brain, but I really do view him as a very tragic character who never received any tools for being a man in America that isn’t quote-unquote masculine. I think we see that nowadays in the public sphere, too, where there’s the crisis of masculinity, there’s just so much worry. And then when you ask anyone what that means, they don’t really have words for it because it’s just this sense that women have taken over, but women haven’t taken over. Men still have most of the jobs. Men still win most of the Oscars. Men still get all the Pulitzer Prizes. It’s just the fact that they get a little bit less than they used to.
I will say, again, the empathy I feel for young men is you would have to teach young men to figure out a form of masculinity that is not defined by dominance. And we aren’t comfortable with that. We don’t do that. Even liberal men who talk about this don’t acknowledge that you have to teach young men a version of moving through the world that is much more similar to the tools that women and people of color have had to learn. But that’s not something that we’re very interested in as a country.
So, the epilogue. Natalie’s serving out a 34-year sentence for aggravated child abuse and other charges, and she sits for a TV interview with her old frenemy, Reena. It is so fascinating, and I could have stayed in that world even longer. I felt like her daughter Mary’s memoir was giving me shades of Shari Franke's The House of My Mother.
Totally.
Even Tara Westover’s Educated. And we’re seeing more and more books by children of influencers and vloggers who have had their lives on camera come of age. Have you immersed yourself in any of that material, and how did this part come to life for you?
I have. I think a lot about the Ruby Franke case. I think that that’s an incredibly tragic story. I think Shari Franke’s memoir is amazing. I think it came out last year, so my edits for Yesteryear were done, and I remember when the Ruby Franke documentary came out, and for anyone who hasn’t watched it, she's this disgraced influencer who is in jail now for several counts of child abuse. It’s an incredibly tragic story, and a documentary came out that had a lot of her old footage, and there are these moments where you see her practicing the same line again and again and again. I emailed my whole publishing team and I was like, “Oh, my God, we nailed it with Yesteryear. Like, oh, my God, this is 100 percent it.”
But I think about the children a lot. I have been asked a few times already in the lead-up to Yesteryear what I think about tradwives and influencers and what they would think if they read my book. My answer is always that I respectfully don’t care. I don't really care what tradwife influencers think about the book, but I care quite a bit about what their children think about their lives. I’m always very interested in the children of influencers, tradwife or otherwise.
I think that on the note of Yesteryear, Yesteryear is a very cold book in some ways, or Natalie, the protagonist, is very cold. It’s not sentimental. That’s not a way I would describe this novel. So, I think having a moment with the daughters in the epilogue was a really, really cathartic experience for me as a writer, to have a moment of sentimentality. It was very emotional for me to write and it’s always very emotional for me to read because, again, this whole novel is kind of kept at arm’s length in terms of the implications of what is happening to these people. And then at the end, it’s just kind of laid out what Natalie has done and what Caleb has done, and how much hurt they have inflicted.
So, having an opportunity to sit with the daughters and to sit with their pain and also to sit with their freedom was very important to me. It’s something that I wish for every child of that. I am always eager to hear those stories. It’s something I think about all the time. It’s the most important scene to me, and it’s the last one that I wrote. I can’t read it myself without choking up because it was just so important to me for the novel, just having a moment of liberation for these kids and honoring what they went through, because I don’t think we often do.
Wow. I’m getting emotional now, so thank you for that. I had a line that I marked from Mary’s memoir, which you wrote so beautifully. She says, “You know what makes me saddest, Mama? How much beauty you’ve missed, because it really is beautiful. This future you prayed we would never get the chance to see, I think you’d like it if you gave it a chance.” And I wonder what that means to you?
Yeah, I think part of Yesteryear is this kind of war playing out with certain characters over trying to remake the world in their image. I think you have Natalie, the main character, she sees it as a war. It’s a culture war. It’s who will win the war to remake the world. But I think the question for me when I was writing Yesteryear—and I think the question that I hope readers leave with—is not can you change the world, but can you love a broken world? And can you exist in the world when it doesn't change? Can you exist with other people when they don’t change? Can you live with it? And that’s something that I wrestle with daily. Can I live with this world, if I don’t change it?
Because I think so much of our politics is trying to make the world a better place, and that is deeply important, but that is the morality of it. When you take that out and when you’re just sitting with people, the idea of these children seeing the world in all of its fundamental brokenness and going, “Oh, my God, it’s so much better than I thought it would be. These people are so much nicer. Like, the ocean is so much bigger.”
