In my new newsletter, some weeks I review a book, and some weeks I review a pizza. Think of it like Pizza Hut’s BookIt! for those of us who now want longer books and better pizza. This first one is free. The next will be for Patrons of all levels. You can become a Patron here: https://www.patreon.com/c/msemilyedwards
In 2012, ABC announced a new midseason show that anyone with half a brain knew wouldn’t see a full season: GCB was clearly aiming to capitalize on the same network’s success of Marc Cherry’s DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, a show about rich women living in a fictional city that is so obviously in Southern California you expect to see the Universal Tours tram go by in the background.
On paper, GCB should have run for at least five seasons. The show was produced by SEX AND THE CITY creator Darren Star. It featured a whole buffet of beautiful blonde women, like Leslie Bibb and Kristen Chenoweth, who at the time had broad, cross-market appeal. Southern Sitcom Star Annie Potts was specifically cast to be a family matriarch. The show only lasted ten episodes. The problem with GCB is that the title itself was obfuscating why the show wouldn’t work: the acronym stood for GOOD CHRISTIAN BITCHES, the title of the source material from author Kim Gatlin.
There was, of course, an uproar, with the American Family Association and the thinly-veiled hate group One Million Moms leading the charge. How dare one use the word “bitch” in correlation with good, Christian women? Other, arguably more problematic, aspects of the show (haha, one of the pretty girls got fat after high school! Another married a gay man!) got no Fox News critique. It was the idea that a Good woman, a Christian woman, could also be a Bitchy Woman that set the tongues a-wagglin’. In was inconceivable. Only Godless Liberals are bitches. This show clearly set out to blaspheme millions of American moms. Christian moms. Good, white, blonde, Christian moms.
The rapid downfall of GCB was undoubtedly clocked by Andy Cohen over at Bravo– though REAL HOUSEWIVES OF DALLAS eventually came to exist in 2016 (the year is not lost on me), it lasted five seasons, and remains one of only four RH installments to be outright cancelled. (DC was clearly folded into PATOMIC, and DUBAI, RHODE ISLAND, and MIAMI fell alongside DALLAS). The other, riotously popular RH installments– ORANGE COUNTY, BEVERLY HILLS, NEW YORK, POTOMIC, ATLANTA, NEW JERSEY, and SALT LAKE CITY– all have one thing in common:
They take place in areas the rest of America does not like.
For whatever reason. We all know that Orange County is a huge Trump stronghold in California and a lot of the women who live there would happily throw orphans into the orphan-crushing machine if it made their property taxes go down. New York wasn’t the place where the Trump family festered for nothing. Salt Lake City is a naturally gorgeous place populated by Mormons who are Christians even Evangelicals give the side-eye. Each of these places is a hotbed of conservatism, if not Christian conservatism, if not Christian Nationalist conservatism. But anyplace west of San Bernardino and East of the Jersey Coast hates these cities. They hate us a lot. They likely wouldn’t mind if a foreign entity threw nukes at us. They laughed when the president suggested it, just the other day.
While I know plenty of liberal/leftist people who watch the HOUSEWIVES shows, they do so with slightly more understanding that the term “housewife” is used as a joke– most of these women are millionaires tens-if-not-hundreds-of-times over, the longtime breadwinners in their families. Most of them are divorced and no longer “wives;” quite a few of them are queer and outside the cishet working-husband/housewife paradigm. The mockery they make on the show is that a real housewife in any way exists in the 2020s. It doesn’t. Not in this economy.
Well, maybe in Idaho.
At the time of this writing, Caro Claire Burke’s YESTERYEAR has been on the New York Times’s best-seller list for 25 weeks. It hinges on something that American women take for a given: that the Good Christian Women own housewifery. If a Good Christian Woman watches REAL HOUSEWIVES at all, they watch the shows not in jealousy, but in jest: Look at those dumb coastal women, mostly in Blue stronghold cities, pretending they can be us. She isn’t a housewife. She has a job.
We will likely never see a REAL HOUSEWIVES OF CHARLESTON, or an off-brand version, like a Hulu-backed SECRET LIVES OF CONGREGATIONALIST WIVES. Those women, the Good women, the Good Christian Women, need more control over their narratives than they can get with producers, directors, and an editing team. They, perhaps earlier than anyone else, tried the concept of using low-budget cable programming to spread their culture and their Gospels with 19 KIDS AND COUNTING, and though we all saw what happened with the Duggars, society gleaned two different things from the great experiment. Some of us learned that restrictive, controlling religious environments are tailor made for patriarchal, sexual violence and the forced silence and subservience of daughters and non-“Alpha”-males.
Others among us learned that there is no foolproof way to control a narrative involving real people, so it’s best to no longer participate in “reality.”
#Tradwife social media content is the perfect outlet for the Good Christians’ hunger for control and also attention. YESTERYEAR’s main character, Natalie, knows this in every atom of her body. While Elle Woods sashayed into Harvard when her life exploded only to learn the power of feminism, friendship, and an immaculate French tip mani, Natalie went in to the hallowed halls of America’s oldest university powered by anger, contempt, and scorn for the society Harvard helped birth.
There is no part of this woman that feels human, no matter how hard Burke avoids using language of judgement. Burke’s tallying of Natalie’s arbitrary values and choices– the girls in her dorm can’t even figure out what religious doctrine she seems to follow– don’t drip with derision; they’re bland in the non-committal ways we assume hostages talk on the phone with police when their kidnapper is in earshot. I dare not speak up, Burke seems to whisper, The Southern Baptists can hear me.
