issue 61
on being transported to 1855 (kind of)
hello and welcome back to the noasletter. i barely remember how to use substack it’s been so long, but here we are! honestly, i stopped writing for the same reasons i stopped writing as a high schooler — i didn’t think i was good at it, no matter how many times i’m told otherwise. but i love it, and it’s okay to do things you love even if you’re not good at them.
so here we are.
a lot has happened since the last time i was here. like, too much to properly rehash. wouldn’t even know where to start! so i’m actually just here to write about yesteryear by caro claire burke because i’m full of feelings about it that i need to get out. warning: at one point this made sense, and now it’s just a stream of consciousness rumination on influencer culture lightly inspired by my reading yesteryear.
spoilers ahead so, if you’re out of the loop, put down your phone, pick up the book, and get back to me once you’ve marked it read on goodreads and picked your jaw up from the floor. i’ll wait.
are you back? okay, let’s get into it.
i was not at all familiar with caro when this book was announced, or when i picked it up, which is kind of unbelievable if you know me because you know that i’m an encyclopedia of internet people and a voracious consumer of cultural critique. needless to say, i’ve got some catching up to do. but anyway — caro is a cultural commentator. she has a podcast called diabolical lies that covers topics like the myth of the kennedy lore and if we should feel bad for usha vance. yesteryear is her first book, and it’s the goddamn peak of cultural commentary in 2026. don’t get me wrong, it’s not a perfect book, it has its flaws as do all books. but it’s a perfect book for these times.
in yesteryear, an influencer who is totally not @ballerinafarm (real name hannah neeleman, married to the heir of the jetblue fortune, notorious raw milk pusher and evie magazine cover girl and mom of too many to count, for those unfamiliar), natalie heller mills, wakes up in an alternate universe version of her perfect life. specifically, she wakes up in the year of 1855, and all the bells and whistles that keep yesteryear ranch the well-oiled machine the internet believes it to be are no longer. at least, that’s what natalie thinks.
by the end of the book, it’s revealed that natalie’s actually not in 1855 at all; she’s still in the present, drugged to all hell after an incident with their beloved producer shannon revealed all the cracks in her family’s perfect foundation and she forewent all flights of fancy in an effort to prove to her shocked follower base she was who she said she was: the perfect tradwife. her older children, who were prominently featured on her account in its heyday, have escaped her grasp with the help of the oldest daughter clementine, her sons pulling the strings from behind the scenes to make the farm look bountiful even though natalie’s useless husband can’t grow shit, and her younger suffer with their homesteader mother. the sweet youngest “toddler” daughter maeve is not a toddler but all, but ten years old, malnourished and undereducated. it’s a shocking, devastating twist.
after months of everyone pointing out the obvious comparison, with natalie being a girl who met a boy from a rich family at a prestigious college, moved onto a picture perfect ranch and had picture perfect kids and made picture perfect content out of it…it turns out she’s not so much ballerina farm as she is ruby franke, hauled away in handcuffs for a whole slate of crimes. her daughter mary even writes her own version of the house of my mother, the devastating memoir shari franke wrote about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother.
i found this twist so compelling, gasping, throwing my hands up in disbelief, asking myself “is this their fate?” while i turned pages. (my parents, who got to view my real-time reaction, can vouch for me.) we’re always so shocked when we get to glimpse past the carefully constructed facade of influencing, when a perfect couple breaks up, or a child suddenly disappears from the content, but should we be?
everybody expects perfection from these influencers. the perfect house, the perfect family, the perfect life. all adding up to create the perfect content. nobody cares about anything else, as much as they claim to prefer realistic content. you can get realistic content from that girl you went to high school with who posts fifteen blurry photos a day of her baby. and perfection is expensive. not just financially, but emotionally, too. with as much time as natalie spends whipping her husband into shape, first by buying the ranch — with the caveat caleb has to give her as many children as she wants — and then by covert maneuvers like hiring staff to tend to the vegetables and using pesticides on supposedly organic fields to make the ranch look more successful than it was in reality and hiding modern-day appliances in tucked away areas and even artificially inseminating herself in the kitchen because her husband is impotent (…at least, he is with her), it is frankly a wonder she didn’t lose her fucking mind much earlier.