It was just a moment for me to almost rewire myself and be like, “There is so much in the world that is so beautiful.” And learning to live with it, with all of the flaws and learning to live with the people who want it to be different than how you want it, is I think an essential question of being human. It was an essential reorienting of the book for me. It was a way of recentering the children and of extending pity and love to their mother, who in many ways ruined their life.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
So, yeah, it was very important to me, and it's also just a personal thing that I grapple with all the time. So, it was maybe a little bit cathartic to write about it in the book.
It’s such a knockout ending to such a knockout book. My fellow editor Patty always asks this question in her interviews, and I’m stealing it for this one because I think it’s perfect for Natalie. What book do you think your main character might recommend to fans?
Natalie?
Yeah, what do you think Natalie’s favorite book is?
I feel like she would recommend, like, Mein Kampf or something [laughs]. What would she recommend? Oh, she would recommend an etiquette novel, like Emily Post. She would recommend an etiquette novel, or she would recommend something biblical, I would say.
That makes sense.
She would tell everyone that they need Jesus.
And how about you? Is there anything that you recently read or listened to that you would shout-out to fans of Yesteryear?
Yeah, a book that I read recently that was published, I believe, in the 1960s, is Revolutionary Road. It was made into an adaption with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. One of the rare adaptions where both the book and the movie are immaculate.The book is just lights-out incredible writing, an incredible rendering and deconstruction of the myth of 1950s Americana life in the suburbs. It’s essentially a story about a couple in the suburbs who are basically living the American dream and who just descend into madness and misery. It’s written all from the perspective of the male and it’s just phenomenal. It’s one of my favorite books, and I think it’s a really wonderful pairing with Yesteryear. It's Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.
What a great book, and I haven’t read that in probably 15, 20 years.
It’s so good.
I feel like it was more in the conversation then, and it hasn’t been, so I love that you brought that back up. I’m going to re-listen to that for sure. I have to mention, Yesteryear has been optioned by Amazon MGM Studios for an upcoming film adaptation. Do you have any details that you can share with us about that?
I do have some details. It’s full steam ahead. There is a script that’s under development. I read the first round. It’s phenomenal. I was very terrified and happy to not be screenwriting, because I was like, “I don’t know how you guys are going to do this.”
That’s my question.
Yesteryear is so interior, and there’s so much moving back and forth across timelines, but they’re really doing a knockout job. Anne Hathaway is going to star and executive produce, which is awesome. It’s really fun to see it coming together. So, we’re moving forward.
My last question is, Yesteryear is a novel that’s going to spark a lot of discussion. What do you most hope that listeners and readers take away from it?
There’s so much in this book. I don’t even know what I take away from it. There’s just so much to discuss. I’ve only just begun my conversations about the book with press, but I did have the pleasure of talking about it with editors and producers throughout the book and film auction. I think something I was struck by during those conversations was how quickly a conversation about a novel turned into a conversation about their personal lives. I found that really meaningful. I would be five minutes into a Zoom call, and an editor would be like, “And this is what it was like to breastfeed while I was working full-time.” Or I spoke to a few different actors about how difficult it is to become a mother and work as an actress, or about how exhausting it is to perform online, what it's like to be perceived by the public.
I think for me, all of my favorite novels are ones where I’m so immersed in the book and then when I come out, I feel like I’m thinking about my own life, and it’s kind of like applying all of these elements to just everyday acts. I would be so thrilled if my book struck that in some readers. If they want to call their friend and be like, “Dude, we’ve got to talk about this book, but we’ve also just got to talk about how bullshit it is that we don’t have paid leave.” Or something like that, where you get into these moments where you’re thinking about something bigger than the book itself, I think is such a privilege.
Also, it’s a book. It’s not a policy platform. So, I hope people like it. I hope they read it to the end. If someone finishes a book, that is the ultimate review, as they say. So, I hope you read it to the end.
That’s fabulous. Thank you.
Thank you for listening to it. Thank you for anyone who's listening to this, who’s going to listen to Yesteryear. It’s the honor of a lifetime and it’s so much fun to see it into the world.
Well, thank you so much, Caro, for this conversation. And listeners, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, narrated by Rebecca Lowman, is available on Audible now.
Produced by Melissa Bendixen and Alanna McAuliffe, edited by Phoebe Neidl, and engineered by Neil Baczek.
