It’s a trad, trad world.
Tradwives abound not just on social media — baking up their own sourdough and homeschooling half a dozen children — but also at the bookstore, where titles about women Instagramming their supposedly traditional lives are filling up shelves.
Caro Claire Burke’s novel “Yesteryear,” about a modern tradwife who wakes up to find that she’s living in 1855 — and doesn’t love it — has been the undisputed book of the summer. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks and counting, and sold more than 461,000 copies, according to Circana Bookscan. After a bidding war, Anne Hathaway is attached to star in and produce a movie adaptation for Amazon MGM Studios.
It comes in the wake of several tradwife-focused books published in the last 18 months, and several more in the pipeline. There are no less than five recent or upcoming books called “Tradwife” or “Trad Wife” alone.
“I should have known. It is honestly a nightmare,” quipped Sarah Langan, whose “Trad Wife: A Novel” comes out Sep. 29. “Someone told me ‘Yesteryear’ was going to be big … [but] when you write a book you can’t think about that .”
Loan Le, Langan’s editor at Atria/Simon & Schuster, said the tradwife trend hasn’t surprised her, but its scale has.
“I just didn’t expect this amount. Everywhere I see now is about tradwives, I didn’t expect it to blow up,” Le told The Post.
When she acquired Langan’s book in March of 2025, the appeal wasn’t the subject matter — she was aware that there’d been a “big auction” for “Yesteryear” but the book had yet to come out. Langan — a noted horror author Le had worked with on two previous books — and her unique perspective on tradwives was the attraction.
“It felt like a true conversation versus an attack or a criticism,” she said.
Langan’s gothic-tinged book focuses on a journalist sent to cover a wifely influencer, only to find that something is not right at the woman’s farmhouse.
The author admits that she did think of the infamous interview Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm did with the Times of London in 2024. A journalist portrayed the tradwife queen as an utterly exhausted mother-of-many who had no help with the kids — despite a billionaire father-in-law — and an overbearing husband who’d pushed her to give up her Juilliard ballerina dreams and give birth without pain relief. But Langan didn’t want her book to be about any particular tradwife.
“I didn’t want to harm someone personally,” she said.
The appeal of tradwives as a literary subject is vast.
“Trad lifestyles are really in the collective consciousness right now. As authors, we get ideas from all the things we see around us, so it makes sense that multiple novels about trad wives would come
out around the same time,” said Hallie Shepherd, whose debut novel “Call Off the Dark” — about a tradwife grieving the murder of her first husband and dealing with the return of her current husband’s deceased brother — is out Sep. 22.
Saratoga Schaefer — whose novel “Trad Wife,” about a homesteader so desperate for a baby, she allows a demon to impregnate her, was released this past February — notes that the subject du jour is a riff on a long-standing trope.
“There have always been domestic suspense books about unhinged housewives,” Schaefer said.
Jo Piazza, whose July 2025 murder mystery, “Everyone Is Lying to You,” was an early entry into the tradwife subgenre, believes “so much of this trend is about women’s rage.” Some book-loving, burnt-out modern gals are keen to see their domestic-goddess counterparts get their comeuppance.
“It’s such a performance,” Piazza told The Post. “They often feel like friends and we develop a real emotional connection to them and that emotional spectrum can range from love to hate.”
When she first brought the manuscript to her publisher in 2024, tradwives weren’t nearly so hot, and selling it took some convincing.
“It wasn’t an instant ‘yes,’ ” she said of the book, which went on to become a bestseller.
The movement isn’t limited to fiction.
Amy Irvine’s “Almost Animal: A Memoir of Motherhood, Wildness and the American West,” out Nov. 10 from Spiegel & Grau, is being marketed as an “anti-tradwife manifesto,” though Irvine notes she isn’t anti-tradwife.
Rather, she’s a sixth-generation Utahn who hails from a long line of Mormon women who have led challenging, complicated lives.
While she said she was “first in-line” to buy a copy of “Yesteryear,” she took issue with its lack of empathy for its protagonist — a common criticism of the blockbuster.
“Let’s not blame the women,” she said. “In the end, she’s just treated like one of Freud’s female patients who’s labeled crazy. I wanted her so badly to come out on top somehow.”
Le, meanwhile, believes the publishing world will ultimately reach its fill of tradwives.
She said, “People will eventually see that there are bigger issues out there in the world.”
Read the full article here