it is frankly a wonder they don’t all lose their fucking minds, or if they do, they’re really good at hiding it. because they’re all doing what natalie did at yesteryear ranch. whether they cop to it or not, and they mostly don’t cop to it because, well, that would ruin the whole thing, they’re rearranging their lives behind the scenes for our amusement. they’re hiring staff to film their lives and edit out the ugly bits, whatever they may be. there’s someone else raising and educating their children while they stare at their phones.
they are, in some way, shape, or form, lying to us. that’s the thesis of this whole thing, this whole beyond fucked-up industry that’s been created by social media and aspiration.
and we love it! at the very least, we’re perversely fascinated by it. they have us right where they want us. remember, an account is so much more than an account. it’s an entire enterprise. these women aren’t people; they’re whole brands. them and their husbands and children, the products they sell to us, claiming to love them the most, theirs and others, the catchphrases they’ve coined.
in yesteryear, natalie frequently references her “angry women.” even when they’re dutifully judging her every move, hate commenting around the clock, they’re paying her bills. putting money straight into the secret bank account she created to supersede the strict pre-nuptial agreement enacted by the mills family. natalie might be fake, but the angry women, and the money they generate for the sources of their ire, are very real. you can find them on every corner of reddit, for pretty much every influencer you can think of, complaining about the volume of amazon links they post per day and speculating about if their husband is unsatisfied or secretly gay or wishes his wife would get the camera out of his fucking face. clicking through every story, combing through every post, in search of something to criticize in a haze of cognitive dissonance. more than once, i’ve waded into these waters to ask, “if you hate them, why do you consume their content voraciously and put money in their pockets?” i’ve even been the angry women myself, asked myself the same question. why can’t we just pull away?
i’d like to think that yesteryear will change this fact, that its ubiquity on shelves this spring (it’s even good morning america’s book club pick!) will really shed light on the unethical nature of aspirational content. but i know it won’t, just like past influencer scandals haven’t. people don’t feel bad doing things like keeping tabs on ballerina farm even though she peddles disease-filled raw milk on her online store and putting more money in her pocket is just giving her the ability to cause more harm.
yes, there are some people who boycott these influencers, but it’s not near enough to make any kind of difference. ballerina farm has 10 million followers, her products are always sold out, and there’s endless discussion about every detail of her empire on reddit.
obviously i understand the appeal in aspirational content, everyone is searching for a life different from their own. i’m guilty of this, as a recent college graduate trying to find my footing in a very slippery world. but what i don’t understand is the…anti-appeal, i guess. why people seem to be equally drawn to hating as they are loving. it’s probably at least a little for the same reason, how different their lives are. these influencers are selling perfection, and imperfect people don’t want to believe that perfection is real, they’re jealous of it, so they dissect it to hell and back. they become pathologically obsessed with seeing the cracks, to the point where they start to invent them themselves. in one subreddit, r/nycinfluencersnark, i noticed that the subscribers were so disgusted by @acquiredstyle’s (real name brigette pheloung, owner of the brand phe phe with her twin sister, fellow influencer danielle) luxurious bachelorette party that they started rumors about her fiance cheating with no proof. suddenly, everyone had a friend of a friend who heard he’d been unfaithful their whole relationship. beyond thinking this was absolutely insane behavior, i also wondered — why do they care? he’s not their fiance, or their friend’s. this has absolutely no bearing on their lives, beyond being another imperfection they can point out.
these days, while i’m not totally immune to seeking out content from perfect strangers who i hate when i really want to wallow, i’ve for the most part pivoted to choosing joy. there are shows and movies and songs i love, and i watch and listen to those instead of the ones that i hate, and i don’t finish books that i don’t like, so why wouldn’t i do the same with online content? why would i watch some woman i hate feed her sourdough starter when i could do literally anything else?