Trigger warning for brief interpersonal violence.
One of the things that makes fiction great is that it can take us past the facade that people put up to show us what’s underneath. We can visit someone’s thoughts and find out what motivates them, what they love or hate, and what they fear. Yes, I am talking about fiction, but a good work of fiction that can capture what’s really behind the eyes is the best way I’ve ever found to generate empathy for people who’s lives are different from our own. Every now and then, however, an author will introduce someone who is very, very hard to empathize with. These kinds of books test us. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is one of the most brilliant examples of this kind of challenge I’ve ever read.
I do not like Natalie Heller Mills. I don’t agree with her values. I definitely don’t agree with her politics. And there’s something about her that makes my skin crawl. Natalie Heller Mills, when we meet her, is at the peak of her career as an influencer. Her Instagram account is full of carefully edited images and videos of her life, with her family, on an Idaho ranch. She bakes sourdough bread from scratch. Her children are homeschooled. Her husband grows organic vegetables. She might let a bit of fatigue or exasperation show through, but she’s careful to smile or drop a word of faithful wisdom to her audience. Because we’re riding along in Natalie’s head, however, we know that none of her public persona is real. In truth, Natalie is far from the traditional wife and mother she wants people to see. Her lifestyle is propped up by two nannies, a crew of farm laborers, and money from her father in law. Natalie is the kind of person who, rather than spark my empathy, makes me long for comeuppance.
The walls start to crash down when Natalie wakes up one morning in a house that looks like, but isn’t, her home. There’s no electricity, for one. The children have different names and her husband is old. Even worse, no one will let Natalie leave. At one point, Natalie spots marks on the wall—the kind of marks parents’ use to measure their children’s growth—but with dates for the mid-1800s. Something is very wrong. Did Natalie slip through time? Is she dreaming? Is god testing her? All of the labor of a family home without staff or power certainly feels like a test: freezing her hands doing laundry in tubs in the year, bread that never turns out right, no doctor to see to illness and injury. Natalie hates it.
Flashbacks reveal even more about the precariousness of Natalie’s life. That comeuppance is on its way and its going to be a doozy. Natalie’s camera woman and editor, a young woman Natalie reluctantly let into her life to help improve the production values of her content, isn’t the kind of person to ignore that things Natalie wants to wave away. Shannon can see past Natalie’s persona in a way that no one except Natalie’s mother can. (Her mother constantly asks Natalie why it’s so hard for her to be nice to people.) When Shannon learns that Natalie’s oldest, Clementine, doesn’t know what an ocean is, it becomes clear that Natalie’s carefully constructed reality will come crashing down; it’s just a question of when.
I was fascinated by Natalie and Yesteryear. I wish I had read it as part of a book group so that I’d have a bunch of people I could hash everything out with. In lieu of a book group, I will be badgering my bookish friends to read it.