Every choice that Natalie pursues comes from a place of opposition: if she does not want to become someone or something, she denigrates it, and chooses its opposite, constantly working in a binary of not Godly Christian good-and-evil, but uneducated approval-and-disapproval. Her elder sister eschews community college to marry a no-goodnik drunken townie; Natalie seemingly chooses her University at random because it is the opposite of Podunk, Idaho, and marries the fifth son of a filthy-rich Republican senator who is convinced the race wars are coming for him in his mansion outside of Napa.
Because the book is actually not that heavy on dialogue, we receive information filtered through Natalie’s running internal monologue, and we believe that Natalie’s explanations are introspection. At first. But suddenly, the format of the book changes to include interview questions– is this a post-modern structure, that is more like a transcript from Oprah? No, even that breaks down as we learn that Natalie holds court on a TV talk show in her own head, a coping mechanism her mother gave her while Natalie suffered with untreated postpartum depression: every chore becomes easier if you pretend you’re doing it in front of an audience.
That Natalie runs her entire day as though she’s Martha Stewart signals the most important thing about our main character: Natalie doesn’t like anything. She doesn’t like being pregnant, she doesn’t like her children, she doesn’t like her husband, she doesn’t like her staff. She doesn’t like her rich in-laws, she doesn’t like making content, she doesn’t like chickens, she doesn’t like any woman who doesn’t match her perfectly cultivated, peer-tested aesthetic. Natalie constantly harkens back to her two-semester roommate at Harvard, Reena Magliotti, a girl with dark hair and an incongruous name, her first being Hebrew and her second being undoubtedly Italian. Reena is emblematic of coastal sins: mixed bloodlines and third-wave feminists, the Angry Women who fill her Instagram comments, interspersed among True Believers. Reena is godless and sexual and flagrant and hungry. Natalie has decided that Reena cannot actually want the things she is working for, because the things she is working for are not babies and a husband. The way Natalie loathes her children and the work of maternity, it makes me sad that she didn’t grow up explicitly Catholic or Mormon, two religions with strong Mary cults. Say what you will about both faith practices– and I can say a lot!– but they worship motherhood. Whatever branch of faith Natalie is steeped in, there is no capacity for divinity to be put onto the weak shoulders of women. In the text of YESTERYEAR, God is invoked frequently, Jesus barely at all. The birth of His son doesn’t seem to factor in to Natalie’s Christianity.
YESTERYEAR is a hard book to categorize– I have no idea what Burke used as comparable titles when she pitched it– every author needs to come up with a Yahtzee of alike best-sellers, “it’s like X meets Y with a dash of Z!” YESTERYEAR is satire, it’s a suspense; the logline of Natalie going “back in time” is vaguely Science Fiction. The only term I haven’t seen used for it is women’s fiction, which I think it is. What else can it possibly be? Straight men don’t read, and even if they did, they are not picking this up. Everything society considers to be of the female essence is here: mommy issues, pregnancy and motherhood, “having it all” with a job and family, shitty husbands, commandeering Fathers in Law. And of course, disappointingly, this ends up with the most feminine trope of all time:
Hysteria.
THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!
Channelling her inner Anne Bradstreet, Natalie makes direct appeals for the help, love, and mercy of an angry God, she does not feel as though she is worthy of his assistance, and the weight of her life– never a path earned by choice, but always a path laid by retreat– eventually breaks every structure in her body and mind. I had seen some vague references to the story’s “twist” online– that she does not “actually” go back in time– but I wasn’t quite prepared for what it ends up being: instigated by her husband’s infidelity and perpetuated by traumatic home births, hurt children, and at least one instance of marital rape, Natalie sinks deeper and deeper into a fantasy world, constantly grinning for a non-existent panopticon, and perpetuating incredible violence on her four youngest children and an incalculable number of cows and chickens.
YESTERYEAR ends up at a long-ish length of 391 pages, and still I wished for maybe twenty more. Or twenty fewer pages of description on how she took Instagram classes from a woman she hated or twenty fewer of description of watching her middle-eldest daughter make biscuits or twenty fewer of just how much she hated absolutely everyone and everything she ever met. What I needed was a women’s fiction button: a moment where someone, anyone, drew a conclusion, the starting point for the next leg of the story, to remind us that life is a journey during which we learn lessons and grow. Burke seems to think she’s done it with the five opening pages of the illiterate middle-eldest daughter’s memoir, but crucially, memoirs sill look back. The eldest daughter, Clementine the savior, gets no internality. She is, in the end, always someone who is there to take the load off her parents, to do the work for them, to be the big kid in a family of uneducated, spoiled children. How I longed for just a page of Clementine calling her parents motherfuckers and pitching a good-old-fashioned fit. But that may be too political for Burke. Instead, she opts to make Natalie baby, a blank canvas.
In a book about Christianity, in a story steeped in wrath, greed, pride, envy, sloth, lust, and gluttony, we are left with a Good Christian Woman who cannot atone, for she knows not what she has done. It’s a disappointment for Burke’s readers, all of us raised in Christo-fascist America now brought to us by smiling, GCB, #TradWife influencers. It goes against everything we’ve ever been taught.
I was too excited to hold on to this review to also include a pizza, I promise the next issue will include some gratuitous cheese.
Leave a Reply