Caro Claire Burke stopped by Late Night to discuss her debut novel, Yesteryear.
Burke’s novel, published last month by Knopf, follows Natalie Heller Mills, a “tradwife” influencer with six kids who spends her days on an Idaho farm tending chickens, churning butter, and baking. One day Natalie wakes up one day to discover that she’s been transported to 1855—without the assistants who’ve helped to cultivate her inauthentic online image. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a propulsive page turner, impossible to put down” and “a remarkable debut—both a book for the moment and one that will endure.”
Host Seth Meyers asked Burke whether she knew she had “a book’s worth of ideas” when she first became interested in the topic of tradwives.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” Burke replied. “I had never written a thriller before; I had never written comedy. I knew the final twist that I wanted, which I will not blurt out right now, but I had no clue how I was going to get there, so this book is the product of me just trying to stumble my way through the darkness and figure it out.”
Meyers noted that Yesteryear is being adapted into a film starring Anne Hathaway and asked Burke how she learned about the project.
“This actually happened two years ago when I was selling the book,” Burke said. “I got an email from one of my TV agents saying, ‘You know, Annie’s interested.’ And I was like, ‘Who’s Annie?’...I did not believe them at all, and I still don’t believe it, and I’m convinced it’s a prank. I feel like someone’s going to pour pig’s blood on me at some point, and that’s going to be it.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
